Because every account that posts spam clicks that little "subscribe to this thread" toggle. As soon as something is posted in it, the spamming begins in earnest. While we delete a lot of spam, there's an interesting trend: When I check the ISP of a spammer, I find that there are thousands of different ISPs, and after a good night's spamming, we might get thirty posts from thirty ISPs. After just ONE thread is replied to, we get sixty or so, over half of which are from the same ISP. Guess which one?

If you said "whatever ISP is the same as the one in the thread that was replied to," you are correct. Not only does replying to a spam post or spammed thread increase our workload, it rewards you with more spam.

Yes we are. Against my better judgement, when we moved to the new software, I caved in to all the crybabies who were so morally outraged by our previous (and I might mention 100-percent spam proof) protections. Every time I turned around, someone was crying "I don't want to wait a week to post a link! I don't want to wait five whole days to post a picture! I want my everything now!" ---

all of which was constantly being exacerbated by a few people who always chimed in with "Yeah; this is the only board I've ever been on that makes you do this. Everyone else uses Captcha..."

I try to be a nice guy, so instead of continuing on with my usual "we do this because Captcha sucks" policies, I figured "hey, new look...new features - why not give them what they want?" Granted, what they want was a crappy defense and a board full of spam, but hey: we went with Captcha.

Guess what?

IT STILL SUCKS!

Well, apart from the extremely obvious, it doesn't work against live spammers. Yep, that's what we get hit by: live spammers. No, no one in the west would do this for a living, but in places were three bucks a week will keep a roof over your head, you'd better believe this has become something of a cottage industry: use robots to find forums and shoot links to live people to get past the captchas. Subscribe to the threads and turn it back over to the robots who wait patiently for a hit.

You don't even have to speak the same language: "e-mail address" looks pretty much the same in all languages, and simply match the Captcha to the little shapes on your keyboard, and boom-- you're a spamming machine.

Don't reply to any thread with spam in it. Report it instead and let a moderator take it from there.