Bots and spam, how to avoid

[surprise]

I seem to get hundreds of submitted stories every week.
All these stories are discarded on submit, but they are still submitted.

It must be from an automated bot because I don't have that many ppl browsing my site.

I also set so only admin's can post stories.

How do I stop these bots from even submitting discarded stories? Why are they getting discarded, because only admins can post? Shouldn't it just block the new story completely?

[surprise]

no one can event see submit.php fields unless logged in as admin.. so it has to be bots.

[UnderDogg]

What I would do is rename submit.php and then change the code (or maybe something in .htaccess) to send the administrators to that new special file. Let's say you change it to 'post.php' and you tell the administrators to go to 'post.php', I think the bots will stay away in that case :-)

[surprise]

What I would do is rename submit.php and then change the code (or maybe something in .htaccess) to send the administrators to that new special file. Let's say you change it to 'post.php' and you tell the administrators to go to 'post.php', I think the bots will stay away in that case :-)

thanks I'll give that a go