Re:Ask HN: 2 karma minimum to lock out spam bots
by jasonkester on Friday April 24, 2009 @12:41PM
(#577740)
Ah, but there's the rub. Extrapolating from my comment above, your number one job is to make spammers feel successful when they fail. If you reject new accounts like this, you'll force them to write those little proxies to get around your system.
The better thing to do is to simply notice what they're doing and flip the IsSpammer bit on all those new accounts (including the first one.) That way you can correctly classify any content they may post from those accounts in the future.
Yeh they can use a ton of proxies to get round that but I bet it cuts the account creation right down.
And it shouldnt affect 99.999999% of "real" users.