I've use IPB for years (nearly 20!).

We get insane amounts of spam now. I spent hours marking users as spammers but their content no longer gets deleted. Beyond frustrating. My community is a waste of time now. Is there a way to delete posts made by spammers in bulk?

Unfortuanetly there is a very large increase in spam lately across the board. What you can do however is to ensure you are doing the following

1. Ensure you are using hCaptcha, rather than any other captcha type.  This seems to be the most effective at present
2. Ensure you have increase the sensitivity when you set up an hCaptcha account
3. Ensure you have question and answers set up, as you dont seem to have at present

You can see more about this, and how to use the "Mark as spam" function, which will allow you to delete all the posts from a person at once if needed, in the following guide

 

Thank you.

 

 

another dozen registrations overnight. all had either not responded to validation email or needed admin validation. flagged them all. 

Installed the plugin from @CleanTalk and set it up, registered for free trial and within 5 minutes it blocked its first registration attempt. Will see how it helps me during free trial. At $12 per year it seems value for money if it does what it says on the tin.  

If you haven't already, in your CleanTalk account, set a block on countries that are unlikely to be visiting your site, plus Russia and China.  Of those that remain, you'll start to see a pattern of blocks in CleanTalk from other countries as well and you can zap those too.

Does flagging a spammer also remove all the PMs they may have sent?