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I agree with you on pretty much all points, this place has gone downhill a lot since 2011/2012. Changes need to be made, but theymos either ignores suggestions/changes or just doesn't want to implement them. The old hands off attitude used to work a lot better when there weren't tons of people around, but times have changed.
Do you mean in regards to newbie spam, or in regards to scamming?
The former would be easier to deal with (e.g increase waiting time between posts to half an hour for newbies and jr. members, or autoban or auto-tempban accounts if they have more than a dozen posts deleted in a 24 hour period), but I don't really see a solution to the latter without us having much more work, getting more mods, and severely limiting other users' freedom.
A little bit of both but mostly the newbie spam, removing the requirements has increased the noise a lot. I'm not sure how we could (easily) cut down on the scamming, but that would be nice to do too. Overall I think we might just need to be a little stricter with moderation.