More spammers and no join page!

Here is a good one. We didn't know how to get rid of the person joining our site to leave back-links to their  affiliate marketing sites. We thought it was just one person, but maybe not, it might be a whole bunch of people. We don't really know. But at any rate we decided to take away the join page for about a month or two and maybe the spammer(s) would go away. So, now we have no join page at all whatsoever. When you click on the link for the join page all that comes up is the login for existing members. You cannot join as a new member, period. I can not even figure out how to join the site with out a join page and I am the administrator. Well, we have had no join page for about 3 days now and yesterday somebody joined our site as a new member. So in other words, the spammers cans still join and leave back-links in their profile with no join page! How is this even possible????

Kindest Regards,

Chuxstir

This part confuses me.

So, now we have no join page at all whatsoever. When you click on the link for the join page all that comes up is the login for existing members.
If you removed join.php then you should be getting a 404 error or page not found. Which does not match what your saying is happening.

So.....

1) What did you do to remove join.
2) Did you physically remove join.php
3) Do you have facebook connect installed, or any other connect module.

Ok, so did you reinstall the join page? If you did, then the first question I have to ask is did you completely clear your cache?

The other point I wanted to make was removing the ability to join for a month won't make any of the spammers go away. Almost all of them are automated bots. There are NUMEROUS posts on this site that explain very effective ways to nearly eliminate spammers. I would do some reading before I go down the "lets just delete some pages again' path.