Whoah there, the odd spam post floating around isn't getting out of hand. In fact I actually noticed several of these were coming from the same email domain, not one of the usual free email services like GMail but something unusual, so I've banned the domain. It could easily be one spammer responsible for most of these.

The quickest and most effective way to stop spam would be to ban GMail and Yahoo email addresses since most spammers are using these, however many genuine users use such services so that is entirely impractical.

It seems all of this is only up to Richard and Sander anyway. It may be a little pitty that us moderators don't have access to these more advanced features of the site, as the master guys seem to have very little time these days and months. :-)
I agree the frequency of spam posts and topics is definitely increasing. I have been active, back and monitoring the traffic again, for just a day after a long break, and already banned 4 bots that nobody seemed to notice or react to accordingly before. that's definitely more than we were used to. :-)
Lukas

There is no way to identify a spambot's account until they make a post sadly. There is no difference between a spam account or genuine user account, otherwise if there were the forum could be set up to block the spam accounts automatically.

Here's another simple possibility, have on the registration page something like:

Choose the first/second/third option

Then radio buttons or combo box perhaps with first, second, third etc. This should be fairly idiot proof, and while not completely secure it would hopefully require spambots to be adjusted to specifically circumvent. I don't think we're that significant that anyone would bother doing so purely for spam.

I know Sander had set up the forum so that signatures don't display unless you're logged in, the idea being that this would stop the links affecting google rankings and hopefully putting the spammers off. Sadly this doesn't seem to have got through their thick skulls.

The database is something of a separate issue, but in terms of spammers I believe if we could have fewer spambots registering there wouldn't necessarily be need for more moderators specifically.

I do know from some E-mail chats with CRichard and Sander that they do indeed have plans for the site and for modifications, perhaps one of these ideas can be put in place as well.

There is a bunch of spam today in particular. A bunch of ads for medicine it looks like.

I think there has been more spam in the past couple of weeks than usual.

This is getting absolutley rediculous. I realize that it appears to be one domain but, its practically constant. Notice how even the posts have the word spam in them. Its almost like the spamer wants to insult us. I bet the spambot has posted over 20 topics just today.

Hi dark,
Just to point out, you forgot to delete a spam topic on the moderator suggestions forum. It's by the same spambot that you banned.