I hate to sound rude, but if nothing else the anti-spam service should be able to catch spammers posting payday loan links. Even on the least restrictive settings, you should be picking up payday loan links, but I have mine set more strict than it is out of the box. I have code 3 & 4 set to ban immediately and 2 set to flag. At the very least, anything to do with payday loans should be categorized in "likely" to be spam, and that's a code 3. I don't see how this stuff can get through.

The spam service does not scan the content of what people are posting. That would not only be very intensive but also be a privacy concern. Instead it tries to catch spammers right when they register. You can use the flag as spammer feature to help the system "learn" spam accounts.

It had paydayloans in the username. :/

Then by all means, please do use the Flag as Spammer feature so our service can "learn" the bad names. :)

I did. But, really, you should just filter out anything with words like payday loans, viagra, cialis, and crap like that which you only see from spammers.

I did. But, really, you should just filter out anything with words like payday loans, viagra, cialis, and crap like that which you only see from spammers.

How would that work for a erectile dysfunction forum or a forum about loans and finances?

I did. But, really, you should just filter out anything with words like payday loans, viagra, cialis, and crap like that which you only see from spammers.

You can do this yourself. Just add ban filters for all spam type words for user names and email addresses then for post body content put spam type words in the bad word filter.

Easy.

The service does not really use username heuristics like you are suggesting. It "learns" based on what site owners report to the service. If a spammer signs up, flag them as a spammer. It will (based on your settings) delete all of their content and report that user to our service so that it can use this data in the future if the same user attempts to sign up elsewhere.

You get a nice backlink from a PR4 site when you report 100 spammers to stopforumspam.com. You don't get to report them if they are just caught by your spam filters so you should be grateful for those spammers.