Disclaimer: I'm not sure how this could be financially and technically feasible, but reducing spam traffic at the very early stage of posting can certainly help reduce resources, thus voat's running costs.
Current voat's way to deal with spam is with the help of devoted voaters and janitors (@cynabuns, @dubbelnougat, @DerKatalog, @Owlchemy, me included) who report directly in /v/reportspammers. Reports are then reviewed by @cynabuns, and they are submitted for review by Puttitout.
This process can take several days, depending on Putt's availability.
Blocking obvious commercial spam (accounts and domains) minutes after being posted would definitely turn down most spammers to create new accounts and domains, knowing they are gonna waste their time.
My idea is that voat could add a new category of moderators (anti-spam) that would have the ability to site-wide ban, "only" newly created spam accounts (less than a month or to be decided) and their posts & comments.
This chosen group of truthful voaters could together help @Puttitout dealing with spam reports.
The less time spent by Putt on dealing with spam reports, the more time he'll have on improving voat.
Of course, for neutrality and to prevent abuse, bans from these "anti-spam" mod team will all be logged and publicly accessible in /v/reportspammers' sidebar, where the current ban lists are.
Now, in case a new account is mistakenly banned, any "anti-spam" mod will be able to un-ban with mutual agreement.
Imagine the /all/new queue with close to no spam that would last, at best, less than a couple minutes.
I think It would not be worth the time for most of these spammers to create fake accounts, submit random contents in relevant subs, for a determined amount of time, commenting relevant things in topics, before starting posting real spam links.
What do you guys think?
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[–] Stavon 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
The best way sure is to handle both accounts and domains. Maybe Putt's banning tool can be improved to save him time.
Not preventing new accounts from commenting allows users to downvoat them into CCP restrictions though. Although that isn't done often enough and many spammers don't comment on their posts.
[–] AOU [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
The ones who do are "one-post" scripted spambots.
[–] Stavon 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Likely, those comments look all very similar.
[–] AOU [S] ago
If they have to first post, they'd get caught in the /all/new queue.
Also, AVE is a great tool to help tagging and to tell new accounts from old legit voaters at first glance.
[–] Stavon ago
I should try that sometime. But telling new users is easy enough without it. And sometimes even old accounts start to spam, like for example Kaiser664.