Some good points here but you’re definitely underestimating the ability of software approaches. Believe me when I say 99.99999% of spam is automated. I know how it works. I have the software programs and have used them (not to spam) to learn how they work and how to fight them. I also used them in anger a few times to blast some known spammers and get their ISP to kill them off, haha, but that’s another story. And I am talking 8-10 YEARS ago, automated email verification was in full swing then, as was automated captcha filling in, etc etc. Here is the process in very brief…
Use Scrapebox (great tool, for other uses, finding sites for research purposes etc) to “Scrape” the entire internet for either keyword hits, or other criteria. This takes a few hours to get a list of MILLIONS of “target sites”. You then cut and paste that list into a spamming program (GSA SER is one, SE NUKE is another, MANY others). In the spam program, you set up email addresses or just go to fiverr.com and buy pre-verified gmail; accounts to look “genuine” as everyone knows gmail addresses are safe, yeah right!
So the spam program actually has an email program built right into it, so it can emulate the human response. I could even set the time between the email coming in, and how long to click the activation, not too quick as that shows you’re a bot. So I could wait say 15 minutes then hit the activation link (all automatically within the software). I can randomise through many different (thousands) proxy addresses so each one has a different address (Hence I take your point about spoofing IP addresses, which is a valid point, BUT banning certain countries IS still a very good way to chop spam down by a large degree, as most spamming rentable IP addresses are still in those countries).
You can then use a spinning program like TheBestSpinner or similar ones, to create a load of spam gibberish words which it scrapes off other forums you already scraped, it produces a random string of text (can be coherent if needed, its clever stuff) and that waits say 4 hours or 24 hours and then posts to a forum thread on the preverified account, and here comes the big point which JR made a very good comment about below - LINK. It’s all ONLY done for that ONE purpose. Swaylocks has good backlink power, it’s got authority and age in the search engines so a backlink from it can really help push a site’s ranks up. I would say most spam is more about ranking a site, than selling a product (directly from the post anyway).
I did start some research and never finished it, but here was my idea… there is one problem above, WHICH thread to post on? Well it can be set to randomly pull a thread, but the majority of SEO spammers know they want a CURRENTLY ACTIVE THREAD. I wonder if that’s why so much spam is hitting THIS thread, its near the top of the activity for the forum, so maybe thats why. I wondered whether a thread which is entitled “USERS PLEASE IGNORE THIS THREAD, ITS FOR SPAMMER DISTRACTION!” but which had a single character post put on it automatically every hour around the clock, I have a feeling that would attract all the spam directed at the entire forum. It’s just a theory, and of course a few random MANUAL spammers will not fall for it, but a fun idea anyway!
I would suggest a first RANK of users, so the rank you get when you first join, to be banned from links or posting images, limited to one post per day, and unable to PM other users, if that were possible within your control panel. That way, once a mod sees a newbie posting genuine posts, he can up his rank. Otherwise they are limited and never get out of that rank, never post a link, and their spam will fail. In time, this will make them remove the site from the spam lists, but bear in mind people are scraping the web daily for target sites and SL will constantly keep coming up as it is a good place to get a backlink, and you can’t change that.
JR idea - no replies as first post, if that’s possible that’s a great idea, as they never want to start a thread, only to get quick views from people already subscribed to an active one (most the views they care about are google spiders, and they visit active threads a lot more than old threads)
Domain specific questions is definitely a great idea and will do massive damage to their games
X number of flags - as Huck just said, that won’t work, ONE spam flag and they should go, a spammer never finds God and surfing all in one week
Links - I would not ban links for registered members, it can REALLY destroy conversation and references to useful stuff etc, but I totally agree with banning ALL links from users who have not yet proved they are not a spammer, and basically ANYONE who chats about surfing and shaping, they are not going to be a spammer. If a manual spammer is clever enough to go to all that trouble, trust me you won’t catch them, they will build a 10 page thread having us all convinced they want to build boards, then they will mention a friend who sells these “widgets” and boom the link will go in without anyone batting an eyelid! If you spot it, good on you, cos most don’t (I frequented the spamming forums to learn the tricks, and manual spam is now the “only way to get a good forum backlink which won’t get removed”!)
Basically I learned everything there was to know about spamming 8-10 years ago, and it hasn’t changed, it’s just got more efficient. My own forum still gets hit by all this crap but some basic tricks (now I know how it works) killed off 95-99% of it. I now just have alerts to tell me if a user posts a link, and I skim the post and usually know from the username if its genuine or not, but if not, I might catch a sneaky sucker every few months who got in under the radar past all my defences!
Think like the software does, a click can be automated, a tick and even a captcha form can be automated (probably much better nowadays), BUT a manually written email on a specific subject, that can not be dealt with by software. Hope this helps. it certainly helped me, and took months to learn about.