Well. This seems a little...wrong to me. Why they didn't simply give higher status to an existing and established moderator...huh.

Well.

gotcha

To add to this, anything that requires an answer / typing is better than nothing, correct me if i'm wrong but even a captcha at register would work well.

The captcha we have seems like first-generation or something. I'm pretty sure it isn't a hurdle for bots. Well... obviously it's not.
Really, the only approach we have currently is IP banning, and we're sorting out the ranges they're coming from, but there are A LOT. And it's an all-day affair, every day, 24/7. So eventually, when all of China is IP banned, then we'll have some peace. ;)

The majority of modern bots can be programmed to read captchas now. If they fail once they'll usually just try again until their parsing software gets one right. Of course, having one is still better than nothing, as the majority of truly prevalent spambots are old software left running for years or months on end. No reason to upgrade your spambot unless you stop getting hits, right? Just keep it running until you need a new one, and by then getting hold of a new one will be easy.

As far as questions, they need to be more unique than mathematical answers or "type the word in this box" questions, because, again, bots can be programmed to answer those.

If the question was something like "What is the name of our first subsection?" then that would be much better, since the bots don't, to my knowledge, reference across multiple pages. Or even "Which letters are Capitalised in THis Sentence?", since the bots likely don't parse that either.

I think the last thing I want to add here is this:
I personally really love this forum, I love the members and I love their contributions. However, at the end of the day it is only an internet forum, the discussions here are meaningful to the people at the time who read them, and that is what ultimately matters.
If Jayshreddz decides to absolutely trash this place up and drag it down into the doldrums, the best thing to do is to close the tab, go downstairs and open the front door.

I'll also say that I've tried to get people to join here and stay around, and what makes people do that is the fact that what this place offers is of high quality. If this is compromised by jayshreddz, this will have an effect on people staying around, and subsequently alerting the owners that the effect is a bad one.
What we ought to do is to realise that one member cannot ultimately ruin our lives here, we have made many friends and had years of interesting discussions.

The captcha that we used on one of the sites I made worked pretty well. It worked as both a typing captcha and one where you had to listen to what was said and type it out. Spam emails would come through but it lessened by like 99% because of an up to date captcha. Though IP banning could be effective, there are still millions of proxy IP's.

Wait, wait, wait... You can get paid... to moderate a forum on the internet? In real money? How can I find jobs like that (anywhere)? I had no idea that was a thing.

If all else fails, there's nothing stopping one of the members here from setting up shop at a new board. I used to post on the Modojo forums.

That forum is now a ghost town because after 11 years of being screwed over by the admins who didn't care, multiple ownership changes, and some terrible website decisions, we upped sticks and moved, wholesale, every member, to www.cloudchaser.us

Its a risk, because offshoot forums tend to rely on a lot of people shifting quickly (we had a previous attempt which died), but it worked.

True, I guess one should also avoid question phrases where a simple google search will give the answer in a web page title hit. Stuff like "what instrument did Slash play in Guns N Roses?" would probably work. Should you not know, it's easy to look up the answer if you're human, but probably not if you're a bot.