Some blogoscoped forum threads seem to get more spam after they have been blogged. It may only seem this way because earlier spam is removed when blogged. Should the forum software always activate the bot check once a thread has been blogged?

See the thread "Google dictionary is now on Google search". Currently the first five entries after being blogged seem to be spam.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/172916.html#id172954

How about not naming bottrap form input "bottrap", but something meaningful for a bot, instead – "email", "name" etc.? And also not hiding it inline (but in CSS instead).

You could also use reCaptcha, but display it only the first time a user tries to make a post. After successfully solving a captcha she would get a cookie, allowing her to subsequently post without having to solve any captchas.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. There is actually a hidden form input field as a bot trap here. I was also considering doing more protection for first-time posters (almost all spam has never-before-used nicknames), perhaps that's a way to go. One thing to keep in mind that we'll still be getting the manual spam this way, there seems quite a bit of that too... it looks like not all spam is automated...

I don't think these are bot spams. Most of them are human-submitted.

I agree, and the content varies daily. Some of the post are made by people who don't like this forum (and/or) blog.

> There is actually a hidden form
> input field as a bot trap here

I know, I was referring to the fact it is really easy to automatically detect and filter out (since input's name is "bottrap"). Sorry if my original message wasn't clear.

I have an optional field on the Uclue registration page for "How You Found Us". The bots always fill this in as "In a dream of course" which I think is quite funny.