Suggestion: Waiting period for new members to create new threads

[AZGolf]

It seems like every evening/night on TCL there's 3-5 spam threads created. Not replies to existing threads, but actual new threads created by bozos either trying to sell credit card skimmers, 50,000,000 acres of real estate (even I had to click that one for a laugh) or Ron Paul campaigning like I saw tonight.

VMG is in the business of selling advertising space on threads that get clicked. People only enjoy using a forum and clicking on threads to read when the content is good. While moderation on TCL is top notch, a spam thread is poison to the content of a forum to a far higher degree than a mere spam reply within an otherwise high quality thread.

You can always skip over a spam reply in a good thread, but getting sucked into reading a thread with a misleading title and finding out after you clicked on it that it's spam seriously degrades the experience. It makes me want to stop browsing TCL, which means no more ad impressions, which means lost ad revenue for VMG. Lost revenue can lead to the website going under and we can all agree that would be bad.

Easy solution: Don't let anyone create a new thread until 30 days and 10 replies to existing threads have passed.

Result: Quality improves, the experience is enjoyable, and VMG keeps making money, preventing depression among car enthusiasts nationwide.

[Tim@VMG]

All of your concerns are valid and noted, but our take on it is that we want the forums to be free and easy for everyone to use.

Think about it this way: whenever I go to other forums, if there is a waiting period or a post requirement to do something I want to do, I skip using that forum and move on to somewhere else. We don't want people to do that here, as we want everyone to feel welcome. The unfortunate consequence of that is that sometimes it's easier for spammers to do their work, but it's also actually pretty easy for our moderators to clean up after them, so we choose to go that route. We're sorry that it means that sometimes there are spam threads around, but is it really that big a deal if now and then there's a thread that you just don't read?

-Tim

[BRealistic]

Is there a way for the software to auto-lock a thread if say ten people report the original post?

And please add a sticky at the top of The Car Lounge (the one that seems to get the most traffic and thus spammer/scammer traffic) that explains how posting to a scammer/spammer thread just keeps it around (on main page) longer.
The proper thing to do is report and ignore.