I can't speak for the software for this particular site but have heard that some forum software options allow for moderation of posts prior to publication. Is that available with our platform?
The forum used to limit where and how much you could post without admin approval. IIRC, you had to introduce yourself and then an admin would let you into the rest of the forum. But it was buggy, sometimes not even allowing that initial post, and also kept out legitimate persons (like myself) so I don't know if there's a good answer here.
I don't think the spam is that bad. Some of it is actually funny. Post approvals just frustrate some people and probably kept more new members from really posting much, so to avoid that a little bit of spam is tolerable.
Chip is looking into improving our filtering. We'll see what he finds and whether that helps. Believe me, no one dislikes this more than MC and I do!
I was a fan of the Esperanto spam. Who is searching for fax services (or whatever it was) in Esperanto? I can't imagine it's fun having to deal with a dozen spam messages every few hours. Ouch!
I liked it so much that I took a screenshot of it before it was deleted! I had to dig around to find the screenshot, but here you go.
Apparently the technical situation for mitigating this is pretty complicated. We're going to try a few different antispam plugins, but we have to do so cautiously, and when Chip has time, so please bear with us for a while.