huh... the bot seems to know interests of certain members

Yeah I got this shit on my site, gotta talk to Yeormom about getting our provider to crack down on IPs that are doing this. I've been meaning to contact them, but just been manually blocking new users via email verification.

All of the bots hitting these forums are scattered IP addresses, most likely using public proxies. You can change your registration technique to kill the scripts they are using if you wanna get rid of them.

Yep, did that. Got it on admin verification.

I mean you can change the verification code sequence that recent builds of phpBB include. That will break the bots and won't make you approve members.

Ah well that works too.