We do, of course, notice when we next check in (and I check several times a day, unless I am away from home). Most moderators don't bother with this part of the forum, but reporting a post gets a mail sent to all mods, so may get it dealt with faster (it's a mail, not a PM, so we can get to see it without having to connect to the forum site).
The procedure is then that the thread gets moved to a hidden Trashbin forum, so that an admin (i.e. Ben/"est") can pick it up and do the necessary banning of the poster, and their IP address. Ben is also actively developing the spam defences, so he may analyse the post as well before finally deleting it. If the spam post was added to another thread, we can split it off as a separate thread, and then move that to trash.
In the two months I've been doing this, the number of spams I've dealt with each day (over the whole forum) has dropped from an average of about six to less than one, so I reckon Ben is doing reasonably well at improving the defences at present.