Cant some sort of cop-bot be automated on the forums side so as to deal with many of these cases on its own?
I mean, when one reports a case as spam it could end up (prior moderator/admin clearance) in a table on the forums database, that is then used to filter out posts either on-the-fly (when the user presses the Post button), or on an iterative process manner, that searches for posts of a kind and deleted them (from a certain date/time onwards; no need to sweep the whole database constantly).
This "cop-bot" process could be a little more intelligent and cope with:
- Auto nuking accounts that have posts that have been reported and clear as spam (I believe this only applies to Newbie accounts since only they are nukable).
- Text variations by means of homographs.
- Go a step further and compares text with some kind of fuzzy logic or Levenshteins string distance algorithm, so small variations of the spam text may also be detected (slight risks of false positives arise though the more flexible one is here to text variances).
- Auto-banning account (temporary/permanent) with x posts deleted due to spam in a certain period of time (alternatively, add a poop badge on the user profile for a certain amount of time).
If the on-the-fly post option is possibly a cause for overhead in waiting for the post to be committed to the database, perhaps fast-track can be granted to users with a certain amount of gained merit (the iterative process swoop would could still catch merited cases that go on to spam).
It shouldnt be that hard to start off with the trivial cases of exact copies that we see every day, and move on from there to text variants with similarities above a certain degree.