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Do you define new arrivals as new accounts. It seems like a moderately competent spammer would look like a new spammer every time

I also think HN regulars are not the kind of the people that spammers could use... still it'd be pretty annoying during the period they learn that (the hard way)

Robots.txt

User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply? Disallow: /submitted? Disallow: /submitlink? Disallow: /threads?

One assumes that a core characteristic of spammers and spambots is that they ignore Robots.txt - or at least I would be extremely surprised if disallowing them in robots.txt has any effect.