Usually stupid people don't have anything better to do. I had one idiot continually make dummy accounts using proxy addresses. It stressed all of my members out , because it was really difficult to ban the troublemaker.

I suggest gathering a good friendly staff of members who can keep an eye on your forum at all times. It's the only way to really deal with idiots.

Mind if I ask why they won't leave you alone ?

It's not people -- it's robot scripts. There's no person on the other end posting over and over and over again, it's a single programmer who's developed an OCR-reading webcrawler that they then sell to a company whose sole business model is making money via ad impressions (page loads). They start up the script and walk away, and in minutes you get a million billion posts in a million billion places.

The best way to combat this is by turning on some flavor of CAPTCHA requirement for all guest posting and account creation. IIRC InvisionFree doesn't have this functionality, so you need some eagle-eyed mods who are always around to delete things as soon as they show up. The worst thing you can do is assume the spammer is a person who is able to respond to you -- they're not.

There's a good chance it's not even a person posting those images, but a bot.

I used to get tooooons of that crud on SotE until I upgraded to phpbb3. Now I get none. :3 But they were bots. I had about 50 bot registrations a day, and it sucked.

Honestly, I don't think they're bots because they've made multiple posts. I've never seen a bot do that. Plus, they've spammed the same RP thread twice in addition to other random threads. I think it's a person.

Edit: this is re the pr0n bots that have been spamming RPG-D.

We had this happen a month or so back. It does make you feel irked. Geez. I go in an find all this stupid garbage on the site. We took the route altering our permissions. There is no forum available for a guest or a newly registered member to post in. They can read forums, just not respond. They can PM admins and that's how we accepts applications, via PM. Once the apps accepted, we open board permissions.

Someone registered a couple days ago and I knew from the really strange name that it was likely a spammer. They figured out in a couple minutes that they had no place to post and left.

We did a similar thing to RyanA... though we still have a handful of forums up for Guesty posting. But with ~270 forums on Tally, even the bots get sick of trying to find a way in. XD

Restricting the permissions on the default 'member' group/mask (the group users are put into straight after registration) and creating a new member group/mask to put accepted characters in with full permissions worked really well for us. Email validation also works for some, and CAPTCHA (if you can get it) is heavenly.

Bots post frequently -- just not all of them. Finding a place where they can post a pre-programmed message isn't uncommon. My old YaBB forum used to run into this on an average of once a week, post-CAPTCHA implementation.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they are bots. Bots can do things like get past CAPTCHAs and humanity questions (what is the opposite to up? etc), so I'm fairly sure they could post more than once. We've had bots on RPG-D making new topics like 'hi im new here' or responding to several different threads. THey might not be humans doing the posting, but humans can make these scripts more 'intelligent'.

I've never actually had a problem with spammers, not on any of my boards. I've had one make an account before, but they didn't do anything and I deleted it. RPG-D is the only place I've had to deal with them.

I asked him a question, to get more information. Their isn't enough info to come to either conclusion. Immature people are very capable of creating more then one account , especially if they feel like harassing you. I've seen the ugliness that forum wars can cause , which is why I was curious.