I am really curious in what people have been having there difficulties in your relationships? If you are single, what was the reason or what you believe the reason is? Are you consistently meeting the same wrong people? Let's all have a discussion on what could be the reason and fix it so you can meet the right person. I am ready to listen and hopefully hear some good stories and good answers from everyone.

Bill.... You should have been a comedian

I have decided to let this play out...

Jon, since you don't seem to be aware of it, the last couple of spam infestations were so prevalent that some of them got past your fly swatter, and are still online.

That's what spammers do; they beat you down until you give up, and then they take over a forum. I highly doubt they'll ever take over this forum. Corey would probably shutter it altogether if things got that bad. But the main point is being missed here.

There is no reason for spam to be posted in YaBB's own support forum.  

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:

depablo wrote on Apr 20^th, 2012 at 8:02am:

So true Bill. It's really easy to use. Once you figure it out, you'll find yourself spending a lot of time on boardmod.org viewing all of the great mods available there. Quite addicting!  

If a dumb coonass from Southeast Louisiana, like myself can figure it out then.... i'm sure you can.

If you want to shoot me your email, I can probably walk you thru most of it.

You can contact me through one of the links on my site or I can send you my email in a PM.

Good luck.