Quoting Stefmuts
Uhm, how does the reporting of spammers work on TP?
Once you are established with an amount of participation on the site you'll start to see a Report button on the top of posts, which you can use to flag something dodgy. This causes it to disappear until reviewed by a moderator and can be deleted or edited and notes appended. The forums are divided into areas such as Asia or General Talk, and each of these will have a couple of mods assigned.
Most spammers dive in for one hit and don't use the user profile again, so we don't usually bother removing the user, we just remove the spam. But persistent offenders can be reported as a user - Report User tab on their profile - and this is dealt with by an Admin rather than a Moderator.
It varies but I probably delete (for the forums I Mod) or flag (for the other forums) from a couple to a dozen issues a day. Some of these are blatant spam, others are more subtle and could lead to back channels dialogue between mods to figure out what's happening, others may be non spam but another rule breach such as including email addresses or phone number, or could be inflammatory - I don't see much of that, this is a really well behaved forum.
Spam is picked up very quickly and I like the way that reported posts are immediately hidden pending review. But it does mean occasionally that genuine contributions are temporarily hidden and also that new members who unwittingly fall foul of a rule are blocked. It happened to me in my early days 
But I was quickly unblocked, I should add!