Q: Why do I need such a thing?
A: To screw spambots.
Q: Does this do anything about human spammers?
A: No, this works only on automated registration attempts - but the actual human spammer has become more and more rare and is easily dealt with in other ways - most of them which do exist, still use automated programs to register anyway.
Q: Has this been tested at all?
A: Yes, extensively. The [OzzModz] Registration Spaminator has logged over 2 million blocked bot registration attempts in exhaustive testing for five years (on vBulletin and XenForo) on several forums - without allowing ANY successful automated registrations or ever interfering with any legitimate human. It has a perfect 100 percent success service record. It has never failed, never been defeated, never been bypassed and never blocked a legitimate human registrant.
Q: Does this alert any possible real people that their registration has been rejected?
A: No, there are no "gotchas" in the Spaminator, because no legitimate humans will ever see it or even know it is there. Xrumer and other automated spam systems are programmed to flag sites that present warnings, "gotchas" or alerts, even unusual behavior like loading an unexpected page - allowing the human system operator to investigate why registrations are being rejected. This information is passed on to the program developers and improvements are added to defeat the blocks. It's why most every anti-spam measure eventually gets defeated. They rat themselves out! Spaminator does not. Additionally, the rare human spammer mostly still uses automation to get registered. Why tell them what they're up against?
Q: Bots still get through the native honeypots in XenForo's registration form, how is this any different?
A: Unfortunately XenForo TELLS the bot program operators about the honeypots! Both with a "gotcha" on fail AND in the phrases and in the code itself! Small wonder those "honeypots" are bypassed! See above, Spaminator does none of that. We reject the silly term "honeypots" anyway, and prefer to call the Spaminator checks, land mines - they aren't told about them, don't see them, and are going to step on them!
Q: What about if this becomes widely used, won't the spam system programmers easily defeat it like everything else?
A: We shall see, they'll definitely try. But we've not only thought of that, we've planned for it in advance. Many other features for this are being developed and tested, and some are ready for deployment as the need arises. We don't go into battle with just one or two weapons or ideas.
Q: What about all the xenforo anti-spam stuff? Does this replace it? Can I turn some of the stuff off?
A: We encourage you to experiment. By all means try turning all the xF native and 3rd party stuff like SFS, off. Turn off the intrusive irritating captchas and the timer. Turn off the silly questions stuff. Run naked! The Spaminator will stop each and every bot that tries to register. Without fail. It's like a gill net in a lake - catches the fish who swim under, while your legit humans glide over, right on in without any hitches or silly "prove you're human" stuff. We let the bots do all the proving, let them jump through all the hoops. Make your registration process as human-friendly as possible. And please, report back to us, telling us your spaminator story. We'd love to read it!
Q: Spaminator is doing it's job in some respect however I've had a few successful attempts and posting spam on my forum. Luckily I still have SFS, Akismet and Honeypot on and automatically put them in approval queue. I would definitely recommended leaving those services on anyway as they are extra measures if Spaminator fails. FYI, I have CAPTCHA turned off.
A: Spaminator did not fail. It was a human spammer that registered. They then post the spam themselves or they hand it off to a automated program.