It's been getting worse here, as I'm sure many of you have noticed.  Not nearly as bad as the days of the non-registration forums or even these before I added a couple modifications, but enough to be annoying.

I've got a couple ideas to hopefully cut it down a bit.  Coding them will be a pain but once I wrap up another little project on the site I'll try to get cracking on it.

If any of you particularly webliferate members out there have any ideas feel free to send them my way.

Death to the spambots! that the product is soulfully undully righteous in the outpouring victory that is Dell Computers saving the space program in monotone amounts of hardware and likable venue.

*insert random link to virus-infested site here*

But how else will we find out about shoes or handbags?

We have women on this forum, don't we?

Ever try Akismet?  I've used it on several WordPress installs, always seems to keep the spam away.  They have a PunBB plugin right here.

stopforumspam.com has a multitude of plugins and APIs, PunBB included.

Thanks for the two suggestions, will have a look into both!

What are the chances of convincing you to alter or remove this rule from the board?

I've run into it several times and have never seen such a rule implemented on any other board. It's not hard to write more than one meaningful response withing two minutes, especially when you open multiple threads at once in tabs before reading. I find it a little discouraging as a human poster, and I doubt the spambots really care

It was because there was a troll who would fill up the board with a huge plethora of threads in a short period of time.

I'll shorten it a bit and we'll see how things go.

A delay on new threads only (instead of all new posts) might make sense, but maybe the board software doesn't allow for that distinction.

Sweet!

Just a reminder (spurred by the recent spam post in the FFXIII Piano Collections thread) that any responses to or addressing a spam post in a thread about something else are likely to be deleted.  Besides being off-topic, obviously I am going to delete the spam and when I do any posts addressing it are going to look even more out of place.

If anyone really feels the need to address a spam post and doesn't want to see their own post deleted the best thing to do for now (until I upgrade to forums that let me move posts to a new/different topic) would be to reply here or in a new topic.

As for the spam issue itself, one problem I've seen mentioned is that some amount of spam these days isn't automated but is actually posted by real people who will do the job for cheap in developing countries.  Hence the spam methods getting smarter.

Better spam prevention is something else I'm hoping to accomplish when I upgrade to new forums one of these days.

Well that answers that question!  I still can't believe anybody would be stupid enough to read a completely arbitrary babbling post in broken English and then click on a suspicious link.  Actually I wonder how spam of any kind actually generates any business at all...

Pure quantity (someone is going to click it anyway) and SEO (raising ranking on search engine for random terms, to have the before mentioned effect there).

Well we're suffering something of a deluge of spam here again lately.  Very annoying (for me especially).  As it looks like I won't be traveling this winter vacation, one of my projects may be to move the forums over to a different system with better spam prevention.  Look and functionality should remain mostly the same for you guys.  Will keep you posted.