so does badspot actually approve of spam threads in the aot forums
He doesn't approve of them really, but neither are they against the rules.
The two big factors that filter out spam on the forums is, firstly, that threads have to be applicable to the board they're on. The second is that posts should try to stay on-topic and related to the thread. Because AoT is old and uninteresting, a lot of meta discussion goes on, and because there's nothing really to talk about what's left over is just a bunch of junk posts. Junk posts are everywhere on the forum but being congregated on this board makes it look like this.