Inability to create discussion posts for users with negative or zero karma was already proposed when we were experiencing attacks of spambots. I don’t know whether it has been implemented already, but suppose it hasn’t.
It has been. It isn’t clear how they were able to post the top level post so late. Some have suggested that they made additional accounts to vote up their older posts but I don’t know of any evidence of that. Unfortunately, there’s very little in the system that makes detecting that sort of thing very easy.
(ETA: By “they” I mean the potential troll, not the spambots.)
Inability to create discussion posts for users with negative or zero karma was already proposed when we were experiencing attacks of spambots. I don’t know whether it has been implemented already, but suppose it hasn’t.
It has been. It isn’t clear how they were able to post the top level post so late. Some have suggested that they made additional accounts to vote up their older posts but I don’t know of any evidence of that. Unfortunately, there’s very little in the system that makes detecting that sort of thing very easy.
(ETA: By “they” I mean the potential troll, not the spambots.)
Spam stopped immediately when having positive Karma became a requirement. Only a few spam messages appeared in comments after that, AFAIK.
Yes, sorry, by “they” I meant the troll in question, not the spambots. Bad wording on my part.