What we can do is,find their thread on bitcointalk and lock it or negative tag the accounts involving the ICO teams.
Would it be possible for a competitor to spam the inbox of users of a particular ICO in order to damage that ICO's reputation and get their thread locked?
I've touched on this above. Whilst it's certainly possible, I would guess the number of people that would even try it to be extremely low, whereas the number of ICOs utilising these spam services are very high, but something needs to be done about these services as I'm getting about 50 reported messages a day regarding them. Sadly, I'm not even sure if the admin's are looking into the accounts because I'm sure lots of them could be stopped before they even start as I doubt they're using different IPs for each bot account.
They might not be doing this now because there is ~0 consequence to advertising ICOs via PM today, but if advertising an ICO via PM meant the ICO thread gets locked, I would think some would engage in moderate advertising via PM for their competitors.
There seems to be a lot nowadays that the admins are not looking into that they probably should. There is a fairly decent amount of admin related work that cannot be automated. I believe theymos recently said that he is the only one handling the coding behind the forum so he might have been busy with that recently.
One solution may be to prohibit Newbies or lower ranked members from posting in ICO threads. If we make it so Juniors or Members can only do so they probably wont bother getting the accounts up to that member-level. At the moment it is far too easy to create an unlimited amount of accounts and bot any thread you want and this needs to be curbed somehow. To remove this restriction it could be included in one of the paid premium memberships like Copper/Silver/Gold etc.
Im confused. I thought the problem was that a bunch of newbies have been sending unsolicited PMs to users who are not interested, nor have given any indication they are interested in any ICOs.
I do suspect that a decent number of people might get involved in crypto because they heard about and invested in an ICO, so prohibiting these people from posting in ICO threads might result in these people bringing their insight and conversation elsewhere.