Well it has now been a full 24 hours and not 1 spam message on our forum

This pleases me, I can see them trying to update their profiles and post messages, the members who I knew about as I have their email addresses, have been banned but I have seen them try again with another "dodgy" email address so these have been banned also.
I will continue to monitor, unfortunately for the real people who join, they cannot create posts until they get to a certain level of posting (however, I can boost people manually), this was the only way to stop them for now until version 2.0 of our forum comes out of beta (we don“t want to run a beta version for various reasons). Version 2.0 gives us extra priviledges and marks newbies as moderated so no posts would be viewed until approved, this will be much better and stop people in their tracks immediately.
We will keep you informed when we need to upgrade again
Thanks
Simone and Gina