I have installed a spam auto deleting system for the clear clear spam, i am adding its keywords as i see more spam.

(clearly only where the keywords are unlikely to be used in non spam posts!) This has instantly cut down on a vast amount.

I am still working on things getting ready to sort it out of course

Thats Great Neil surly it would be better to have a mod preventing the registrations rather than one that deletes the spam once its posted.

I understand that the the forum and spam industry are forever evolving but there are things out their like i mentioned in my first post which stops nearly 100 % of spam bot registrations, obviously you still have the problem of "normal people" posting spam but thats what mods and admins are for is it not ?

This does a great job on all my forums

NoSpam! for vBulletin 3.7 - vBulletin.org Forum

Most of the spam here is from real users and not bots, they are signing up to post their spam as humans.

This method gets around all the issues in one go, human and bot.

The real question is what to do with all the idiots who post in every thread

Yes i agree

link1 link2 link3

And i think i may have to start banning them.

Most of the spam ive seen of late are bots , although they are cleaver they are still bots , like the mobile phone stuff for example.

But yeah i know what your saying about the "yes i agree" people, that should be where your mods and admins come in though , give the member a warning , delete the links from the thread, if they do it again then ban them.

I think banning them straight away could maybe put a stop to a potential good member that is just inexperienced, a friendly warning could be all they need.

But i know where your coming from and it is very annoying lol

We will be analyzing the posts soon.

1) Anyone posting the same link more than once in a 24 hour period will have all other posts with that link deleted in the last 1 month.

2) Anyone who makes more than 5 posts under 32 characters in a 24 hour period will have any further posts that day deleted under 32 characters. And it may be worth deleting their existing 5 posts as well hehe.

3) Anyone who makes more than 3 posts in a day with external links will have all posts with links for the last 3 days deleted.

Is what i am proposing at present which will kill some good posts perhaps, but it will certainly help in cutting things down.

32 characters would work , after all posts that say "i agree" and "thank you" were suppose to be fazed out with the intergration of the "Thank You" hack.

Another idea i might implement is any posts under 200 characters in a thread where the previous post is over 3 weeks old will be deleted also, that could keep things easier to follow with the new posts section.

Just a suggestion regarding the registration captcha. I was just looking at the register page and I think that captcha is not exactly 100% bot proof. I've integrated Re-captcha in many of my sites and it successfully killed all auto bot spam.
What is reCAPTCHA?

Captchas that have spaces are usually 100% proof, but captchas without spaces are not necessarily. There are some crazy image translation software out there but none can translate a blank into a space.