Last night, while the mods were getting some much-needed rest, a new user started posting advertizements for a blog. The community moderation worked, with many of the posts were marked as SPAM. However, a new user is free (as far as I know) to continue posting spam.
I would like to propose that new users who had, let's say three posts marked as SPAM by the community (i.e. 5 SPAM flags) are automatically suspended pending moderator review and/or their posts are not published until they pass review (as jippie suggests). The moderator review of suspension/required review status might be useful if we are worried about some number of users colluding in chat to gang up on an unsuspecting new user. Note that I am not proposing to ban the source IP: rather just suspend the user account. Yes, the spammer can create a new account and continue defacing the site, however, this is a bit of an extra hoop the spammer has to jump through at no cost to the community, under the present proposal.
BTW, a similar question has been discussed in the post How do we avoid spam recidivism? here, however, both the problem and the solution proposed are somewhat different.
