Or am I mistaken in thinking they’ve increased of late? How do these bots manage to register?
They come and go, as we get on different spammers’ radar, and then they get bored and go away. Every now and then someone will post dozens of threads in a few minutes before getting banned. We don’t see the vast majority of them, because they get deleted very quickly.
We mods do our best to “vanish” them ASAP, but we sometimes don’t see them for a while. I not only don’t know why there have been a lot recently, unless it’s that school is out and there are lots of high school and college persons with time on their grubby little hands. I gotta say, I don’t understand these things anyway. What are they trying to prove or do?
Anyhow, y’all help by reporting when you see one (click on the little ! in the red triangle in the upper right corner of the post) – that’s a big assist.
I’d say that the numbers are normal.
The bulk of them come from India and China. The rest mostly third world countries, but sometimes poor people working cheap in second world countries.
We get 'em pretty quickly. Many, if not most, are posted between midnight-8 A.M. US EDT. Because they posted during the work day from overseas.
So, Aldi, you see them because you’re on here while they’re being posted.
Also, most are probably not bots but hard working poorly paid third worlders. They can figure out capchas and multiplication problems.
I also haven’t noticed any particular increase in spam.
Is it just me, or has there been a surge in resurrected zombie threads?
Not that I’ve noticed.
On that subject can somebody explain how these spam sites work? Are there actually people trusting enough to contact a website that is in the business of making and selling fake ID’s?
“Yeah, I’d like to order a fake New York driver’s license and a fake American passport … okay, here’s the personal information about me I want on them … and here’s my home address so you can mail it to me … how much will this cost? … okay, here’s my credit card number…”
I can think of at least one. 
Trusting enough? Maybe or maybe not.
Desperate enough and/or stupid enough, fer sure.
Those fake ID spams alone may account for the OP’s question. Seems like we’ve gotten a lot of those. They must really want our bizness.
Say, I’ll trade you three fakum Mikey Mantles for a fakum Wayne Gretzky!
Not that I’ve particularly noticed, but usually during school vacation we get new people strolling along, find an old topic of interest to them, and resurrect it. (Also, we’ve got a couple of long-time wonderful members who discover new information, espesh in CoCC, and post to an old thread to let us know about some new research or whatever.)
Thank you, Sam. That explains it. I’ve been coming to the boards much earlier of late and it’s clearly coincided with one of those times of day/night when most if not all mods are busy unknitting the ravelled sleeve of care. Either that or they’re asleep. 
Apparently the mods need to establish a Night Shift; perhaps rotating the duty among themselves.
I’ll do it if they triple my pay. 
3x $0.00 : done! 
I thought one of you [del]characters[/del] admins was overseas. Or was that another product of my fevered imagination?
xash was in India and basically had the night shift. He’s still on staff but doesn’t do much day-to-day stuff now.
Presently our time zone spread is from GMT+1 to GMT-9.