Underneath every member’s username (and avatar, if they have one) is a triangle with the title text “Report Bad Post” underneath it. Click that, then fill out the form and click “send” and the staff will be notiified.
Thanks. 
But it is in a private message, and taking a look at the message gif i attached, there is no “abuse” icon on which to click.
so, my original question persists i think.
Thanks!
Michael
They won’t be spamming anyone anymore.
I’d also add keep your forum software up to date. We run an older version of PHPBB on one of our sites and an old security bug was letting comments get through our captcha-enabled form. It tooks us days to figure out but then we felt like idiots when we realized it was a bug that was fixed 5 months ago.
I’m thinking of replacing a phpbb forum with something else and was tempted by vbulletin or Vanilla. Are either of these less spam prone?
Or (he asked expecting the answer no) is there a particularly spam-free forum system out there?
There is no spam-free forum out there (every forum can and will be spammed eventually), but vBulletin and SMF are about as “secure” as you can get for PHP/MySQL based forums, IMHO.
You’re going to want to read the tips and advice given in this thread to help you lock down your forum, though. In the end, moderation is the key.
FYI, this forum gets spammed like crazy. Spam is an issue you can only deal with through diligent moderation (and maybe gets some help from mods).
And this issue is not made any easier with people like Michael Rasmussen advertising forum spam software at his web site 
Yeah, and I’m sure you guys don’t know whether to laugh or ban me for some of the spam reports I send in.
For everyone else’s sake, here are some examples.
“Spammer spammer on the board, who’s the next one to go overboard?”
“They say spammers are a dime a dozen. I’d like to know who’s supplying the dimes.”
“I dont like green eggs and spam, said Spam I Am. I don’t like them in a can, I don’t like them where I am, and I definatley don’t like them with SPAM.”
If you ever heard the song “Convoy” you’ll know what this next one is set to the tune of…
“We’ve got ourselves a spammer, what a horrible sight. We’ve got ourselves a spammer, please kick him out tonight. Spammer…”
Or Ghostbusters:
“When there’s something weird, on the message board, who do you call? Spambusters! When they post their warez, and they don’t look good, who do you call? Spambusters!”
These are, of coure, in addiition to the more traditional “Spammer sighted on X board in Y forum, please remove.” reports.
Funny you say this about phpBB - a board I visit is almost two months old and just got their first forum spam today. This is how they dealt with it:
http://www.superhiro.org/spam-is-delicious-vt1130.html
10,000+ posts, 900+ members, 1 spam. :scratches head:
I like it. Humiliate them and publish their email address. I like it a lot…
Now that’s spamming with style ;).
great post - this helped us cut down on the spam by 99%!
Excellent tips, one of my sites suffers badly from forum spam!!
Thanks for the info. we have just started our own forum at AffiliateBOT and i found your advice here very useful.
I think, the best antispam solutions are unknown antispam solutions. 
Most forums already counter forum spam by restricting user registrations. I think the list provided is quite helpful and will benefit many forums.
I faced this problem and countered it by building my own anti spam work arounds…
dont bother with the “proven” methods that are on the phpbb mods forums…
that is the 1st place that the bot developer will look for workarounds.
I have developed my own that asks them a VERY simple question that if not answered correctly their registration is denied. My solution accepts multiple spelling variations of the answer and if they cant get the basic question that I ask them right then they dont deserve to register.
It has not effected my registration rate which is still around 6-9 new users a day and I have not seen a single spam email since.
Every other solution that I used from the phpbb forums did nothing to stem the flow.
I dont have time to sit there all day approving registration requests, so I took a few hours, used my brain and came up with a logical solution.
I hope this inspires people to go out and create their own solutions, because at the end of the day they are the ones that work!
Cheers,
Shannon
Very nice thread! I am definately be using these on my own forum.
Well done
I am using PHPBB.
There are ton of spams to my forum.