[2019] WTF is up with all the Chinese spamming the forum?

Spam Bots work by crawling and looking for signatures of known software. Usually this is a snippet of text like a copyright or a meta tag but it could be any consistent identifier. This usually applies to blog and forum software.

It is a constant back and forth between Captcha/ReCaptcha/use of a field that requires the user to answer a question and the bots "learning" them. Rinse and repeat.

Making security in regards to these bots as tight as possible tends to lead to genuine users encountering difficulty or frustration in signing up to our Forums so we look to walk a fine line between catching the bots and user experience.