Byteang3l Funny thing is the auto mod filter that we have set up catches the bulk of it. There have been times when I've opened the front page of the forum and almost the entire thing was filled with spam, all caught by the filter. Only a small number of them get through. The issue with using a filter is that we cannot possibly set up all words/phrases to catch everything. Some posts need an actual human to check if it's spam or not.
There is a thing set up where known scammer IP addresses are blocked from registering. That was set up before I joined the moderation team, but I could tell the difference. It reduced spam by a lot. It was really bad then.
Byteang3l Assuming they're bots and not humans
I've heard that they're real people. If that's the case (not sure how they determined that since I wasn't a moderator then), then they'd get past any pictures of motorcycles and Cloudflare checkmarks the site throws at them. Also worth mentioning that some users on here wouldn't like the idea of adding these things from Google or Cloudflare.
yore if a select few trusted, active users were given the ability to remove (newly created) threads.
I don't believe there's an option to limit these things based on account or post age. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. So, anyone who can mark one user as a spammer can mark anyone as a spammer. Also worth noting that we have accounts that post a few sort of seemingly useful posts, go quiet for days or months, then come back to post spam.
Byteang3l the scam posts have been up for a few hours and I did flag them
Flagging is the preferred way to notify us. If spam is really bad, people who are also in the chat rooms have pinged us using @mods. Doing that is fine too.
Byteang3l assuming it grows more rampant
I think it's mostly been about the same recently. The two posts earlier were just around for far longer than spam posts usually are up for, but we do get those kinds of posts from time to time. They're not abnormal.