I haven't said it yet, but I probably should have... I do admire the mods and their hard work because I was a mod on one site and an admin on another, and hate spam was the reason we shut down one of those sites.
I think the two groups here, the staff and the members, have to make some sort of compromise. Either the users live with what the mods can handle or make a proactive decision in stopping new spam users.
IMO, the argument of steering away new members with captchas or admin approvals is not convincing to me. I would have loved to take back a few first posts I made here, because I was attacked for not posting things in the right place. I think if you educate people as to why they can't do things as a new members, they will be more understanding.
I know admin approvals aren't logistical on such a large community so I guess I can leave that out of the question, but I think captchas for new members when they post is reasonable. For spam posts containing inappropriate words, there's a vB extension that sends posts with predetermined keywords to the moderator's queue (keywords could be swears, sexual references, enhancement drugs, URLs that are constantly spammed, etc). You could also turn up the flood control slightly longer for new members. Does this site already do email approval for accounts? I don't remember.
I've seen varying degrees of admin intervention for new members on many sites. There's one site that goes as far as making users ask to become a full member after making a specified amount of posts. They steer away members, yes, but the quality of their content was above any other related community. I can live with spam as long as it's dealt with, and it seems to be fairly under control in my eyes. Just giving some input to make things even better...
