That is the downside for sure. Steinburgs system of only letting newbies post in certain sub forums might be better. Here you could use the Starting out forum. If it gets spammed it would not be a big deal. I guess it depends on the forum software which might not be that sophisticated. 
 
Another deterrent I've seen used, is you have to fill in a lot more personal data and answer a Sonar question first. Signing up here is just way to easy IMHO.  

Without spending a lot of time explaining the technical details, I investigated this but this software doesn't handle it well unfortunately. New forum users would have to jump through tons of hoops just to be able to ask a question, and we'd need a lot more people to constantly maintain different user groups. I was really hoping it would work out, but once I started having to set up a flow chart for how a new customer/member would get started in the community I knew it was a bad idea.

I think things are pretty good here, seems to be working for me. Spammers are always a pain, but the 3 flags things seems to work. I flagged a handful of posts as soon as I saw them about 8 hours ago, some of my flags were the third flagger and this site is quiet around then, but there was enough prepared to deal with the spammer.
 
I have nearly 20,000 posts on a non-music site by Hearst Corp. (magazine company) and they overhauled their site for the worse. They had a big user base, lots of established user supporting and encouraging new users that would evolve into knowledgeable and giving members themselves. Then they re-vamped, removed a user-moderator, the spam went nuts, but they had traffic and it was financed through advertisements. They killed that site.
 
I'm on a football (soccer) form, with 2 tiers. The lower tiers can be interesting, but often crumbles into petiness, fuelled by trolls. So you don't bother reading to much, just read the interesting and more respectful top tier. Then you have something valuable to give, and you realise you can't, you're a forum spectator.
 
I posted on Celemony's forum and PBend data on midi exports, and was faced with a notification that my thread had to be Mod approved. My reaction was 'FFS really', not a shouting angry 'FFS really', but one of deflation having gone through all the sign up rigmarole, to a from emails. Imagine that as a new user with a genuine issue that require more than noobie experience to resolve. Imagine you had spent ages researching before you reached for forum support. You may have even been reading the forum for ages, just never needed to ask anything. This stuffs important to us, we don't need things being more difficult. when things are being difficult enough.
 
I like this set up, I'm happy to flag, and others are, because forums belong to the users, if they don't, they set up their own ons that do. No site is perfect, but this seems pretty damn good. And we don't have to [URL] code to get blummin' hot links to work, just past them in. [IMG] is nice too

I think the absence of spam, or at least the quick killing of it, speaks for itself.  There is a pretty balance at the moment, between allowing new folks to come on in and post, yet still giving us a pretty handy and expedient means of flagging spamholes.  (is that a new word?).  :)
 
I too get pretty annoyed at some sites having me run around the moon just to ask a simple question, so I vote for running with things the way they sit at the moment - for a while.
 
The forum folks seem to eagerly be willing to flag things as they pop up, so let's go with it as is.
 
Bob Bone
 

@Ryan How about IIS URL rewriter?