I know most of us these days just skip past it, but for the noobs still suffering, here is a quick tutorial on how to write simple filters.
A lot of people just paste the words in the Filter's section in the [Option] menu in the upper right hand of the page, but they can change spelling and capitalization now and then, or perhaps even use alternative characters
To handle this kind of thing you can use character classes; you may have to cut and paste characters they use.
Lets use 'toots' as an example,
Using these character classes,
[Tt] upper or lower case T
[0Oo] upper case or lower case O and a 0
[Ss5] upper case or lower case s and a 5
A simple instance would be
[Tt][0Oo][0Oo][Tt][S5s]
This would cover Toots, TOOTS, t00t5, and all other combinations.
If you wanted to cover extra letters; for example toooots or tootsss
you could use the matching operators: *, +, and ?
-
= 0 or more instances
-
= 1 or more instances
? = 0 or one instance
[Tt][0Oo][0Oo]+[Tt][S5s]+
so this way we can match extra letters
This should be enough to handle 90% of the spam text out there.