Starship Asterisk*

This suggestion might be the best way to stem the tide of spammers. If the posting process scanned posts for key words i.e. PORN, etc and didn't allow for posts with those words, and or, didn't allow posts with more than a certain number of hyperlinks (like 3) and required the input of a verification text string to ensure that it is an actual person entering the post Like "enter here______ what you see here[____] in this box.
As most spammers have certain key words in their posts and most have multiple links in their posts. While this might be a minor inconvenience for most legitimate posters it wouls serve as a henderance for most spammers.

Thoughts???

as you can see in this thread and can not see in hidden forum (because you have not yet applied for modship (hint)), these things are already coded and wait to be installed (but Nereid does not seem to have time or will to do that).

Then I'll wait with baited breath but I won't hold it

Another clue is to look for ALL CAPTION headers.

I see a lot of blogs using spam filtering software that blocks new user comments based on rules. I guess spam recognition software is a disciplin of it's own, so looking for some software extension to this forum software might be the way to go. The filtering software for bloggers got a spam queue, where suspiciously looking posts from new members get sent. The moderators then need to look through this queue every couple of days and allow wrongfully identified users.

I guess another way is for users to mark posts as spam. That way we the users can moderate spam on this forum by ourselves. If a post got a sufficient number of spamremoval requests, it's automatically removed. If by chance some users abused this ability (for instance harry's posts ), they can be identified by the voting list, and the moderators can act accordingly. Obviously new users should not get the ability to mark spam before some weeks or a month.