[percept]

I wish Google Groups worked out better for moderators, because as a user it's the only message system I enjoy using (versus my 300th phpBB or vBulletin registration/confirmation/login cycle).

I know some groups have promoted frequent posters to moderator status and this helps with the workload (though it sounds like the jQuery group already does this and it's still too much).

[forensic]

Even vBulletin requires manual spam control these days.

Spammers are more than happy to pay sweatshop wages to people who manually register and log in to site after site and post their spam until the account is hand-banned by a moderator.