>Perhaps one of those computer generated number things to prohibit spam?
That has been suggested before -- always by people who didn't take the time to understand the system or the challenges it faces.
The public part of the situation is this: our incoming spam is different from your e-mail. You get one gonif sending the same garbage to ten million people -- and there are a few thousand gonifs in the trade. So clamping down on the automated zombie e-mail senders will seriously impact your pr0n supply.
But we get five thousand gonifs a day, each sending one post to us. Since automated posts are not the problem (we believe trained monkeys are used for the vast majority of these), then the approach you suggest really doesn't address the issue we have. In fact, any automated approach we take would result in retraining the monkeys, and our 5p4m intake would hardly flicker.
On the other hand, we don't talk about what we ALREADY do to help editors can spam efficiently -- and sorry, that's not going to change. People are welcome to show their skill at grokking the problem (by, say, a few thousand edits in progressively more spam-ridden categories.) And then participating in the internal discussions.
I do think it is safe to say that with only the anti-spam techniques we had five years ago, the editors would be completely overwhelmed. As it is, we are comfortably treading water.
