Re: OMG... ProSoundWeb'd forums are pissing me off...
I don't have time to get too in depth about what goes on with spam prevention here, but here it goes.
Robots and human spammers can't answer industry-specific questions.
You'd be surprised at how many can! A lot of the spammers make posts that relate a lot to the topics. A human being paid to make spam posts all over the web knows how to make a Google search!
We use Spam-O-Matic as well. We had a bunch of problems when we first started with the Glowhost software, but things are good now. Whenever a new member registers, if they get passed vBulletin's captcha/human verification system, all of the information they enter (including email address, username, IP) gets checked to the Stop Forum Spam database. The problem we run into with that registration system is a college, or public area's IP being blacklisted by the Stop Forum Spam database. It doesn't happen much, but once in a while we'll get an email from someone who was told they're a spammer, and we'll have to manually go in and create an account for them.
I don't recall how many of a user's first posts we check, I think it's one or two- but if a newly registered user's first post contains certain things like a URL, it will require moderation before showing to the world. If they make it through that, their post will be checked against the Akismet database, which contains millions of spam postings. If all goes well, the post will appear on the site.
A few times a month a post will require moderation, most of those aren't spam. The last one that came up was a new user posting in the market place.
But without any of this, the amount of spam a smaller site like us has to deal with is very minimal in the big picture. The guys over at larger forums have a much bigger pain dealing with hundreds or thousands of spam posts/registrations daily.
I can't speak about user registrations, but I will say that the guys at other larger forums do a very good job of handling spam posts.
