This is what I did.

All of my members that sign up and verify. They can't do anything but read posts. till I change the user role. 

I have my members Roles set so that they can see but not post. It's strange but it has really helped.

Thanks.  I'll try it.
C

We turned off join completely.  the whole spammer things is just nuts.  Its really a sad comment on the state of the Internet that so many people are abusing well-meaning sites.  All we want to do is give people a forum for educational ideas and free resources and it all get crapped up with  . . .

Its very discouraging. 

We also turned on the flash screen with a message about emailing to join.  My guess is that there will be little if any interest until we grow the SEO and backlinks.

Any other ideas for validating users would be appreciated.

Colin,  some suggestions:

1. Use FB connect only instead of join.

2. Use one of the anti-spam plugins available on the store.

3.  Turn on "Mandatory user approve".

4. Make a couple of fields including "upload avatar" required.

Thanks for the suggestions.  We are discouraged enough with the whole spamming ting that we've made the site "private" for now.  And as we suspected, no one is taking the time to send an email to join.  This tells us that our only purpose at this point is feeding spammers and that whole devious reward system.  As soon as we complete our secure login and user verification, we will open the site back up.

Its a sad comment on where the Internet has come.

I'll second to what Aliia said. Even I was facing the same problem. To overcome this I started using FB connect and Twitter join only for registration.