How are people getting through the already mildly annoying anti spam features to commit spam attacks on this forum? It's really getting annoying and I hope they can find a way to stop the spam attacks more permanently without making it impossible for the rest of us to post

someone is likely manually doing it. or its lacking a timer delay on successive fails and they are brute forcing it. or they have a algorithm setup to detect the script in the spam field and workout what its asking and solve it but id say its more likely the first 2 options then a really advanced annoyance

Persistence.

We're doing some site updates that should help.

blog.vanillaforums.com/help/9-ways-to-el...our-community-forum/ this has some general suggestions, im not sure if you want to ban new users from creating any topics but you should probably set them to 1 or 2 a day with a 10 min break between new topics being able to be posted and probably put a limit on number of posts on topics of say 5 a day and have it need like 15 posts to go from new user to "member" number 1 i think might be pertinent but a number of the points are good 1. Make sure links in your forum are set to ‘nofollow’. This tells search engine crawlers not to follow the links and therfore, SEO spammers will derive no benefit from spamming your forum.
this is about a different forum program i think. but many of the points are relatively universal