Flood

A Chinese spam account has just flooded the forum with dozens of spam messages. They were posting a message every 10 seconds! till I blocked the account. I am going to ask Tom if he can mass-clean the damn flood. Besides, some stronger spam prevention is needed.

looks like they created another profile and are doing the same thing

Yeah. I've blocked that too, but it's all too easy for them to create several accounts and post all the spam messages they want.
Maybe a few minutes' time-out between a post and the next one, at least for new members, would make it not so easy for them. No normal user would send posts every 10 seconds, unless clicking twice by mistake.

They were originally creating thousands of lists I guess its moved on to the forums now :(

HOLY F**K there is just no stopping these spam accounts flooding the forums

It isn't anything new: I reported a similar attack to the forums three months ago. Now they're becoming more aggressive though!

Some random ideas.

1. A few minutes' wait between a forum post and the next one by same user.

2. Easy Captcha's (e.g.: 2+4=? ___) for new users when they post.

3. E-mail verification when creating an account, like Reporting said.

4. No exotic charsets, as it's an English language forum, while this site seems to be targeted by Chinese spammers.

5. Blacklisting by IPs.

6. A "Report" button to alert admin/mods of abusive forum posts.

I'm going to add some of these thing in the beta site

Tom will come in and clean it up but this might not be over for the night
they have done this multiple times with multiple accounts in one night

Back with a vengeance. 59 pages of garbage on this thread in roughly 11 hours, someone needs a new hobby.

And still going..............

most likely a bot rather than some person just spamming over and over