I have to agree with everything said so far. Yes there is a big influx of spam lately, no this isn't the first time and unfortunately no, this won't be the last. The risk you run when you have an open / user automated site is that anyone with a valid email address can sign up and post. Add that to the fact you have a pretty popular website to the mix and you're just begging for spammers. Open forum registrations are a necessary evil of open communities. Any forum community that tells you they don't have a spam problem is either lying to you, not allowing open registrations, or they're getting virtually no traffic.

We use multiple methods to try to prevent / catch spam varying from registration captchas to some other various tricks I keep up my sleeve. The entire goal in using these tools is to not prevent a real, *human* being from registering on the forums and being able to ask "WTF IS A MAKRO?!oneoneone". As soon as we do that we cut off our user base, and we cut off what makes this site run...people. The difficulty here is that most of the spammers are either using really badass bots or they're actually using human people to register the accounts and then days (sometimes weeks) later the account comes back and informs us all why we need larger penis' and the latest purses as discount rates.

So really, in order for us to remain open and not make new users jump through *too* many hoops (we already have them jump through a couple) the easiest solution for us is to keep doing what we've been doing in encouraging members to report posts. When you report a thread or a post, it goes to it's very own special forum that only the forum mods and I can see. (yes we actually have forum mods again, they just wish to remain rather incognito, but you've likely seen them around.) I only actually read through the entire site about once or twice a day. But I visit much more than that, and my first stop every visit is the reported post forum to see if anything needs to be done.

This probably isn't the answer people want to hear, but at the same time, give some credit to our other forum mods. For every 1 spammer I ban, they ban 3-4 others. We also have a mod that regularly checks new users for spam signatures / profiles and bans them before you even see them. I can't thank these people enough for what they do, on the budget they do it on.