After launching my website, .net, i had a lot of showdown with spam bots. At first, i had about 10,000 registrations at some points, i studied those registrations and noticed a pattern, i wrote an sql function to filter them and i delete about 6,000 pirated registrations instaneously.

At first, my registration had no captcha, the spam bots were registering, but their accounts was being banned immediately - without their knowing, that is why my site has not been flooded with spam stuffs.

Next, i added a recaptcha, and i banished about 2000 pirated registrations again.

Meanwhile, there is a special button i click whenever i notice a spammer - that bans the spammers without them knowing they have been banned.

Now, i noticed that facebook and some other websites do not accept just any email, if you enter an email such at olusegun @ .net to signup for facebook, they will just not accept it.

For the newbies here, let me explain what i meant by pirated emails. Now, many of you guys see sites that ask you to do email verification when you register right? That is to prevent automated signups.
Now, there is a way to bypass that. If for instance, i wish to register what mukina2 calls "spam usernames" (for reasons best known to her), i do not actually need to use my mailbox - there are softwares that allow you to skip all those email verifications, but the sad news is that - those softwares cannot work using real emails like yahoo, gmail accounts - well, it is possible theoritically, but very difficult and will be slower. I suspect this is the reason why facebook is stopping registration with unrecognized and untrusted email servers.

Aye, then the blogs, the comments of the blogs is opened to guests, well, the spam bots bypass the captcha somehow and still spam, so i placed it under approval. A spam bot exists there, but it is bypassed somehow most of the time.

The war against spams go on. Well, i have many ways of handling spammers on my websites, some very very harsh - even harsher than the okrika spam bot on nairaland.

Please, share ways you employ to check spam bots on your blogs and forums.

The method that I have applied that eliminate spam completely is using the below code

$email = $_POST['email'];
if (!preg_match("/\@(hotmail.com|gmail.com|yahoo.com)$/i", $email) ){
echo 'Email Service Not Allowed';
}

Using this method has eliminated most of the spammers and also give me the choice to choose which email service I need to allow.

That will sort out most of the problems right away. I was very much tempted to do that, maybe i will do that eventually.