The Shining Source

I'm quite curious. How smart do they have to be to fill in all the registration crap and then post in the main forum?

Not very smart at all. In fact, I bet I could write one.

The smartest bits are downloading the captcha image and using pattern recognition on it, and a few bratwurstbots "learn" things about the board and use it in the messages. There have been a few that have said how great "General Blah" is, but that's about as far as they go.

I think breaking the captcha is not an easy task. Other than that it's simple to write some javascript to manipulate the form. Some people use human computation to break captchas, that is, they hire people to manually enter them or have web surfers break them without knowing.
I saw this stuff on a google tech talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=tech+talk+human+computation&hl=en

Maybe we should have a contest to see who can write the best captcha breaker for YOB, although i'm not sure where i would start.
Making a strong captcha sounds like fun as well, maybe we can have a contest on that instead.

A good CAPTCHA for YoB would be to show a picture of a character from the Shining Force series and ask them to type their name. You could link to a gallery of characters for people who didn't recognise them.