Good idea; though I'd argue 2 is too low, if these aren't "bots" but real humans, it wouldn't be hard for them to adapt by commenting and then upvoting each other.
10+ would be nicer, anyone truly interested in HN would understand why! :)
10+ would be nicer, anyone truly interested in HN would understand why! :)
It turned out (based on IP address analysis) that the accounts were being created by humans in the Philippines and then handed over to spammers in Dubai. Ah globalization...
If you have an efficient spam vector, it's not unusual to see low-wage humans manipulating the system to get around captcha.
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.
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.
Probably both have merits but I am inclined to agree yours is the better way :D
So at least one of them has to say something that the original community finds useful. And if he/she does manage to upvote his friends, those upvotes will generally be cancelled out by the community (not because they are fighting spam, but because they don't agree with the upvote)