I have noticed several new member posts with spam and phishing in their first post. While it is easy to ignore these at the outset sometimes the post title can be misleading. I propose that a requirement for new members is their first post to be done in restricted new members section or other way of validation by moderators or other power user.
In the last forum I ran, everyone's first post was moderated. That's at the very least. If they started a thread with an obviously legit question, moderation lifted. If their first post was harder to tell (bots and trolls are figuring all this stuff out), we left 'em moderated for however long it took.
The tools for this are quite intensive, and not at all easily installed. We're also not getting enough new registrations to justify it at this time, but honestly, I'm hoping that this will change as we get some of the other refurbishment taken care of. It will help us that Google will see that a lot more of our pages are alive, and that we are in fact clearing out spam. They really, truly don't like spam posts sitting around. When they see that we're taking care of business, they'll raise our relevance over time, which will mean better placement in search results over the next few months.
Which reminds me, if you see something you don't like for any reason -- spam, trolling, whatever --
please hit that report button! I'm getting email notifications of your reports even when I'm not posting, and I try to get to them right away. I hope you're seeing that things are at least a little better on the spam front already, with more improvements on the way!
Much mahalo,
Tim
Mod