But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".
The press board generates very little traffic. I noted previously that most threads have less than
three dozen page views.
I think it would help to clarify what actually qualifies when it comes to "notability" and to mandate that topic starters in that sub include their own thoughts an opinions to accompany the quoted segments they're posting.
Anything from a site solely for crypto news should be banned, since these sites churn out non newsworthy click bait a dime a dozen, since that is their business model. If anyone just copies and pastes a bit of an article, then that is a low value post and should be deleted.
I just did a quick experiment on applying those two rules to the current first page of Press (ignoring the 3 stickied topics). It cuts the number of topics from 40 down to just 3, and the number of total replies from 117 to 55. That's nearly half of all the replies in just 7.5% of the topics. Unsurprisingly, those 3 topics are first, second, and third in terms of total number of replies. Those topics are where the good discussion is. If we trashed all the spam as I have suggested above, then almost the entire front page of the board would comprise good quality topics like that, which would slowly but surely attract back good users.
I might apply a similar rule that is applied when theymos decides if a new sub is needed. That is to measure the number of threads on the first two pages.
Topics on the first page of the press board have the most recent reply as early as October 25, almost three weeks ago. The second page goes back to Seppember 17, nearly two months ago. Based on the above, I don't think it is accurate to say that what you describe as "spam threads" are drowning out higher-quality threads.
It sounds like your main concern is that the press board is deserted. If I find any interesting articles about bitcoin this week, I will post them, and will try to find interesting threads and reply to them. Hopefully those who find my posts interesting will read my posts and more traffic will be attracted to the press sub.