In the many, many years that I've been a moderator or administrator of several fora, I've never managed to discourage spammers.
You see you're trying to get through to people who are generally as thick as a brick.

All one can do, I've learned, is to be patient and just keep banning them and eliminating the spam.
I do it here and in one or two other places every day sometimes two or three times a day.
Above all I try not to let them wind me up. After all that's handing them the victory isn't it?

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. 😉

JohnG.

Two comments:
- The current CAPTCHA is obviously not really helping, or is just being brute-forced to bypass
- They tend to post on "0" replied posts, which is digging up some interesting things I may have missed either from the abundance of SPAM at the time, or from before I joined. :p

[quotePost id=11598]The current CAPTCHA is obviously not really helping[/quotePost]

The CAPTCHA protects against bots. For all of the spam we're seeing, somebody is being paid to click through the CAPTCHA.

Clemens is quite right.
If you watch as closely as I do you'll see that the vast majority of the spam occurs Monday to Friday.

Just where it's directed varies over time.
Some while back (months(?) a year(?)) I logged in one morning to find three to four PAGES of new spam messages!
It took me a good half hour, or so, to clear it all up.
I wouldn't be surprised though if I missed a few.

JohnG.

Why is there an option to "ban the user" but no option to "delete the topic"?

There usually is a "Delete" menu item just below the "Ban post owner" menu item.
Which thread did it not appear on?

Interesting point.

If I remember, the 'ban' option is not really a 'ban' as it's for a period only, which is not a lot of point. From the point of view of malicious spam (and really, most of the spam we get here is malicious, as the material is irrelevant, and it's cluttering up the system and making things more difficult for legitimate users, and it's uselessly bumping old items to the top of the list, etc). Such items should justify total deletion of the account - BUT - there would be a problem if the same user already had legitimate topics posted, then they should not be removed?

Geoff

"Delete" only works on the replies. If the spammer started a new topic, "Delete" does not show up.

It does not appear on the first message of a thread.
It only appears on the replies.

Apparently, the ability to delete the first post (i.e., the entire thread) is a separate right that somebody forgot to give to you.

Would appreciate that...