1131 Forum Bots

I’ve ran several Internet forums over the past 3 decades, starting with a mailing list back in the Stone Ages. While almost all other Old School forums have switched over to social media platforms, I still fully control my own with a remote server & storage company that I change as prices change or security issues emerge. I don’t even know where the site is currently hosted, but parts of it are in my attic. Over the years my site has been DDOS attacked a number of times, and it’s constantly the target of webcrawlers, a half-dozen or more at any one time: occasionally it gets swarmed by 1000s of crawlers indexing for some new search engine. These are all benign activities that are of little concern but bots actually cause me to close down new sign-ups because I was spending so much time deleting them. There are many, many attempted sign-ups that the CAPTCHA, question, and other techniques keep out but there are a dozen a day that get through: their username is not a construct, they're not blacklisted, the email addresses are not throw-aways, and the IPs are not in known bot territory but I if send email to their addresses asking them to respond they never do. Many sign-ups have Anonymous IPs which I just ignore; the others mostly come from Russia & Ukraine, but also China, Amsterdam, Poland & even a handful coming from the States. These are very well-camouflaged bots, and make me think it’s people who sign-up so that bots can later post ads and run prepared scripts: that’s not why I host a forum.