Yep, I'd say that there's yer problem rot there, ma'am.
Beats me how the site got set that way. We used to allow public registration, with a captcha graphic.
I'm not going to just turn public registration back on, though, in case podrock turned it off. He's been dealing with spammers for months, wouldn't surprise me if he solved the problem by sealing registration.
I'll post the question to pod over on Community.