Wyllow3
presumably - since they are always helpful ime - the knowledge and computer skills to tackle this is no minor challenge - £££ and time involved to tackle "root and branch". Also it needs a system that operates in the night?
It would involve rewriting chunks of the code that runs the site pages, to deal differently with the posts that are received for the forums, then closing down the site while the files containing the instructions replace the old files.
The site would then have to be tested to check that it all still works OK ( I am sure you have all had those updates that are supposed to improve how your device works, but end up scrambling something else because of a single instruction in the middle of several thousand lines of code) If there are no glitches, either in what was being chamged or anywhere else in the site, (because the whole of the instructions are interlinked) the site can be opened up again.
If not, it is back to the drawing board to find the glitch and fix that, then retest.
At the moment, posts received are automatically sent (I assume) to the thread where they were written, unless they are from a banned poster. That would have to be changed to first run each through a filter to check whether they were the first posting from a new member, whether they included words that gave a clue to them being spam, plus any other clues in the email address of the poster, the country or email provider they came from, and so on.
That would involve the software searching through various lists and databases for possible reasons to isolate each post until it could be double-checked by a real human (otherwise innocent posters could find themselve banned because they had said something like "I hate all these posts offering witchcraft")
Then the software would have to decide what is to happen to each post intercepted, and present the resulting lists to the moderator on duty at the time to do the human double-check.
When everything is working properly, the site could re-open to posters - who by then would be flooding the site themselves with demands to know what was going on.
All this code-writing and testing takes time, and is not something that moderators coud do in between their other tasks - and which they are probably not qualified to undertake. Coding is a skill. It would also take money. Good coders don't come cheap.
