stopping spam

Deleting the spam helps and his automated system is doing a reasonable job but I agree a moderator or 2 would speed the process up. I have offered to help in the past and my offer still stands.
Banning by user name and email address does not work at all. You will notice that the spam will come in a block of 4 or 5 from one user then that user is never seen again The next lot comes from a different user (same user different id) This user is a machine not a person and can create hundreds of accounts a minute in both free email and any forum it finds. Banning by ip sort of works but not that well Quite often all you see is the ip of a proxy server which could have hundreds of addresses but also it could be a virused pc that is being used as a relay. There are millions of these pcs. Banning these could block real posters although Im sure all real posters take proper steps to keep there pcs off the zombie list. On my other forum I ended up blocking a whole subnet in Bangalore due to one persistent spammer Stopped that one but did it really drop the amount of spam in that forum. Maybe by a quarter to a third No more than that. Only thing that works is live moderators willing to use the delete button.

Lots more spamming of the comments sections seems to have happened overnight. In one case it's from a username that has been used for spamming before so perhaps not a bot & banning may have been effective?
I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers to be "live moderators" on this site. As one of many who have put a bit of effort into information sharing here I hate the site being debased by spammers. Given the opportunity to delete their advertising crap I'd joyfully use the delete button.
Glenn

Matthew I see a trend developing of profile pages being used for spamming purposes. There does not seem to be a flagging or reporting facility where this can be addressed besides alerting you like I'm doing now. It would be worth reviewing some of the recent sign ups & a few of the older ones.

i flagged the last lot

Like!

Agreed. I'll look into it.