If he takes vacations he needs a secondary admin. And I think there were some secondary people. Making a mod isn't such a big thing, he could give that right to someone.
Umaro sounds like one of those annoying Admins who don't like to appoint mods and, at the same time, who cannot really take care of the forum themselves... and that sucks.
On PO forums we had the bot problem for a really long time. Finally, the devs pretty much stopped the trend. What they did is restrict a user without posts to post a hyperlink in his first message... since 99.9% of bots use a url in their message, they die out... The devs did say that they also "updated the protection", but I don't think that is the real reason, they said that before, and bots just kept coming.
EDIT: eh, where the heck is umaro? The spammers are killing me.
Agreed, contests are fun.