I see a lot of spam lately on the forum and I am wondering how we could reduce the amount of spam we have to moderate. Has anyone an idea or are we just going to delete each spammer?
Maybe there is an integrated spam prevention module for discourse…
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Probably the best option is to include a captcha in the registration of new users, it has to be open source of course.
That would be one option. A second option could be spam detection (like on email servers) based on some ratings like : a user that just recently signed up on the forum and is creating a new topic directly after the registration, and in his post is linking to sites that are already on some blocklists. This kind of behavior could be banned.
As a modest “traveler” in this forum, if i can give my opinion.
Maybe it’s better a system witch inform the user he try to use a forbidden word or a forbidden link (maybe with a counter) before an automatic erase.
some person miss some caution and can give a hazardous link saying “i went here, is it dangerous?”
And maybe ban some insult word can help you to keep calm exchange into the community and earn time.
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Aren’t new posters’ first posts here approved manually by a human? If so, just create a wall of shame scoreboard showing which human approved the most spammers. This is sure to reduce spam. Or human volunteer approvers. 
Maybe limit how many threads a single user can create in a day or every 6 hours.
Not necessarily the amount of posts but amount of thread topics they can create in a period of time.
And then make it so that a user can not double post in. That would fix a decent proportion of the spam problems.
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No, only if the user behavior is suspicious (typed extremely fast, only posted after registering and not clicked any topic, etc).
The spam all happens on the “Anonymous” category, which allows posting via email without any review. That inbox should simply get disabled.
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Using Tor or some email addresses must also be deemed “suspicious.”
As anonymous posts are the only thing about this Discourse forum that is consistent with F-Droid’s “we don’t track you” trope, that feature should NOT be disabled
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For now it is okay, but every few hours we have to ban some posts. It’s still managable, but wasted time…
Posting via email is not anonymous. The forum then knows what email address was used. Given that there is a ton of services that let you create temporary email inboxes, you can confirm an account without using your own email inbox. These services usually do not allow sending email, though. To post in that category, you need to use an email address that can send. Which is usually your real email address. It is therefore less anonymous.
Not… cough… really. There are enough places to get throwaway (non “real”) email addresses that can send. Disguising your “real” IP is icing on the anonymous cake.
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Ban them!
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Reduce the number of messages of newcomers
The latest messages from “bots” have been disconcerting, I don’t know if it’s some sort of cryptic messaging.
They consist of a single sentence that can really mean something without any links.
Linkedin & whatnots appearing. I just flagged 3 posts myself. Hope admins can stop the bots and stupid users. Will keep flagging. 
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More insidious perhaps is the uptick in reawakening old threads with new posts, only to delete the new posts after some more new replies, leaving a disjointed history. Not to call out anyone in particular, but the initials of one recent practitioner of this tactic are @opensourcefan2016.
Sorry!
I was thinking : discobot was a trap but i saw his trust level as leader so… certainly it a real part of this forum…
Yeah, discobot is real. It leads the interactive tutorial on how to use the forum.
Can this email inbox be configured so that the messages there need to be reviewed before being published?
This should kill pretty much every spam thread I personally have seen so far. The resulting delay seems to be a good tradeoff.
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It appears that if you delete a bot spam topic that they will auto generate a new post but what if we just leave the post up and let go down into the posts would the bots stop spaming or would they make duplicate posts?