How can we get rid of the recent surge of SPAM on VisforVoltage?

Agreed, we've got a plague of robots signing up and posting meaningless stuff to various threads.

For a while, they had links in their signature, and their whole purpose in life was to give a better google rank to those links. But recently, perhaps due to a changed forum setting, they've had no signatures and thus no links (or at least I'm not seeing them anymore).

I usually click on the "Flag as Offensive" button on the bottom of their posts, which should help our webmaster locate and remove them faster.

Unfortunately, the harder we make it for robots to create new accounts, the harder it is for real people to join up and contribute. There's a balance to be found somewhere.

Can we have some automated rules to bust the spam?

For example: Newly signed up members cannot post including any links.

Can we bar IP addresses of offending parties?

Could we equip a bunch of long-time members with the authority / access rights to delete any post that looks like spam? Anyone with half a brain can spot them pretty easily, false positive deletions would be quite rare I think.

Actually there is some automation that blocks some of the spam. One of the tools does track IP addresses and inform us when multiple accounts access from the same IP address, and none of the spammer accounts I've seen were ones with multiple accounts on the same IP address.

One really great tool is to equip members with the authority and tools to deal with the spam. If you go to your "My Account" page there is a choice to apply for a role, and the roles include "Moderator". We start you out as a Moderator in Training on a rigorous training regimen involving early morning scooter rides up the steps of the philadelphia art museum and drinking raw eggs.

Seriously. More moderators is desired and there has been a spate of spammers recently.

Having tried out several anti-spam systems I'm not confident that algorithmic defense is the best. The spammers simply invent new ways to masquerade as real content and these latest are pretty shrewd. The first time I saw one of these "I liked your blog post and have bookmarked your blog" comments I thought, why thank you, though you do understand this is a forum and not a blog, right? In other words it appeared rather natural for a naive user to have posted that. But then after seeing the second or third of these that, oh, this is an automated spam bot thingymajob. What I'm meaning to say is that the spammers are getting inventive about making their stuff appear real, and it seems to take human brains to identify it.

I look forward to talking with some of y'all about this..

P.S. @MikeB:

For a while, they had links in their signature, and their whole purpose in life was to give a better google rank to those links. But recently, perhaps due to a changed forum setting, they've had no signatures and thus no links (or at least I'm not seeing them anymore).

Yes that's true.. however the more recent ones are putting links in their profile. Again the goal is better page ranking, but an indirect method relying on links in their user profile.

That last post is ironic

spammer with a GSOH :)

I'll apply for moderatorship

It is getting so the site is nearly unuseable