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in doing more research of my members and signups, is it possible that these “spam members” may, in fact, be REAL people that are going about doing this..  maybe they get paid for the number of registrations they create on boards?..

they go about this by appearing to be legitimate, with spam links in signatures and bios..  they do it this way so they don’t get deleted or banned..  and what happens is those links in the signatures and bios get indexed by search engines, which increases those rankings and traffic..

think of it like paying for search words on google..  these people may be paying the same, just going about it a different way..

this is an infertility prevention, reproductive health and family building non-profit site with discussion forum.  bottom line is, member accounts that i would say are spam accounts, are actually posting to the discussions that are legitimate and real posts..  these new members are activating via email, and coming back and logging in to the site..

thoughts?

Yes, labor is cheap these days, human “spam” consequently on the rise.

Yes, people assume that it’s bots and scripts spamming because it’s hard to fathom both being a person paid to spam and being a person to pay others to spam, but that is the case with the majority of spamming.  It’s simply cheaper to hire unskilled labor than it is to retain a skilled developer to continually modify an effective script to crack and break through the spam prevention tools.  And cost isn’t the only factor, it’s also a numbers game.  An ocean of economically depressed unemployed people vs. a small pond of skilled developers who both have the skills and are willing to use them to that end.

ok.  great..  so, my next question is, how to manage this?  my client is getting hundreds of new “members” per day..  manual authentication isn’t really an option..  any other thoughts?

Depends on the needs of your site, and the patterns of spam you’re receiving.  Do you use the ExpressionEngine Blacklist module?  User banning to ban email address patterns or IP addresses of offending accounts when you find them?  You can also try Bad Behavior, though that’s more for bot related spam.  Akismet receives good reviews by many users.  Is the site a community site where volunteers can be enlisted to help combat spam?

ok.  great..  so, my next question is, how to manage this?  my client is getting hundreds of new “members” per day..  manual authentication isn’t really an option..  any other thoughts?

I manage one EE Forum site with the same problem. Not hundreds, but dozens of new registrations each day, many with email addresses to companies in India, most with email similar to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). It’s a mess.

In this case I’ve modified the user registration agreement, and banned email addresses from @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, et al. That stopped 90-percent of them. For the others I ban them on a case by case basis, sometimes deleting if they don’t post after a set amount of time, or, if the email is from India, Russia, China, etc.

The odd thing about them is that they register and leave, never to come back. Maybe they’re planning a big uprising in the future where they come back all at once and spam hundreds of member accounts.

I’d like to see incorporate some extra moderation levels in the Forums (a forum post is held up until moderated; after n-number of legitimate posts, all future posts are unmoderated). It’s a growing problem.