I really want to be as optimistic as you are
Yeah, I agree its a fairly optimistic approach, but I know from personal experience that we've combated a few projects using malicious ways to spam their threads, and we've come up on top. Now, the only thing that we haven't been able to do is continue this thread wide, and do it to every announcement thread.
I'm not sure how we are suppose to get more people to report. I've made a resource as you know which I hope has helped, but probably hasn't. I'll continue to encourage users to report, and I guess that's all we can do. I don't know how rare it is for someone to just sit down, and dedicate their time to reporting without any benefit, but I'm sure there's a few others that would be willing to do this. They might not be part of the forum right now, but join at a later date. This is exactly why I will continue to encourage it.
This has to change. I think it was different back in the day but I'm rather new here I don't really know.
I don't think there's a awful lot that has changed. I just think it's a little more exaggerated now that there's a lot more users on the forum.