Some things have been done about it, Grue implemented this, which locked threads that spammers liked to use to increase activity, all displayed profile information (eg signature, personal text, bitcoin address, ect.) is now removed when a user gets permanently banned, Grue created this, which makes signature advertising less effective (and thus less attractive for companies to use -- previously if yobit et al can only afford to pay the little dust they were paying, then they might not be able to afford to pay anything at all), hilariousandco has been aggressive in finding, and banning copy/paste spammers.

What Lauda was proposing was to implement some "solution" without regard to it's potential effectiveness, nor it's potential consequences.

I remember when Dell started accepting bitcoin, that there were threads that literally had nothing but pages upon pages of posts that all said something along the lines of "this is great news", and we do not see anything close to that level of spam anymore.

I think Grue locking threads in off topic whose solicited replies were insubstantial replies improved things greatly. I think it would be a good idea to implement (and enforce) similar policies in other sections of the forum, especially Bitcoin discussion, as Bitcoin Discussion has started to fill up with a lot of useless threads. We could even possibly expand this to include threads of which it would be very unlikely for any meaningful conversation to take place.