I took out the trash

[3ICE]

I just wiped 1720 spam topics clean (means I deleted them all)

--3ICE

[3ICE]

The bots reposted 60 threads in 1 hour, so the guest forum will have to be Locked indefinitely.

I could stop the spammers, but it would be too much work. Locking the forum is faster.

[3ICE]

I get more and more spammers every day... And now they even register, so they must be advanced!

In response to this, I set up a script that automatically bans them based on two factors:
Did they register very recently? (They usually register and post their spam right after.)
Did they make over 5 new topics? (They usually make 6 topics.)
If both conditions are met, the spammer's posts are wiped and he is removed from all user groups. (Which effectively removes all forum permissions, so it is basically a ban.)

EDIT: I do keep a backup of all the deleted spam for 1 week, in case the script catches a false positive. But that is unlikely. :)

[3ICE]

To prevent mass registrations spamming the user database full, I had to enable CAPTCHAs today.
Though I must pat myself on the back; we went almost three years without requiring users to waste their time on captchas. Yeah! (That is 34 months or 89,253,005 seconds to be super-exact.)

[3ICE]

They can defeat the old CAPTCHAs now. I can either update to ReCAPTCHA (invisible NoCAPTCHA) or turn off registration. Guess which one was easier to do. Yeah.