> informing them of how spam networks work

You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority.

The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community.

I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.

All that means that I can’t spell it out for you, I don’t know how you can be here and not understand contractual obligations. You have to come to the conclusions yourself. All I can kinda do is act as an oracle and say “yeah that might work” or “that sounds like a false sense of security.” Everyone here thus far has had zero curiosity or willingness to debate things on actual merits despite me dropping a few big hints and would rather either attack me personally for being willing to debate something I can’t go into details about (but could probably talk what-ifs), or tell me it is impossible because of a magic tree and I must not know what I’m talking about.

So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions.

At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.