Hello, I know very well of the spam problems… but the “Please wait a moderator approves your post” is not less irritating 
I would opt for a ex-post moderation (maybe with a “report this item”)…
Currently we operate on a progressive moderation scheme: New users who sign-up are on TL0 (TL = trust level)
TL0 is subject to the following moderation criteria:
- First post is moderated
- Every new topic is moderated
Once a user spends enough time on the forum they get auto promoted to TL1 and we do ex-post moderation.
There is a flag button at the bottom of every post to notify moderators.
3 Likes
The system is designed to improve the experience of the people receiving messages, not writing them. There’s exactly one sender and many recipients, so ex-post moderation optimizes for what’s essentially the inverse of the utilitarian objective.
Note that on julia-users we had ex-post moderation at the start and many people disliked it, which led to moderation of new authors.
You’d be surprised by how much recruiting spam gets posted to technical forums. So far none on Discourse, but it was common on julia-users and julia-dev. Maybe spammers aren’t onto Discourse yet in general, maybe we can change this, but for now, we do first-post moderation.