Looking at the recent spam that was deleted today, is unusually more than normal. Some days we get 1 spam post, some days we get 20.
There will inevitably be a larger amount of spam now that we are referred from python.org as a few months ago give or take. But there are a lot more real users as well.
You cant stop spam 100%. If you do then you are blocking real people that just might sound spammish, but do not mean to be. We have a lot of anti-spam countermeasures. And that is blocking 98% of the spam. The rest just have to be mopped up as they post it from moderators and admins.
We usually have a lot of team members on, but it only takes 1 minute of no admins and mods on the forum for a spammer to go crazy. Ive seen where they hang out and wait for admins and mods to leave before posting.
I think the best approach is also to add more mods. I think we do a good job at removing spam when it appears. Ive seen forums where spam will reside on the forum for 12+ hours. This includes the MyBB help forum. I feel like this forum, spam wont reside more than 20 minutes and thats giving spam a lot of credit.
We encourage users to report spam. The first mod or admin that shows up after the report, will remove the spam.