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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[–] Owlchemy 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
There's so many good Voaters, I have another couple of suggestions, if this should be considered. Rather than making a permanent crew of anti-spammers, how about making it a term limited kind of deal. You choose a team of five or six with the mod status, they serve in the position (voluntarily) for say three to six months, then the anti-spam mod team is replaced with another set of volunteers. Or you could stagger it, so there's experienced and novices. That way it never turns into a power mod kind of thing ... and other deserving Voaters with good reps, and there are lots of them, are given the opportunity, if they accept, to take their turn. All mods to be selected and/or removed from position by Putt. (Edit: And you can be a repeat anti-spammer, just not back to back terms)
It would also be nice, if done, that any spam reports made by users are also routed via a message to the anti-spam team, so that any online at the time gets the flag and can act on it, should it otherwise be missed, or not acted on by sub mod.
If also applied to trolls, this could go a long way in solving that problem, too. The ability of a small group to disable a troll in his/her tracks. But that's another story.