Wanted to pass along the idea my brain farted out since it may help mitigate some of the spam that is making it thru the firehose. It seems like a fair number of the spam accounts/bots over last 24hrs making self promotion communities aren't filling in the community about/guidelines portions during community setup.
- Question: Do yall have a way to add a friction point for posting to communities?
- Idea: Community stays in dormant mode until the about/guidelines are populated.
- Potential Benefits: Could help slow down the less invested (lazy) bot runners from spooling up more communities for whack a mole which in turn lowers the volume of total orphaned communities when a spam account is inevitably banned, cuts down on number of repetitive 'whats going on with all the bots' posts yall have to respond to, and establishes best practices for legit communities to fill in the basics so mods/admin have something already defined to point to if there are future 'why was my post removed' appeals
- To Consider: If you apply something like this universally, means a number of newly established but legit communities would go dormant (eg founders may not have populated the sidebar yet but plan to), might be less of a userbase feedback headache to apply as a go-forward v a retro change
Don't envy you facing the endless sludge that is knocking at the door, but do appreciate everything yall are doing to squash it down