My 2
cents Satoshis:
1. Spam protection shouldn't be optional. If you want to stop spam in your thread, make it self-moderated. Anything else should be applied globally.
2. Not only Newbies spam, spam happens on higher ranks too. All Newbies who get through without being banned eventually get a higher rank.
3. The "spam score" shouldn't be a fixed value, it should be a percentage of the posts a user makes. But even then, it can be abused. Suppose I don't like you: I'm Legendary, so I only need to report 5 of your 113 posts as Spam to get you banned for a week!
I appreciate you trying, but most ideas have downsides too.
This will help people to differentiate between a serious and a BS topic.
Ideally, this shouldn't be necessary. All topics should be serious topics.
My new personal favourite: report more posts than you make! In the past week I got
about 800 accounts banned, on top of my "normal" reports.
Or maybe give this option only to moderators or DT members?
Moderators already have a ban-button to deal with spammers, and recently I've seen several DT-members who start tagging spammers. If that happens enough, spammers may fear for their accounts and spam less!