It's either that or implementing captchas. And I think pg is not very motivated to do the latter.
edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
edit: top of my head reply/speculation so I don't claim any factual accuracy.
Real spammers have tens of thousands of unique addresses to use; why would they use the 300 or so exit nodes that Tor has available?
For spam, http://www.stopforumspam.com is pretty awesome. But most likely because the few people who have written scripts for vBulletin or phpBB attempt to hit all of the vBulletin and phpBB sites... so it works pretty well for that group. May have zero effect on something like HN where an entirely different approach may be used (cheap labour?).
He could just give users a kindly-worded error message instead of flipping the switch on them, but DO NOT QUESTION THE FLOW CHART.
So here's a simple captcha idea: judge a first-time user on the pertinence of their first comment to a thread. Just like show-dead, only users who browse with show-newbies enabled would see those comments (in green). No downvotes? Welcome to the community