I have a few comments. Obviously, this forum is not the first priority for the Haynes admins. We have to live with that. The way they dealt with the spam problem indicates that they didn't have more than about 1 hour to spend on the forum during the two months we are having this problem (if we discout the possibility that they are grossly incompetent).
Personally, I find it strange that commercial forum software was chosen when the Open Source alternatives are way more flexible, easy to use and secure.
Lastly, running a forum site costs peanuts, contrary to what the locostbuilders owner would like everyone to think.
TT, if I gave you a list of suspicious accounts, would you be able to remove them? It's obvious which ones are spam when looking at them -- home page URLs in Ukraine or Poland, ICQ numbers set, registered this autumn, gibberish location and interests, last seen on the day they registered. (e.g.,
http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/member.php?u=3984,
http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/member.php?u=6248 and
http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/member.php?u=5078). I suppose I could spider the user list and put it into a spreadsheet. That would make filtering fake users not very hard.