That is so true.
Except the spammers now have figured out how to defeat the new stuff put in place (check the General Discussion forum).
Oh no i thought they had that fixed.
Thing is… it’s not clear if these are new accounts or the ones that, like I said, were created and lying in wait.
So a week later, Korean spam is still being seen in the General Discussion forum.
Either there’s a truckload of accounts still lying in wait or the issue has not yet been resolved, which is it?
HI,
There is be heavy spamming on the forum. I tried to translate the words called "BIG Brothers Casino" ... Moderator please settle the issue.
Regards,
Still working on it. Close one door and they seem to weasel in through another. 
In my experience it’s best to customize off the shelf systems (e.g forums). Any changes introduced should not affect users (make their life harder), but target the spambots. Start by flagging any korean symboled tiles/context. I would even go as far as to block them as it should not affect anyone else. Consider introducing various verification that “bots” might have a trouble interpreting. I vaguely recall coding a custom system, some 10 liner where user was asked to distinguish between an apple, banana and something else - forum spam(on phpBB2) was eliminated. I am not saying it will be as easy, but I am saying it does not have to be hard either. Chances are it can be solved with 20 lines of code.
Seems they’ve upped their game, with a mass of posts in the early hours (to me - UK), another at 10:15 BST this morning, and another shortly after 11 BST. Perhaps it’s time to put a temporary block on new members until the problem is identified and fixed.
Gerneral Forums getting hit good(8 pages). What if you made it where new thread button not visible, until new member info approved by moderator?
All of these solutions are in place. They do no good when there’s an exploit or backdoor being used. The difficulty is in tracking down the source of that hole.
The spam also appears in the Finished Projects section of Artwork. Too much spam going on there, about over 25 or so posts by different spam bots.
Watch the size of the member list, wait for it to change, without a member using a captchya.
Is there anyway to see whom edited it?
All posts had one thing in common: Repetition (obvious pattern ie. many, many, as repeating textures). So if are found in text/post - it’s a bot.
Human tends to stay away from repeating (too much). 
You could just have an automatic ban-hammer strike anyone whose first thread contains the word st339 in the title (it’s in nearly every spam message).
it looks like it is not over.
We certainly appreciate the recommendations and advice that you’re giving. However, trust me when I say that if the solution were to “just” do something, we’d’ve already done it (or… more accurately, we have already done it and the bots have managed to circumvent that too).
In short, I’m pretty sure I know how they’re getting through… the problem is needle-hunting through our haystack of a database, and the needle doesn’t want to be found.
We are working on it. It’s just going to take time. Meanwhile, the whole moderation team is stuck playing whack-a-mole with the bots that make it through. It’s unpleasant for everyone.
now they are in finished projects forum.
For the time being why not having mods approving the first post?
They would probably bypass that.
They can already bypass the post cooldown and the ignore the moderation approval requirement.
I think a solution might be soft ban, every new user gets a ban after their first post/thread which automatically gets removed once a moderator approved their first post/thread. I’m not sure if vBulletin can automate something like this and if instead of it saying “banned” it could say something like “pending approval”.