Mike, I'm not a computer genius, but I think these are Bots and aren't even "listening". Rick's been pretty good about deleting them, but I start to wonder if there's a security setting or something that would inhibit them from even getting posted in the first place?
I'm sure there are a few geeks out there who know how all this works.... heck, they're probably the bot-developers!
There is a version 7.6 of the UBB threads - but they're not doing development on this forum software anymore. Regardless, It's likely that this older version still has an option to turn on an option to require new registerees to type in a letter/number sequence on one of those fuzzy pictures in order to register a new user name. That alone should keep the bots out.