The captcha helped, it only took half an hour to clear out the spam this morning instead of six hours.
It is my belief that the people doing the spamming are SEO folks trying to get as many links to their customers websites out there as possible to improve their ranking. Part of the reason I believe this is that every single spam consists of one sentence and a link.
These links are only valuable to them if they stay up there long enough for Google to crawl. Getting them down as fast as possible reduces their incentive for spamming.
I am looking for volunteer moderators to delete spammers from StatusNet. It is really very simple, you see a spam, you click on the username in the header. On the right you get a moderate pull down, select delete. It will ask for confirmation, you say yes, spammer and all his posts are gone.
If you would be interested in helping moderate Status.NET, please drop an e-mail to support@eskimo.com.
Thank you!