Robin and I have talked about more automatic anti-spam measures. So far, our feeling is the extra inconvenience to legitimate users and possibility for "false positives" isn't worthwhile. We really do not like the idea that a brand new user would be unable to immediately ask a question. An extra question at registration might make sense?
Currently we're using the
Akismet filter (yes, we paid for a single-site license), which is automatically moderating almost all of the hundreds of daily spam messages. But some do get through every day. But no filter is perfect. Over the last several months, at least a few false positives have occurred too, causing quite a lot of trouble for the people affected.
Robin's looked into some forum mods that automatically block spammers based on a number of criteria. The trouble is that no filters are perfect and some of them achieve their spam effectiveness at the expense of trouble to real people.
Right now, our main strategy is to respond as quickly as we can to spam reports, so....
Please use the "Report Post" button. (it's the little black triangle icon under each message)
Don't bother writing anything in the report, just type "spam" so it's not empty.
Something else we explored, and I *really* want, is the report spam button to automatically moderate the message. Well, within some parameters... perhaps if more than a certain number of reports are received, perhaps where people with 50+ messages posted count as many reports? (and maybe other anti-abuse measures?) I spent an afternoon searching for such a vBulletin mod, but only turned up lots of other people asking for pretty much the same thing! I briefly considered try to write it myself, but that seems foolish with so many things to do on software for Teensy 3.0. If anyone can find such a mod for vBulletin version 4, please let me know?