Every day a ton of 'people' register on my forums with random letters as names and emails, some activate with their email and some don't. None of them ever post or do anything and they're all from different ip address. I installed reCAPTCHA and Fassim AntiSpam, they slowed it down a little bit I think but there's still a lot.
There is no way to stop spam registrations. Captcha II is very good for such purposes, but you can't stop the bot coders to break that spam prevention too.
Install stop forum spam plugin. You'll get rid of most of the spam.
So it's nothing I should worry about? Do the accounts take up any extra space?
They take up such a tiny amount of space in the database that it's not going to cause any problems with space.
- Is it a security risk, keeping them around?
- Wouldn't they generate page impresions if we kept them?
No, there's no security risk, all they might do is come back and post some spam, but that's nothing to do with the security on your forum.
Not really, the user/bot behind the accounts would still visit but they'd just be a guest...
So...do any of you ban them or keep them?
I've installed the "stopforumspam" plugin and also banned a few of them, preventing them to register again. I have reduced the number of registrations from several per day to just a couple per week. Another thing I've noticed is that they hardly ever post anything at the beginning and that gives me a chance to get rid of them automaticly as I use auto pruning for members with 0 posts after three months. In our case there is no use of register if you aint gonna post anything...
usually e-mail activation leaves you with a huge list of awaiting activation
Secondly, i've forced the fields of bio, location and gender on registration, some bots won't fill them in, so they can never continue registration.
Simple and stupid things, but hey, they work !