Firstly, at the time that you created this thread, there were a grand total of……....3 or 4 spam accounts, who in total made a total of 10 or 12 threads here. Over a single weekend, that's still nowhere near as bad as what we used to get here. Most of you regular users never saw the true extent of what we had to deal with before, however with the old image captcha system, it wasn't uncommon for bots to post half a dozen threads every 2 or 3 days during the week. On weekends it was worse (especially when there was a major sporting events happening like how the Super Bowl is happening today), with as many as 2 or more spam threads getting posted. Depending on whether or not a staff member was online at the time they were posted, or how quickly a staff member was able to catch/spot them, the actual number of spam threads that regular members saw varied from a handful, to a few to none at all.
Secondly, a change was made during the first half of January of 2016. I removed the image captcha verification that had been in place and have implemented a "Question and Answer" system in it's place. This means now that users registering new accounts must answer a specific question in order to verify they're a real person.There are currently 20 possible questions that a new user would have to answer. They are randomly rotated so that a bot cannot predict what will be asked at any given time. On top of that, I have personally devised/written up the Questions myself, as well as the appropriate answers for each. They are not super difficult, but they are specific enough to HJU and to the tokusatsu genre that in order to successfully register, it will actually take an actual person actually putting forth the time and effort to look for the answers. I must admit though, I would have liked to have a two-step verification (like answering 2 random questions back-to-back), however I cannot currently find a way to set that up here… assuming it'seven possible.
So basically from this point on, any spam threads that end up here should be ones that were posted by actual people, who are usually not as prolific at spam-posting as spambots are. Human spammers usually want to get in and out as soon as they possibly can, so while the new system may not have been able to eliminate spam threads 100% (and realistically, the only way to do that is to no longer allow new accounts to be registered), the results that we staff have seen so far shows that at the very least, the volume/number of them has been significantly reduced.
Dealing with spam threads is a regular, expected thing when you're part of an online forum. So everyone here still needs to do their part to help us keep them in check. The staff will keep booting them if/when we spot them, and to help with that, we need regular members to use click the "report thread" icon (for anyone who doesn't know, it's found below a users name on the left side of the screen and looks like a triangle with an exclamation point) to let us know when they appear.