To beat off the bots, use a captcha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

I don't have any specific program to recommend but I'm sure Google can be your friend.

They've got clever since that was invented. There is now character recognition software that can read them. Consequently this board is set up so that each new user has to be manually activated. Hopefully that only takes a matter of minutes as I always get an email each time a new user registers. Each morning I usually have about 20 - 30 of them - all from Russia usually.

Captchas do not have to be visual. Any device for distinguishing humans from bots is a captcha.

Now supposing you had to answer one of a series of random questions to register:

"What was the surname of the Pools manager who was replaced by Martin Scott?"

The Russki bots aren't going to be able to do that. That's one advantage of being such a specialist website.

Er Cyril Knowles %^& fiss pop(*&