The mesages are coming from the forum mailer, because there is a new topic on the forum. Very often these are identified has spam by a moderator and deleted so the message has gone, but too late to stop the email. Any returns from thes email end up with me and typically this can be 100 or so emails, so it is very much something I want to resolve.
As its stands anyone can register on the forum and post a message. There checks in place require them to receive and respond to an email and there are various restrictions which will prevent automated systems, from registering and posting, but if we continue to allow automatic registration there isn't much that can be done about someone who goes through the registration process and then submits spam as their first post. Once we know someone is not genuine then further post can be prevented. I did some research on this a while back and understand that students are being paid to find sites like ours and register and post advertising spam, which may explain why there is a concentration of spam at weekends.
I have made a minor change to the forum configuration which will stop the first post of any new user from containing a link to another site. This may discourage advertising spam, but not the person just out to be disruptive. Also I have implemented an anti spam feature designed to stop identical posts. Not sure if this will help much, but it will not do any harm.
One option is to prevent automatic registration. This would still allow the forum to be accessed by anyone as a guest, but they would, but in order to post they would need to apply to be set up as a user . Downside is that this puts an obstacle in the way of genuine posts.
Mike Weideli