That would prevent many (legitimate) people from joining this site. Too many dolphins would be caught in that tuna net. A much better idea: Give a few dozen trusted longtime ET members 'partial' moderator privileges. They'd be only allowed to erase obvious spam, and never allowed to erase anything else. If they break the rule just once and erase something that isn't blatant spam- their 'spam eraser' gets taken away.
If he's behind a gateway you ban all the people behind that gateway. That is a problem if he's using a major internet provider
we don't need kiddos who are just here to mess around, spam and can't even afford their own direct access to the net on this site... i've used proxy servers in the past, from the emirates notably, but its never been necessary to access a site such as elitetrader.com in my experience...
$RM$; " A much better idea: Give a few dozen trusted longtime ET members 'partial' moderator privileges. They'd be only allowed to erase obvious spam, and never allowed to erase anything else. If they break the rule just once and erase something that isn't blatant spam- their 'spam eraser' gets taken away." unquote Great idea, especially if different time zones can be covered. Provided, none of them are z10. Im still waiting for the "Baron feedback forum", with thread's like "man, im sick of these bozo's telli'n me how to run my site"
Why would it prevent anyone from joining the site? Simply having their first 5-10 posts slightly delayed while a moderator reviews and approves them should not have any impact on people joining ET. Many boards employ this method. I would much rather have this in place than a handful of "trusted" ET members being able to delete posts they think are spam.
The spammer operates out of Russia. All the mentioned things were tried. Obviously he/she is technically savy to beat all those things.
How about a filter that would automatically delete or at the very least, place posts that had certain words/phrases/URLs in a suspect folder for review by mods.
Sorry if I insist, but if it's always the same it could also be a bot. I would still like to suggest a captcha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha I didn't see it on ET, and it shouldn't be very difficult to add. Lot of sites have it already.
The probation period might be nice for those who continually come back with new aliases as well. For instance, "Iconoclast", the latest addition to the Skalpz/Coinz legacy.