Is it worth keeping this site/forum open ?
It's all bot programs, mostly Chinese IP's but if you firewall china off, they just come from other IP's. I struggled with the same crap on my own phpbb forum. The way they handle it here is pretty effective (don't fill out any profile fields, or fail)
there's a few things you can do. The stock captchas were totally busted as well as the algorithm for the authentication e-mail. What I did on my forum was drop any registrations from UTC-12 since it's actually option 0 in the list and most bots pick that (it's an uninhabited time zone). Then I just added one custom profile field that is mandatory but only accepts one answer. That eliminated 99.99 percent of the attempts.
I actually attended a pretty good presentation once on how spammers actually make money through online pharmacies. Believe it or not, as stupid and as much of a waste of time as spam e-mail and forum spamming seems like, there's actually good money in it, much to every forum administrators dismay.
there's a few things you can do. The stock captchas were totally busted as well as the algorithm for the authentication e-mail. What I did on my forum was drop any registrations from UTC-12 since it's actually option 0 in the list and most bots pick that (it's an uninhabited time zone). Then I just added one custom profile field that is mandatory but only accepts one answer. That eliminated 99.99 percent of the attempts.
I actually attended a pretty good presentation once on how spammers actually make money through online pharmacies. Believe it or not, as stupid and as much of a waste of time as spam e-mail and forum spamming seems like, there's actually good money in it, much to every forum administrators dismay.