Hi
Spam is a pain for me also however it looks like your doing most of the things you should to prevent spam. Sadly no matter how much we do we'll always face some level of spam but there was one thing I did high made a bit difference was adding reCapcha on the registration page, this almost instantly had a benefit in the fight against spam.
One other thing you you could do "similar to limiting PM access" is to grant access to bypass spam moderation for trusted ranks, this help cut down on the good stuff being filtered but ultimately the only way to stop this is my constantly removing any "valid" posts so the spam engine learns.
Goodluck
Hi Fellsteruk, ah yes.. we have an 'established member' role applied when a user has posted a few times (quite a low rank but just enough to identify any odd behaviour) which lets users bypass the spam filter. Our ranking system is currently broken (all users seem to be gaining the top rank automatically for reasons unknown - lithium are looking into it) at the moment though so we are having to hold the fort manually :D Not good but we are somehow managing.
A captcha on the registration form sounds like a good idea and should provide extra level of protection against automated account creation. I will take a look into that (would probably need Lithium to implement I am guessing?).
One idea I have had is to create a custom page for moderators to have all sorts of panels and tools available to them. Things like feeds to the report/filter pages, flagged items, pre-moderation blog comments etc etc. Would need a bit of planning but I have a feeling I could come up with something useful for managing the forum from a moderators point of view.
