It's a combination of things:
- As Rose said, I check for spammers every time I log on to the site, at least once a day and often every few hours. If it's there, I deal with immediately and terminate both the spam and the user with extreme prejudice.
- I require email address verification. That cuts out a huge number of spambots that aren't sophisticated enough to receive and respond to email.
- I can't be bullied into relaxing the security by trolls claiming that Hotmail or Gmail blocks the confirmation email from the board.
- I use one of those "enter the secret code from the image" things. That defeats a lot of spambots.
- I added an extra question to the signup procedure that cuts out most spambots. You have to agree or disagree with a question.
- I block all known spammer domains--hundreds of them, maybe even thousands--so that the web server simply does not respond to queries from those IP addresses.
- I block all known domain name and IP address maskers.
- I require manual activation of every registration and check every new one to assure that the registrant is connecting to the board from a legitimate ISP. (I do allow Hotmail and Gmail, for now, but the IP address you connect from must be a legitimate, identifiable ISP with responsible spam policies or I won't activate the account.)
- I periodically check who is repeatedly hitting the boards without registering. This has added a few more spambot domain IP addresses to the blocked list.
- My anti-troll policy is to delete and ban without comment,which only takes a few seconds. That means a troll who is attempting to manually spam the board has to do at least 100 times as much work as I do, and the only reward the troll gets is having spam messages appear for just a few minutes.
I'm not sure lazy is the right word for BBS admins who dont do these things. I suspect that many don't know how and the rest don't realize that it only takes a few minutes of your time to set it up and then a few seconds to deal with anything that gets through.
So instead of lazy, the worst we might say is ignorant or misinformed. Inattentive ought to be on the list, too.