I just wanted to repeat what others have said about needed CuteNews features. There are a few areas that could use some tweaking, but I think a big one is spam control.
I think that there should be a number of spam control options included by default in CuteNews. The hacks are good, but it's really something that should be in from step one.
1. Captcha, or some other method of human verification should be available. Captcha's pretty good, though, it seems like.
2. Banned words and domains, preferably with regular-expression matching.
3. Spam control via time-per-post.
We have 3 now, but it's really only a damage-control feature. It won't stop spam from happening, just slow it down a little. It's good to have, but only to augment other spam-control features.
I know there's a captcha hack, and number two might be out there somewhere, also. Perhaps some sort of plug-in system would useful (although I expect that making a usable plug-in system might be harder than all three above). Editing the files by hand can be a pain. I think a lot of users probably can't be bothered with it, or try it but fail.