I agree with you Yair. Started a post on it some months back, but I chime in here simply because it is a relief for weeks to actually see a non-spam subject here!
I don't think you can add your own questions to the registration -I use the same forum-format for a MMO-guild- my experience is that the only way of putting a cap on the spamming is to prolong the registration so that you can read and register but not post until you've been 'approved'. This could be done by making an area only for 'introducing' yourself - but this would a) require a lot of work for the webmasters, and b) significantly raise the threshold on joining the community and thus possibly deter many would-be joiners, which might suffocate the forum. I can do this when it comes to the guild because the site is only relevant to people already known from in-game and we dont need to be 'accomedating' to strangers as they would have no other interest in our forum but to spam.
Btw - I do think that if you could add a question it should not be something you can simply read from the question, because as Ravenscroft pointed out many of the spammers seem to be 'live' ones. Such a question should be something relating to Atlas - either something everybody knows or could know simply from popping by the main website. But again, since many different games are discussed here such a commonality might not work and would yet again raise the treshold.
I do not know whether this is already done - but maybe banning IPs indstead of loggin IDs might be an idea.
But all in all it is just simply very frustrating - and I still at times think that removing the Generel Discussion might be the only way. But I do not think that would help either. 