Except, the problem is the market. There are people who buy V14GR4. If spam is filtered so successfully it doesn't reach enough eyeballs to be profitable anymore, it'll just plain old die. And in any case, if it gets to being a real problem that Bayesian filtering hasn't solved (Doubtful), we can always do the smart thing we SHOULD HAVE DONE YEARS AGO and start using strong cryptography for all our personal email. Mailing lists and such can be whitelisted, or signed digitally. Nonencrypted, nonsigned email can be dropped by default by mail clients. Spammer signatures can be identified and blacklisted rapidly. Privatized areas of the Internet would be the Internet equivalent of gated communities - Totally devoid of commercial value, precisely because they're gated. We already gate down parts of the Internet using firewalling; maybe when it becomes feasible to have an always-on, always-connected server at home, we can all get our mail on our local boxes and be able to attenuate the problem at home. I'm not claiming spam isn't going to crawl out of its grave and rear its ugly head again, I'm claiming that, right now, for all intents and purposes, it's dead.

Of course, this is provided everyone takes the usual precautions. DON'T hand out your email address to any old website, for example. Don't have it displayed publically; if you do, put some padding on it. And you don't have to switch to GMail to get rid of spam; Thunderbird, Evolution and I believe Opera Mail have perfectly fine spam protection on their own. The more spam you get, the quicker a Bayesian filter learns. I don't get more spam in my local inbox than approximately a single message every month or so, albeit sporadically. If I can do it, so can you.

How would having a signature be any different than creating various IPs to get around the forums?

GMail has started being targeted, as evidenced by my evergrowing spam folder, but barely any touches my inbox, and when I mark it as spam, that trickle stops for a month or so.

I use Gmail and had been getting those weird new picture spams (spam that has pictures as it's ad as it gets past most filters because they can't tell the difference.) After a couple of reports they stopped

I get 0 spam on both hotmail and gmail.

See? It's not rocket science.

Its computer science... much more difficult!

Database programming is a pain in the ass, the rest of it isn't all that bad.

Great, now there are bots which make threads which are alright, but have eww links in their signatures.

@Noola: Maybe they think you'll forward it to some friend who can actually use it ;P

@Admins: Removing posting privileges for guests, adding a mail verification thingy to the registering (you cannot post until a mail has been sent to you and you've clicked on a link) and capchas if the thing gets very bad added to teh starting a new thread / replying forms might help. It did for us.

That thread was hardly alright.

Compared to those which spammed links and eewww terms?
At least the joke was moderately funny.

No it wasn't.

(I guess it was better than the porn, but still!)

Was it a dirty joke? I love a good dirty joke.

Once again... We have all of those.

We don't have per-post captchas. Which I'm glad for, because they're an utter pain in the ass.

And I love good porn.

What? Someone had to do it.

Are you sure? Guests keep posting (when people forget to log in).

None of the spam I've seen comes from guests, though, so that might not actually help much, other than to save us all the frustration of realizing that we posted as a guest.

I am sure that Estarra has said that all the security measures that the forums offer are implemented.