Zedwork

Some thing about the forums I think you could improve:
[list=]Forum Theme
Animations on title page
Allowing posts to auto-publish without approval - hence the staff must be active to moderate the forums as well.
Giving away prizes for people making their first 50 posts, etc.
Giving away prizes for people even registering to the forums.
Making hidden staff boards for staff to file ban reports- unless you already have done that XD
Making a staff guide like the one I showed you, Zed
Making a rank for people you are interested in making gaurdians, but want them to somehow prove themselves- perhaps forum moderators, or in-game moderators capable of /kick and /mute, but not /ban

Perhaps I will add to the list soon...
[/list]

Okay;

Theme, as you know, I'm working on it

The posts should have been a one-time approval for your first post, then all subsequent posts are auto-approved. You should see my spam list in my moderation queue
Amended this, so it is as it should have been. Was set to three posts before auto-approval.

Prizes may be a good idea, though I don't want to promote spam postings just to get extra benefits.

The rest are in place in the form they are required.

Thanks for the suggestions, Josh

Spam posts would be deleted by global moderators- Posts must be relevant to the topic.

Yeah, there's not much point in allowing the spam to be posted at all. It's only the first post; not much of an issue. I'm trying to stop the spam-bots from understanding how to post, once I manage it I will remove the need for approval.

Maybe you could do:
First post = Captcha + Wait for approval
Second post = Captcha
Third post = Auto-approve
etc.

And in order for posts to count, they'd have to be relevant to topics- you could use the system above (or a modified version to your liking) and trust the players would be capable of expressing the same maturity they do in-game on forums.

Speaking of which, if people abuse the ability to use the forums (which currently I guess you don't have a problem with), you could ban them from forums, but not in-game. The result of this is the loss of the ability to appeal a ban.

Oh, and have you ever considered a sort of map?

Aye, all good ideas. I dislike captcha, though. It hurts my little head. I've added a kind of security question, only humans should be able to register accounts now.

And yeah, been considering Dynmap - server plugins are a little unstable at the moment (though not massively so), would like to iron out the issues before adding more plugins - as far as i understand it, Dynmap can be kinda resource heavy.