A self heal like community is great. Imagine owning a forum with millions of registered users and don't have to spend time on moderation or hiring moderators. Site owner can set general rules for people to follow and moderate others.
I don't mind having Google Recaptcha NoCaptcha on the following pages: registration, every post, every reply, every PM. NoCaptcha is quick and it's just a click.
Akismet intergration can be nice. I'm not sure how effective it is.
Some places we can learn self healing community: Reddit, Wikipedia (there are some great youtube vids describing the methods), Discourse.
Basically find a way to weight quality users from normal users and new users over time. Those super users have better say in each of his flags. Other users/super users can participate in flagging. A post/reply with enough weighted flag score will get hidden until the owner of the post edit it, then it'll be notified for review again. Something like that, it can be simple and improved over time.