Have these improvements been applied to Stable as well, or do we have to be on Beta to get them? Our forum which is on the 1.3.x Stable might be getting hit by bamwar spam as well now (I haven’t looked into it closely enough yet to say that for sure), and I’m just wondering if the pseudo-secret protective barrier is already in there.
No, all the magic is in 1.4, you should be running beta 
you are hard core
beta is super safe
On 1.3 your options are Akismet. But you should be on 1.4 anyway, all our customers are.
With TL0 and Akismet enabled, I am happy to report that spam has gone down (and all but disappeared)
However, I got a user response that they received a message “Akismet has temporarily hidden your post as potential spam.”
There is nothing on my end that I see that I can use to unblock his post 
I seem to recall an Akismet section in the Admin pages, something like “/admin/plugins/akismet”?
Akismet is there under “Settings”, but there is nothing displayed under the “Plugins” section
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Sounds like you are not logged in as staff? There should be a red circle with a number on it over the menu drop down at upper right.
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I remember an option being available before, it disappeared after a recent update (without about 18 commits to Discourse and 1 commit to Akismet, I believe)
It should be present at /admin/plugins/akismet.
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So… @codinghorror, we’re getting slammed by the same South Korean ip’s. I had to bring up a post I made almost 3 years ago about this: https://meta.discourse.org/t/some-ideas-for-spam-control/10393. Blocking countries (or ip ranges) is sometimes the only way to deal with spammers.
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You can now block IP ranges in Discourse 
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You can use both stars - 1.2.3.* - or CIDR notation - 1.2.3.0/24.
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Make sure you are on latest Discourse as there are changes in 1.4 to make life much harder for human spammers like bamwar.
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What version are you running, be sure you are on latest, you should be fine without an IP ban… hint: auto block first post regex of \p{Hangul}{3} totally resolves this.
Blocking all of South Korea is bad karma.
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Any IP blocking will take some inocent people with them. IPs being mostly shared or dynamic, I have been blocked from a small website that, said the message, denied access to my entire country, and its incredibly annoying.
These IP lists could act reducing the number of necessary flags for banning to 1.
Dont take it as a request, my small instance has zero spam, I am pretty happy with what you already done in this regard. Its a request for the admins here to think before they block half the globe out.
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We have not seen Bamwar (or any automated spammers) be a serious problem for a long time since the changes in 1.4.
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