A community includes a help-desk, a panel of knowledgeable people who can help out and sometimes, even learn new things in the process.
A help-desk does not last long, especially if there is no incentive for people informed about issues to remain together to help people out.
And the only way to eradicate spam completely is to not have a forum at all, but have people mail in questions to which you reply to somewhere on the site. Forums are meant to create communities, especially when they are for games. If this was a forum for technical items that most people would have problems with, it would be more understandable that there would have to be a hard grip on spam-control. But, as I'm about to become redundant, this is a gaming forum. Without community, especially when an increasingly large number of visitors play online (or used to play online) or design scenarios (or used to design scenarios), there would be no reason for people to help out others.
Communities are formed due to human nature. If there is a restriction on building communities, the "human" part of human nature would not stick around to answer/ask questions. And obviously, it is a human urge to veer off-topic. Even in controlled threads in forums ruled by iron fists, there are deviations from the topic in its contents.
And I'd say spam has been down and lower than before. Rather than abstaining from or punishments for things that may or may not incite spam, it would be wiser to keep the spam itself controled where it does not belong. If a person tends to spam due to a certain thread or realizes it is okay to spam at a lower degree (as it appears to be acceptable by modelling the paradigm of posting upon a certain thread), the issue is not the thread. It is the person. If you believe that the root of the cause is the Splash Splash thread or the Town's Crier, then why not go even higher and ban people whose expressed opinions and ideas may potentially lead to spam? That puts all of us in the same boat, even the Cherubim, Angels, and Seraphim of the HG Community.
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