fake forum members

I don't know if anyone noticed but could it be that most of the forum members are scams?
If you take a look at the linked websites there are often things like "cheap inexpensive designer bags", sex ads, car rentals and other online stores.
I wanted to see what the user base of NVIL is at the moment. There are a total of like 25 people that have posted something. Not much in my opinion. But I remember I often only read the Silo forums for about a year before posting anything.
But there are at least like a hundred views on each newer update thread. It's just, that I would gladly see NVIL become a success as in new, slick, powerful/feature rich, easy to use, compatible-with-other-apps modeller. I am not even in dire need of one, but still would spend some bucks, if the software made a difference.
So I guess that's how I say "Hi! I'm new here."

Ya, the problem is that, the forums Olny got 2 admins, myself and istonia, and even with things like honeypots and recaptcha, the bots still get in once and a while. I tend to just ban and delete the ones that successfully make posts, since I don't got the time to check every new user.

Hm, switching to another forum software could help. Some forum software is simply not secure enough, means no valid weapons against spam, and under permanent spambot attack. I made good experiences with a proper setup PHPBB3 forum in the past. Migration is a chapter at its own though. And PHPBB3 a very special chapter too ...

What could help is to customize your forum software. Most spambots are made to catch the masses. And so they attack the security features of the masses. Captcha is no longer a big hurdle. That`s more a thing to prevent valid users from login nowadays. Have a look if there`s a plugin or a way to add a custom question to the registering form. Like what is four and tree. Or even better two questions. The more customized the login is, the less spambots makes it through.

in my experience phpbb has been much worse for spam than  most, and like i said there is more than just captchas, using some hidden fields, and validation tricks, on both user registration and posting, might do the custom question later, but your suggestions such as simple math using the words for numbers, bots prolly still will get that, since more advanced ones can pick out key words and use simple logic.

very few bots manage to post due to the honeypots, which is good, im not really overly concerned about there being some registered ones that aren't doing anything, and i also don't got the time to go through the whole user list and figure out what is a bot and what isn't, so at best i might just delete 0 post accounts past a certain date.

in my experience phpbb has been much worse

PHPBB isn`t this much worse than other common forum software solutions. They are all under attack. I had PHPBB2 running, and was at a daily base at spamhunting. With version 3 and some tricks it went down to zero spam. PHPBB3 has an onboard way to add custom input fields. And one of them with a special setup did the trick. Not sure though if this special setup is still a valid method. I have closed my forum last year to save some bandwidth. But it has worked up to that point. Zero spam.

I had my hands at other forum software too over the years. Like Bulletin board, Burning Board and another big one that i cannot remember at the moment. They all had a massive spam problem. And here i have never found a working solution.

The key is customization. Behind a specific point it doesn`t make much sense for a spambot writer anymore to customize its bots for all eventualities. They want to catch the masses. 99.9 % of them are made to pass through the usual antispam methods. That`s by the way why common plugins doesn`t help this long. When a method to prevent spam becomes standard then the spambot writers fixes their bots. At the moment it`s a honeypot solution that does the job best. Better said did. It is common now. And i already see this method failing at my Wordpress blog. And i see it failing here.

Ah, the everlasting war against spambots ...

Thinking, maybe a question specific to 3d would work well, since I know bot breeze through the math ones. Could do something like this.

"What is one of the three components types that makes up a polygon model."

Than have vertex, edge, and face as acceptable answeres.,

I would have to think through different names for things though since some people might say polygon instead of face etc.

It`s defintely worth a try. You can also add two questions. The less common the better it is