I'm not sure I'm buying the small company angle. Sure, there are always going to be very creative people who work around complex rules, but that's not everyone. They could apply very basic checks and get rid of 99% of spam I've seen. Specifically, applying "you just moved more than 20km in one go and posted the same message including {bay/sell} => permaban".
For one moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal - using the Intel map. If you use the chat there it uses whatever location your focus is on. Also banning the "selling items" accounts does very little, they are cheap to recreate. The thing you have to control are farming bots.
> moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal
Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.
I'm not saying it's nice and that I support those sellers, but I'd try to kill the root ... and the chat experience always was limited with Ingress. In my local groups it was good enough however to get into contact with people to get then to hangouts or slack or whatever. With Pokemon this is really missing.
Perhaps it's just easier to leave it like the way it is? This way they can easily track spam-bots and the network behind it. If they start to implement more sophisticated by systems the spammers would also become more sophisticated.
At the point where you can't really talk to people anymore because your window is just flooded with spam, no. It may be easier for Nianic, but not for the players.
Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)
