Yes, spam across the internet has been ticking up in general, plus we've gotten onto a few lists of "this is a good place to spam" because it's been a few years since we've gone over the technical ways that we can make it harder for spammers to benefit from their spam and make ourselves slightly less of a soft target. Some of those technical methods can make things more annoying for certain legitimate users, so we're hesitant to lean too hard into those[1], but changing what you can do on the site before you confirm your email address is a pretty low-hassle change; we just wanted to warn y'all ahead of time before we started going too hard on making life difficult for unconfirmed accounts, because I know there's a lot of people who have a ton of RP accounts and may not have confirmed all of them.
[1] For instance, the people who are having trouble using DW from certain VPN networks are victims of this: 99% of spam comes from VPN services that are really lax about getting rid of spammers, people who are running DDoS networks, and people who are engaged in high-traffic security "testing" to try to find websites that have security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, plenty of our users are using VPNs for privacy or personal security purposes, or to route around state-sponsored censorship, so we can't just shut off all VPN access entirely. So we're trying to thread the needle of just blocking the really awful VPN services that don't police their networks without blocking the ones that our users are using, but sometimes we don't even have a choice about whether or not we can block that traffic, our host is doing it for us. tl;dr: this shit is complicated and it takes way too much of our effort to deal with it and when I'm Empress of the Known Universe, spamming will be a hanging offense.
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[1] For instance, the people who are having trouble using DW from certain VPN networks are victims of this: 99% of spam comes from VPN services that are really lax about getting rid of spammers, people who are running DDoS networks, and people who are engaged in high-traffic security "testing" to try to find websites that have security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, plenty of our users are using VPNs for privacy or personal security purposes, or to route around state-sponsored censorship, so we can't just shut off all VPN access entirely. So we're trying to thread the needle of just blocking the really awful VPN services that don't police their networks without blocking the ones that our users are using, but sometimes we don't even have a choice about whether or not we can block that traffic, our host is doing it for us. tl;dr: this shit is complicated and it takes way too much of our effort to deal with it and when I'm Empress of the Known Universe, spamming will be a hanging offense.