user profiles

Hello!

I am a new user to Drupal, and have spent a few days acquainting myself with the interface, terms, modules, and other various techniques related to using Drupal. I am also currently reading through two Drupal 7 specific books. Now, to business...

I have a community portal where users have the ability to register w/o approval. I implemented Mollom almost a year ago and that has eliminated most of the comment / content spam. However - I've recently noticed an increase in account creation where spammers are filling their user profiles (additional profile fields for my users like bio / website / etc) with their spam links. I actually noticed this with some bizarre twitter spam that was linking to a user profile on my site... Not good - I want to get rid of this garbage.

I've just released the first beta of a new module, with the exciting and extremely inventive title: Content Profile Form Parts.

The idea is to allow users to edit their profiles without leaving their profile page; to do this an admin identifies parts of the Content Profile form the user should be able to edit, these go into Drupal system blocks and are loaded via AJAX when the user clicks a link on their profile.

With the vast amount of profile as nodes implementations, how do you set up your own profiles on your sites?

What I am really looking for are what modules are deprecated and rarely used to the more flexible and complete user profile solution.

Does anyone who is serious about creating complex and dynamic profile(s) ever use profile.module and if so, why?

Do you use any custom coding, and if yes then for what?

I am really looking forward to creating a profile solution for one of my sites and I want to maintain a clean back end and flexibility.

Hi all!
As a part of my course on Usability Design at the University of Leuven (Belgium), I'm doing a user and task analysis on Drupal.
I have started a user survey to collect useful data on the users of Drupal. With this data, I will create user profiles and personas to reflect some typical user groups of Drupal.

The survey can be found here: http://drupalsurvey.vanisterdael.be/index.php?sid=76524