Frankly, I think this sucks ass. I've been on this forum for quite a while but only occasionally post, so now I'm being put in the kiddie pen.  I'm sorry moderators that you're having problems with spammers, but maybe there's another way?  I run the digital coin forum http://digitalcoin.earthsociety.org - also an SMF forum and I've put in a script to halt forum spammer-bots that's fairly effective, albeit, my forum has very little traffic and perhaps spam-bots put more effort into popular forums - I don't know.

Still this is rather like banning the freedom of speech because of terrorists - the terrorists win.