Responding to the current spam wave

Hello everyone!

In response to this spam wave, I have tightened a fair number of settings on the site. A few of these are somewhat drastic, but given the relative inactivity of this forum, i believe they are warranted:

  • staff approval is now required before new accounts can access the site
  • minumum trust levels for some actions were raised
  • threshold spam flags before posts are auto-hidden and the posters auto-silenced has been significantly reduced (thank you to everyone who flagged the posts as spam)
  • limits on posts and post frequency that apply to new users and first-day activity have been increased

Thanks again to everyone who flagged the spam posts through the discourse flagging interface (and also reached out out-of-band to let the community know as well).

If anyone has feedback or questions about this, feel free to reply below