I just saw the second bot and reported it.

Question is, how can they sign-up? Isn't there that human input thing in registering? Is ES vBulletin updated to the latest version? If its not then its vulnerable to hackers and I guess in this case bots.

Any investigation in this?

Riv , you can easly set-up templete which is based on a script that read the website security checks.I think the filters which are set are eniugh for major adv spam bots.

so this is a possible vBulletin security exploit? or is it from ES side?

Riv, one basic fact .. you never can prevent having them 100% .. I dont know how things are setup here .. probably DesertDestroyer can help in this or kamakazy.

well just to help out the ES team, this page will help:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=211647

P.S. I have beta tested vBulletin a LONG time ago when these things weren't a problem, but it was forecasetd that time and the image captcha was conceptualized.

That vBulletin support page brings me back to Squinty's thread about new users being able to post.
A mthod to prevent these guys would be like after 20 posts a new user can create a thread or something? or moderator approval for new users?

Thanks for bringing this up, we had this issue a while ago and did some measures to prevent them, which worked for a while. It has restarted again recently again as noticed. The team will start again to find the best way to prevent them again. The mentioned sugguestions are well appreciated and will be considered as part of the possible solutions for this issue.