What version of SMF does this forum run?
1.1 as best I can tell. And the only thing to do with spam check is a checkbox with the description "Disable spam check on posts". It's under a general category, and nothing I can find in membergroups, permissions, or board configurations allows me to change that.
I think guests would CHECK the forum that they can post at before any others, regardless of the board order.
Well yes, probably so. The goal here is to get people to post, though, so I find it hard to consider this a bad thing.
And I'm saying, at one point, regardless of how much staff we got, it's inevitable that a guest will reach a topic with poor content in it BEFORE a mod gets to it.
This is basically inevitable, I agree. Though, it's happened before with at least two members to my knowledge (Gumbykid and T1K), so it's not like we're immune to it happening as it is. Thing is, a mod team is reactionary in nature; they can only take down inappropriate content once the content's been supplied. The more active (or large) the team is, the shorter the period of time between the content being posted and it being taken down. So yes, we will be running a risk by doing this, but we already run it by being on the internet. Hell, our registration system doesn't even require a valid email.

Point is, I think the risk isn't great enough to not at least try this out. It's the same risk we run by having a public forum; we'll just have to be a bit more attentive, which shouldn't be too much for us to handle. And again, if I turn out to be wrong about that, the solution is fairly simple.