How to keep spam where we want it.

[Kamikaze28]

I find page rank nibbling a very arcane reasoning behind forum spam. To me, it seems more likely to get people to click links, just like in most email spam. While this forum (which is based on MyBB) requires a static captcha for account creation, those are known to be bottable/crowd-sourcable and do not provide a perfect protection against spam. There are animated captchas emerging, which are supposedly better at keeping bots out, but I have no idea how to put them in here.
From my experience, spamming will always happen for one reason or another. If your forum is popular, it will be spammed. Even though it is time consuming and tedious, the qualitatively best way to deal with it is by hand. I would like to emphasize the button under each post, which is meant for reporting spam, advertising messages or abuse. Reporting posts/threads will alert the admins to take action.

Account / IP bans are mostly ineffective. IPs can be changed quickly and easily and most spammers will just create another account to spam again.