Thank you to every for the alerts about the spammer. They have been removed and their drivel with them.
Spam is a PITA but it doesn't happen that often and is easy to clean up. I have a few things I'm going to build in though to keep things under control and prevent the disruption they do cause:
Spam checks on email addresses during registration and reporting to the spammer database on removal. Most spammers are already known so that will pick up a lot of them.
Linking the "flag" tool to a reputation system so that if enough respected members votes report someone as a spammer then the system can take care of things on their own (this can work for lots of things - the community become the moderators).
More gradual ramping up of posting limits and checks for repeated posts with the same content. A lot of the limits are intentionally "flexible" to allow people to have occasional bursts of chattiness while preventing someone taking over completely. Just reducing some of that elasticity will help but I think the other measures are better because they won't impact regular users.