Wish there was some way to deal with them. It's a daily thing having to delete between 5 and 10 spams and they're getting raunchier every time what with the porn stuff. Especially considering that this board is accessible by children.

I have noticed that the Music Theory Forum seems to be getting the automated posts while the occasional posts in the Open Forum almost look like they're posted by an actual person rather than a spam bot.

I'm confused as to how these guys managed to adapt so fast when we changed the forum name and address. You'd think that by renaming a forum area and changing it's page address, that the spambot would lose track but it just seems to automatically adapt somehow.

Any ideas would be definitely welcome...

When I was moderating these forums I was able to keep things to a minimum by filing abuse complaints with the ISP's. But these guys seem to be originating in Asia and other countries that don't have any strict rules on this sort of thing. So abuse complaints sometimes seem to have the opposite effect and end up increasing the spam rather than eliminating it.

Even my email inbox has had a significant increase in the last few months with spams bypassing 3 levels of spam blockers including SpamSieve, the ISP and Entourage Rules trying to catch them. Even writing in rules to delete anything with the words "Viagra" in the email headers doesn't seem to work. (I'm up to about 4000 spam emails a week now and luckily only about 50 of them make it through the spam blocks.)

I honestly don't know what the solution is. If you block their ISP number, they just use a different one. If you disable bbcoding, you lose formatting and quoting. If you require email verification on signup, they get by that somehow.

And yeah... it's pathetic. I don't know what these companies get out of it.
Nobody ever reads them and everybody is annoyed by them so why do they even bother.