We get blasted by all kind of bots and chinese, indian, ...human spam bots.
Human spam bots? Are they human or are they bots? They succeed with the turing test at time of registration so they are likely human (or bots with human help)?
The amount of posts you need till you have free reign is rather low, so its just a bit annoying at the very beginning.
Good to know there is hope - still couldn't the limit be lowered? Because a ordinary spammer spams right from the start and will be directly banned without the spam even published - right? On the other hand if one posts like 3 times valuable/proper content he is likely a valid human fellow which doesn't need to be redistricted to just post every 2,400 seconds?
And it's really not just a "bit annoying" for new users - it really shoots two birds with one stone and contradicts participation as well discourage users to stay in this community. Even as I'm here for seeking help (packed with much more #censored#) I struggled shortly if I should register again at all as I remembered the (for me absurd) limitations this forum has in the year 2023.
Relying on users to flag spam doesn't work because when you present a shitty task to a large audience everyone hopes or assumes someone else will do it, with the result that nobody does it
A you certain about this? May I ask were you got this mileage from?
From what I know it's almost defaults to have the community doing the first level of moderation/flagging. It just needs to be "easy" enough (3 clicks no more). That combined with some standard anti-spam rules/protection which comes shipped by default with every modern community software and the spam (which is only handled by a handful of mods right now) shouldn't be anything but a big problem.
the staff/mod users (who are already doing it, and the people doing initial post approvals and the main responders to around 2/3 of the threads in the forum anyway
That's the (only?) good part indeed. But as the mods are human it's only logically as they do this repetitive and probably not to challenging "job" the brains get inventive and to have at least something (a little demanding) and not just approving posts like an AI could do they challenge themself in giving (the correct) answers. Like a gamification of a repetitive task to last longer doing it.
and it's a highly effective spam block
That might be true but it comes with high restrictions/limitations for (possible) new community members. Over blocking has lot's of negative side effects which mostly are invisible. Kind of a collateral damage.
And you pay nothing to get free software
I'm actually free software advocate and regulatory donate to FOSS projects - but yes, technically donating is not paying while both lower the amounts of $$$ on the bank account
Or to give free support 
Probably the most ordinary thing for open source projects is that the community helps the community - no?
Reminds me that I wanted to open a thread about the WIKI to add a warning about that Hyperion article and that it is outdated on only works till <=LE V9. As I can't make a new thread the next 2,400 seconds (annoying!) I just dropped it here (mods can probably just split the post and make a new thread out of it - thx!)
