The only solution I can think of after painfully watching this shit show unfold from the sidelines is a consensus-based solution around removal, and maybe some kind of penalty system.

In one case of the spam, I noticed the "exterminator" account has over -7 reputation. This is one of the accounts being controlled by the name we do not speak. That right there should be a warning sign that the account is probably trouble.

I think there needs to be some kind of system with manual controls in place who are alerted to accounts so negatively low in reputation (you must be doing some bad shit to get that low). Maybe it can be consensus-based to prevent massive abuse and targeted campaigns like the current flagging system. Reports are reviewed, maybe even Steem users have to "stake" STEEM to make a report if it's an accurate report, the STEEM is refunded, otherwise, it is kept as a penalty.

Ideally, I want to see the ability for witnesses to block and refuse to sign transactions on a node level. While it gets hard with the ability to create hundreds of bot accounts, maybe if we incentivised the community to report these accounts through a system like @steemcleaners then we can prevent their blocks passing through. Users could be rewarded with upvotes, delegation, STEEM or even a custom Steem Engine token.

More extreme cases like the present one, hard fork account removal. Strip the offender of their Steem Power and remove their account from the blockchain entirely. This is what some people in the community were threatening to do to Steemit Inc's stake by hard forking it from the chain.

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