If I though my thousands of reports would actually lead to change, rather than only cleaning things up for a matter of hours, I would be back at it in a heartbeat.
What if - and stop me if this sounds like the craziest idea ever - reports weren't restricted by post throttling?
If it takes me 4 seconds to report a post, even if I can instantaneously decide "spam/not spam"...
How long does it take for a spammer to post a new reply? 60 seconds? 120 seconds? Divide that by 4 seconds: how many spammers do I cancel out?
So, how many spammers are there in total?
Oh.
Moderators can't see if a user has been reported or had x amount of posts deleted recently, unless they manually check via the modlog.
I often reported users with a comment along the lines of "I have x number of good reports against this user for spam in the last 30 days, please consider a ban", which was easy to do by simply visiting my reporter stats page and searching for their username. Even when I the number of reports I (never mind anyone else!) had against that user was in the order of 50+ or even 100+, they did not get banned.
Take
my reports as an example and feel free to cross-reference the number of good reports (found in sent feedback and partially-filled in BPIP) against users. There have been some with multiple hundreds.