[sciencemadness]

The bad actors were much less prevalent back in the heyday of small phpBB style forums. I have run a forum of this type for 20 years now, since 2002. Around 2011 was when link spam got bad enough that I had to start writing my own bolt-on spam classifier and moderation tools instead of manually deleting spammer accounts. Captchas didn't help because most of the spam was posted by actual humans, not autonomous bots.

In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.

[pixl97]

Yep, if you're on the internet long enough you'll remember the days before you were portscanned constantly. You'll remember the days before legions of bots hammered at your HTTP server. You'd remember it was rare to have some kiddie DDOS your server off the internet and you had to hide behind a 3rd party provider like cloudflare.

That internet is long dead, hence discussions like Dead Internet Theory.

[carapace]

My mom still has a land-line. She gets multiple calls a day, robots trying to steal an old lady's money. For this we invented the telephone? the transistor?

[pixl97]

Honestly the internet has a lot to do with this problem too, stealing VOIP accounts and spoofing caller ID has enabled a lot of this.