kd522, thanks for your feedback.

Nobody has as much experience combating spam on this forum than Harry. For years he's been a superman in tracking spammers, deleting their posts and devoting a lot of his time and energy into keeping these boards clean of the thousands (millions?) of spam attempts we've had. All unpaid. I have huge respect for him.

Further, I've had to do a fair bit myself, In fact, we even had to move to a dedicated server because of the pressure from bots and spam bots slowing down the service for everybody else. At one point we were getting several thousand requests per minute (at peak times) with well over 90% of it being bot activity.

But it was becoming too much and I talked Harry into agreeing to move to this new forum software where we could automate a lot of the spam control. If it means that a new user occasionally (not always) has to wait for a few hours for his urgent question to be made public, that's a price I'm willing to pay to save several man hours a day even if those man hours were voluntarily provided - particularly because they've been voluntarily provided.

evenso, thanks for understanding. Occasionally, very occasionally, a well established member's post may be held up too. That's no reflection on the member and I'm trying to keep such hold-ups to the minimum. I don't believe it affects even one in a thousand posts at present.

Do you also purge or delete the account if an account is used to spam ?
I follow a zero tolerance policy. Sometimes mods mark a thread for Harry or me to have a look at. I have never, repeat never, had to over rule them. If in their opinion something is spam then it'll get deleted and the account will get my special attention. Any potential new member reading this - bear it in mind when you get the urge to start a new thread with all your mobile phone "special offers" - it takes only one spam post.