The spammers are self-aware
Well first let me start off by saying that I thought they deleted the feedback section. I only got here because I typed feedback in the url bar and I was able to get to it from a forum that was still in my history. What's with making things more difficult to access?
Anyway, onto what I came to say.
I wish I could post screenshots but imgur keeps giving me errors so just take my word for it.
There was a spam post titled "Oh boy. You guys are fucked. Lol." And I thought that was awfully strange? It didn't follow the same incoherent phrase pattern that the spammers do.
Then I scrolled down through the new forums
And scrolled
And scrolled
About 57ish spam posts just from what I counted? Yeah, that spammer was...correct...we got hit with a huge wave of 'em. Not the worst I've seen but like. Still significant.
It's quite clear these spammers are real people just working for some thing (?) and aren't going to be deterred by an anti-bot method.
@Phthalo
Maybe, maybe not. I was able to find spam threads with the same title on other sites, from July and August. Either way, it's still annoying.
I agree. I suspect a thread with that title on some other forum got a lot of clicks once, and there is software that automatically reuses successful titles.
What amused me was that the links in that post are to another spammed discussion, one owned by IBM. Even IBM gets spamed 
It's true, however, that we are not being spammed by simple bots. That's why the captcha had little or no effect, other than annoying genuine members of our community.
Our problem isn't really the spammers. They are just doing what spammers do. Our problem is that 7 Cups as an organization isn't resilient in the face of challenges like this. The technical problem of how to block this spam is a relatively simple one. The management culture problem of how to run an agile yet effective organization is a really hard one. Personally, I feel we need to be more patient. 7 Cups is young, and even IBM gets spammed.
@MorsVicta
@RarelyCharlie Where did you see IBM get spammed?
@Phthalo
I think he means this sort of thing:
@MorsVicta Ah ok. Well, I'm not going to try to go to the link of course but I highly doubt a real IBM website has a /recipes/tutorials page lol
@Phthalo
It's not that kind of recipe lol
@MorsVicta What other kind of recipe would it be...
@Phthalo
It's supposed to be for hardware and software — e.g. "Use a mobile phone to connect to IBM Watson IoT Platform cloud and visualize the data generated by the Mobile Device" — but it looks like, these days, it's literally hundreds of spam threads.
@MorsVicta Why would a spam thread have a link to another spam thread though? Im still quite skeptical on this
@Phthalo
That I don't know. Maybe to make them look legit, since it's IBM.
