Two ideas:
– You could delay the first submission of a new account until it is approved by a moderator.
– Each item could have a link for marking it as spam.
The idea of a "report spam" link sounds interesting.
Perhaps, if the account that posted the alleged spam article was recently created and the article was reported by at least certain number of users (4 users or something), the article could be automatically hidden from view, until an admin manually approves it, or delete it. But instead, if the person has certain reputation, then, it will only be a flag for the admin to check, and will not be automatically hidden.
The idea would be to have the ability to hide the spam articles as fast as possible, but at the same time, prevent the possible abuse of the "report spam" link, to hide articles that some people could just don't like.
(That last part may sound weird since echojs is not a politics site, but remember how passionate some people get about things like the whole semicolons debate!)
Interesting idea. There could also be a threshold of (e.g.) 3 reports before something is declared spam.
Hopefully, having to submit one valid JS link before one can post freely will also make it much harder to spam.