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There's a spambot in the N&R forum putting up lots of escort agency adds right now.

I was wondering what Dakka has in place to stop that sort of thing? Is there a built-in requirement that all new members are locked out of posting in all the other sub-forums until they've posted in the new members forum first? If not, then I'd suggest something like that. It doesn't stop spam-bots, but it does do a good job of halting their progress. If they start off confined to one sub-forum, they often stay within that sub-forum, and that makes tracking down their spam threads a lot easier.

Just a thought.

Maybe add a captcha system on account creation instead?

Adds restriction to the bots whilst leaving posting as is. Or even both.

Captcha doesn't really work. Either the spammers develop software that can handle them, or they employ cheap third-world labour to process them.

Anything that limits initial posting or makes signing up harder restricts sign-ups from actual potential posters, which is something that the Admins are keen to avoid.

So there's a balance act between making it harder for spammers, and making it too hard for people who legitimately want to sign up...

In practice. the spammers really aren't that huge a problem. They post, someone reports it, and the post is removed and the account and associated IP address nuked.