I remember the new forum plan going on for like a decade lol it became kind of a meme for me. I checked back up on it a couple months ago and yeah it looks like they're no longer pursuing it. I actually want to develop a chat feature for bitcointalk myself and I've had personal interest over the years on making a general forum software so forums can take over the internet again since I don't like the segmented thread design that has taken over and is used by sites like reddit. So maybe if I make this new and improved general forum software that many sites can implement then possibly bitcointalk would implement it as well. I will most likely first work on the chat feature for bitcointalk though, as long as people want it of course.

As far as the spam I think it's still very bad, it seems like most people are just farming posts for signature campaign payouts. The quality isn't anywhere near what it was early in bitcointalk. Even when people shitposted early in the forums history at least those posts were kind of endearing, the shitposts now are just slop.