How to prevent an influx of spam bots on our forum?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

This sort of spam has become very common lately, we have a guide for general spam prevention here:

Tips for Preventing Spam

This documentation provides a comprehensive guide on preventing spam in Discourse forums, and includes information about various settings and tools designed to help maintain a spam-free community environment. Required user level: Administrator On most forums spam is rare. However, if you’re having problems with spam on your site, Discourse comes with numerous tools to help you automatically prevent spam. The following guide offers some recommendations on how…

In the replies there was a useful post about a regex that can be used to block or flag phone numbers and email addresses using the watched words feature

Tips for Preventing Spam

One very useful regular expression is \d{3}-\d{4}|[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+ which blocks email addresses and phone numbers. Don’t forget to enable settings - posting - “watched words regular expressions”.