Right now, if the moderators are gone and a troll thread pops up, there’s nothing anybody can do. This happened over the weekend and is happening again today.
Because the Editor/Sage program is long gone, there is nothing anybody can do besides waiting for mods to reappear, but by then it’s way too late. If expanding the moderation team across more time zones is not a priority, then flagged posts should be auto locked until it can be reviewed. Most of the posts have been hidden (“This post has been hidden by community flags. View ignored content”). This would pause the spamming until a moderator is able to either lock the thread entirely or reopen it.
This is all that is required for this system to become a weapon that trolls can use against normal everyday forum members. The auto hiding system was never designed to be a temporary substitute for moderation — if it was, it wouldn’t give you an option to view the post.
The current system for auto hiding is rare to see unless the post is blatantly breaking the rules, so it would be hard to abuse this in theory. Plus false flagging (not ever organized like you’re saying) can lead to a strike.
This would be worse as it could be abused by organized trollers and eventually lead to the unreliability and destabilization of the forum. The best that could be done is that once it’s hidden, it could be unlisted until further review.
In response to your comments on troll threads. you should be able to ignore them without a problem. As long as you don’t interact with it, it shouldn’t spam your inbox. I don’t know why you have to give your focus on attention-starving threads that could be ignored which could be closed by moderators later. The phrasing of the request sounds like you’re intentionally looking for trouble.
One of the things I noticed is that none of the spammers got their account suspended on DevForum, so they can just wait like a week for things to cool down, and then strike again at a perfect moment when moderators are not present.
You have engaged with the troll threads as I’ve observed it and yet you complain about troll threads while you could’ve just reported it and ignore it. You’re giving the trollers attention.