So what? If it's a choice between having delayed posting of messages or having a forum being over-run with spam, many forums choose manual pre-moderation. At this point, however, the LVA forums are not over-run. The "broken windows" theory of crime fighting, though, is that small offenses need to be aggressively tackled or they'll get out of hand.
Do you realize under your proposal someone making a post on a Friday evening wouldn't be able to get their post approved until Monday morning when LVA employees come in? You might as well close the board altogether at that point because the term discussion board implies there is active discussion. What you are describing is a primitive comment system circa the late 1990s. I also don't agree with the assessment that it is being overrun. I get about 20-30 spam posts on my WP site a day and it is a brand new site. Black Hatters write programs to spam commonly used software. There is no way around it if you run a website. Look at the comments on any big site and you will see spam. A lot of those sites even employ people around the clock just to delete spam comments.
I meant posters wanting to link to their TR or pics can write "instagram dot com slash myname" or something like that as a workaround. That's commonly seen elsewhere where links are prohibited.
It wouldn't work. Under the current rules, anything that looks or hints at a URL is being filtered out. Nobody would manually type in somebody's entire Instagram post address to view a few pics. LVA needs more content especially media-rich content like images and videos related to Las Vegas. Under the current system with no URLs, you are getting even less of that. I have suggested many times they allow YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other social media embeds as a way to pump up this sort of content.
I didn't look at them, so I don't know about the earlier ones, but I saw recent spam, and it looked like they were posting links as the product or company appeared in a different font from the normal text making it look like a link that had had a URL it had been pointing to removed. Not sure about that, though.
They were placing text links not active hyperlinks. In order to place active hyperlinks, the bots would have to have the ability to click on the hyperlink icon in the post editor, fill out the fields that brings up and then close the hyperlink pop-up. That is too complex an operation for spambots to carry out. If someone is posting active hyperlinks, they are doing it manually.
Registration could require manual approval. The delay could discourage spammers, and if something about their registration form indicated they were spammers (like their IP address or email), they wouldn't get approved. Making a difficult CAPTCHA also could help. I've seen simple games one had to play and win or a math problem (2+5 = ?) one had to solve to complete a registration .
Registration requiring manual approval would make more sense, but you don't need to go that far. I can tell you from experience simply not allowing registrations from free email services would eliminate 80% - 90% of the spam. The spammers use bots to register the email addresses at the free email services so simply banning one email address wouldn't do anything as they use a new one each time.
Hell, if I added just added Yandex mail addresses to my registration filter, I could cut my spam volume in half.
IP addresses are irrelevant in 2020. Many ISPs even assign dynamic IPs to their users. The bots are using proxies to mask their IP address. Anyone can get a table of hundreds of IP addresses through VPN services for a few bucks.
