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Reducing Hack/Bot Spam
Admins, you might try a CAPTCHA input for a time, but just on new threads, to see if that slows or eliminates the ridiculous spam. Should be a drop-in script for whoever develops your site. This would not really inconvenience those of us who start threads for the right reasons, and if it doesn't work, it's easily removed. I wouldn't add a CAPTCHA to making regular comments, as you might lose a lot of real contributors.
If the thread spam continues with a check like that by morphing into comment spam, you could also make a "rep power" threshold for posting comments, so that a moderator has to basically promote members to a rep power above 1, or it is met by other means, to be able to post anything other than PMs, or you can have hidden conditions you do not publish, like member locations that must be in particular countries. These two options are less ideal, of course.
Also, you should make sure email addresses are kept in a honeypot along with usernames, so that as new accounts are registered no email address can ever be used more than once! Generally, these desperate bot spammers will go away if it gets to be too much work to spam a site by hand. A thread check and preventing email re-use will dramatically reduce the horror of seeing your forum defaced so regularly, reflecting poorly on Meguiar's, and having to delete spam and ban bot users, etc, only to see them come right back
If the thread spam continues with a check like that by morphing into comment spam, you could also make a "rep power" threshold for posting comments, so that a moderator has to basically promote members to a rep power above 1, or it is met by other means, to be able to post anything other than PMs, or you can have hidden conditions you do not publish, like member locations that must be in particular countries. These two options are less ideal, of course.
Also, you should make sure email addresses are kept in a honeypot along with usernames, so that as new accounts are registered no email address can ever be used more than once! Generally, these desperate bot spammers will go away if it gets to be too much work to spam a site by hand. A thread check and preventing email re-use will dramatically reduce the horror of seeing your forum defaced so regularly, reflecting poorly on Meguiar's, and having to delete spam and ban bot users, etc, only to see them come right back
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