whenever it (fortunately, rarely) appears.

If you are not here when it is posted -- usually early hours of the morning US time; then by the time you do visit, it has all been dealt with so you never see it.

Early and mid-morning European time, its a pain.

If it ain’t broke . . .

You're obviously one of the majority who leave dealing with spam to others.

The current mechanism is a painful multi-step process.

1. View node; type reason; check checkbox; click consider; wait for refresh.
2. Check "reap"; click moderate; wait;
3. Check downvote; click vote; wait.

And by the time you've done all that, upto a dozen more have appeared on the RAT page.

And you can only hope that 3 other monks are around and diligent enough to go through the same process.

All good and proper for dealing with matters of off-topic nodes, the lack of code tags and correcting titling; but too slow and cumbersome for dealing with spam in a timely manner.

I don’t personally believe that author-based heuristics will be useful, or successful:

Strange, given that the existing consideration mechanism that you are so supportive of above, is already author-based.

It requires any monk using it to be a) logged-in; b) of a certain standing -- ie. to have acquired some minimal level of XP to ensure at least some level of worthiness either through attendance or positive contribution.

And what do you think these ingenious bot authors that you are so enamored of are going to do? Create 4 bot accounts; have them log in every day and answer enough nodes to accumulate sufficient Xp; so that when the bot owner posts spam; he can arrange for his bots to countermand the consideration process by have his bot vote "keep"?

You really do not think things through do you.