My next idea is to try out a service called CloudFlare to protect (and speed up) pothos.org. It should improve page loading times and reduce the number of active spammers. this will slowly switch on over the next couple of days.
Please note that under this system you may get a challenge page before you are granted access to the site. You can still access the forum by passing the captcha.
They say:
Please make any observations, good or bad, on this thread - the change can be reversed at any time.Cloudflare wrote:"Only a small number of your forum members will see the challenge page" and that "the challenge page will appear if there are indications that their machine is infected with a computer virus or malware. The best thing to do is to run an anti-virus scan on their machine as a precaution...there are false positives with the data, but it is most common when the visitor is coming from a shared network like an office, college network or coffee shop. What this means is that although their computer isn't infected, someone else on the same network does have an issue. Your community member should run an anti-virus scan as a precaution. If there is no virus or malware, then they can enter the CAPTCHA to access the forum. The data set will refine over time."