Inc, is there any reason you're not using captcha?

Sure it's annoying to end users, but it's also a quick and very effective solution to all of those spamming web crawlers filling your forums with nonsense. Which makes it worth it in my opinion.

There is a captcha on the Sign Up page.

-1 to require captcha for every single post. That's annoying as hell and we don't get spam that often.

-1

The problem with captcha, and even googles re-captcha is programs can probably solve them even easier than humans can. I know people think that these "none machine readable" images are cool and stuff, but really all they do is slow down a determined spammer, and even then only by a second or two. I mean there are already services like https://2captcha.com/ out there! These services have warehouses full of koreans just waiting to solve the captcha for you!

END CAPTCHA NOW

Like arf says, I would prefer to block them on signup and just cleanup/ban any who get through occasionally. To date, it hasn't been that big of a deal.

We could put posting limits on new accounts that haven't done much yet, but that's a more involved heuristic, to avoid false positives on enthusiastic new people. Also, someone would have to implement that, and it's just not a huge priority at the moment.

We could put posting limits on new accounts that haven't done much yet, but that's a more involved heuristic, to avoid false positives on enthusiastic new people.

This is definitely a better idea.

Why not just see if an account has a character with Combat 1?

They may be having trouble getting the game running, so bugs would at least need to be exempted.