It goes without saying that dealing with spam is unpleasant. I think a lot of forums have been abandoned because of it.
In my case, spam got so bad a couple of years ago that I was going to shut down our forum. I couldn't go more than 15 minutes or so before another spam post needed to be deleted.
But then I realized with embarrassment that the spam was ultimately my own fault. For one, I was still using Yabb 1 Gold SP 1.4 and the only thing I had done was to shutter guest access in favor of requiring a membership to post.
I upgraded to YaBB 2.4 since that was the latest version at the time, and I happily utilized the captcha setting. Hardly any spam came through after that.
But then, as so many admins already know, captcha was defeated by sophisticated spammers. So I began using admin approval. That worked quite nicely for a while.
Later on, pre-registrations from spammers were soon coming in at about 200-300 a day, and while it was easy enough to deny them, only taking a few moments to deal with a dozen or so in batches each time, it was a real pain.
Thankfully, by then YaBB had Spamfruits, but that required installing BoardMod, which to this day is still foreign to me (
again, my own fault).
However, I noticed ggn's anti-spam hack, which didn't require installing a mod, and it seemed easy enough to implement, so I gave it a try. To my surprise, I was able to make the necessary edits to make it work.
Simply amazing! 
To date, many hundreds of thousands of attempted spam-bot registrations have been
stopped cold!As for the handful of hu-bots that have pre-registered, they've hardly been a bother at all. I now get so amused by them that I actually write them a nice little reply letting them know our forum doesn't allow spammers.
As I type this, in the last 3 or so hours our forum has had 500 spam-bot attempts to register (
by about 30-40 different users multiple times).
ALL have been stopped cold!Legitimate registrations do of course still make their way through, and all members get to enjoy a spam-free forum.
As for being a moderator here to help swat away the spam when it appears, I like the idea of it, but frankly, I wouldn't accept being a moderator without the installation of an anti-spam mod.
I would even strongly encourage the use of admin approval, although that may not be needed after an anti-spam mod has been installed.
Edited: A spelling error was corrected.