On average, we've been getting about 20 accounts created per day (successfully) by Chinese and Russian spam-bots.
While the valiant efforts of our moderators have meant that they are not successful in posting their latest scheme on World of Warcraft Gold Sales, the accounts are still a PITA to eliminate out of our userbase.
As a result, I've enable a more sophisticated "capcha" image that seems to be able to thwart the bots abilities to do automatic OCR (optical character recognition).
This means that if you register a new account, you'll see an image something like this as part of the registration process:
While it may be a little more difficult for our legitimate users to sign up to the site, it is, in the long run, for the better good, and we apologize for the hassles.
...jeff
