This was a huge problem. Spammers were putting advertisements in News, in photo album comments, and sometimes in forum comments

The way we mitigated this annoying problem was:

1) Lock News. That's why the front page now says "Please post most types of news in the Meetings or Main forums"

2) Because the spammers were using temporary email accounts, the Web Admins changed the Register process to have a 2-day delay. In that time virtually 100% of the spammers had forgotten or could no longer access the email and so couldn't finish the signup for the Club

The latter solved the problem, however it had the unintended consequence of delaying or preventing new user from joining -- if the Admins were too busy to check frequently to see how signups were going. Periodically the process failed and no new users were added