I can assure you, Akismet is installed and running. The problem is that we get hit so incredibly hard all day long, that the small percentage that make it through is still considerably large and very annoying.
Install re-captcha and the bots will get lost:)
EDIT: perhaps you can limit the creation of topics in the backend.
For example, the admin can choose in the backend whether or not if users should have topic creations limits:
* No limit
* Allow only X topic creations / hour, where X is chooseable.
just out of curiosity, does bbpress.org run anything like Wanguard, Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin, etc to deal w the bots that flood this site 4 times a day ?
i use wanguard on my much smaller bbpress site and it does an excellent job of keeping bots out, but i know this site sees way more traffic than mine…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wangguard/
http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin
Not just this site but also the WordPress.org forums… I wonder what they have in common? 
I see spam as I post!
more mods to clean it up regularly would be good too, there are currently over 70 spam posts from just one user borking the first 5 pages of this forum and they have been there for about 12 hours, all forums are prone to be spammed but this is a bit much…
Right now it just happened that a handful of the mods are out for SXSW so it was a little slow.
Normally the spam attacks are cleared within an hour. Anytime you happen to see a spam explosion feel free to alert me on twitter @jaredatch.
Sign-ups are disabled here. They come in via WordPress.org, and having no role here yet, they post, and Akismet seems to miss a bunch of them in waves.
