I used to run a forum hosting service. After a while you try everything. Honeypot fields, incorrect field names, etc. You will notice things like CSRF tokens ge

I used to run a forum hosting service. After a while you try everything. Honeypot fields, incorrect field names, etc. You will notice things like CSRF tokens generated by one IP and used by another. When stuff fails, they send 100 real people and record what worked, and it fixes their script. It’s all pretty automated. IP reputation can be helpful for some players, but most snowshoe. Spam attempts would grow exponentially. So every time we cut it down by 90% via one of these tricks, it only gave us a bit of time. None of this stops the determined troll though.. they can have all day to manually add offensive content. Shadow banning was good for this (1999) and group shadow banning was the best (bifurcated forum posts so all the banned people saw each other, but no one else did). Ah, memories. So good.