While The Pharmacist tends to go a bit overboard in his rhetoric, as many have mentioned, his frustrations aren't completely unfounded. Nothing has led me to such desperation as watching East Asian and Russian spammers flood the forum with waves of crap that I'll never be able to mop up, no matter how hard I tried. And while the not every [insert nationality here] is a spammer principle applies, trends do exist and certain countries with shitty living standards do tend to dominate the spamming sphere more than their more affluent counterparts. (Usually) not the individual's fault, but the mind does tend to lump people into categories.
I've witnessed how much work the mods actually do to try and combat the spam that keeps on popping up. By the time they have mopped up a few hundred posts when they check again there's another few hundred posts to deal with. It's a vicious circle right now which quite frankly won't be prevented by hiring new mods. Changes to the structure of the forum is likely the only way we are going to combat this. But, then we risk hindering the actual legitimate users of the forum, which I for one aren't a fan of.
Signature campaigns are a big problem of the forum. Changes have been forced which are far from perfect. The changes which have been made have done little to actually stop the widepread spamming. Serious discussion and it's sub board for example isn't dealing with it directly but, allowing a safe haven for discussions that people want to talk about without the annoying spam.
It isn't just signature campaigns. Altcoin annoucements and bounties are a big part of the problem and it tends to be a spamming ground for many non English, broken English and English responses.
You could pay $2 per post, whatever the fee per post, it has to be enough to pay for at least 6 new mods, 2 of them to be active for 8 hours, another 2 for the next 8 hours and the last 2 for the last 8 hours of a 24 hours day. forum needs more than 6 new mods, this is just to have 24 hours online mods on the boards with the most spam.
Let them pay, if you have enough moderators, you could stop them from breaking the rules. you say they'll rank up by spending time? they are doing the ranking up and are earning at the same time, if they'd post just to rank up without breaking the rules, you couldn't do anything to stop that, it is their time.
The forum shouldn't have to accommodate for signature campaigns. Signature campaigns should accommodate for the forum. What should be done is if the signature manager isn't doing it's job then the thread should be trashed and the manager punished.
I don't know if you've ever run something which requires using moderators, but it's incredibly difficult to find trustworthy ones who most likely have no identity attached to them, more so on a cyptocurrency forum. Plus, any of the reports that I make normally get dealt with within a few hours at most. The forums staff team cover almost 24/7 between them.