I have noticed something that is a bit odd here.

If there is a spam post and a mod deletes the post, the thread still stays active at the top the forum stack. Removing that post is not changing the post date variable back to the last post date. Which leaves it at the top of the stack.

While this may sound trivial... If the site gets a large scripted attack, current threads will be buried is a sea of old ones that have no current relevance at all.

I am not sure how your post handler is set up, but it should not be that hard to reset the last post date after a spam post is removed. Many of the forums I ran in the past automatically did so when posts were removed to stop them from ending up at the top of the current stack.

There may very well be a setting for this in the posts or publish module....

This is nothing new, as it's being doing this for ages.  I've gotten to the point where I check the time of that "last post," and if it's much earlier in the day, I assume I've already seen it.  Besides, it's gotten so I can tell by the alias/name of the last person listed as posting, and i know there's nothing new there.

Of course, there are times the last post is not by the spammer, but someone we all know and trust.  I'm just so used to this, I ignore it most of the time.

Yeppers, we know about this and added it as a suggestion to the developers to fix ages ago. It's currently number ten gazillion on the list of things to do.

Ok then... Fixing it in 20 years or so, lol.....