Right. My concern is that anyone who's aware of the policy and bored or disgruntled enough to bother could easily reenable spam submissions by upvoting any of the existing posts.
Although I suppose that might not be an issue if they're scrubbed effectively enough from the site.
Even a small karma requirement seems like it would be better than no karma requirement at all. Spam and trolling aren't quite the same thing.
Spam (curiously enough, always for jewelry) accounts for maybe two-thirds of what comes through the LW Discussion area's RSS feed these days. So although the moderators have been doing a great job of quickly removing it from the site itself, it remains a substantial annoyance for those of us who keep track of LW through a feed.
I think it's time to revisit the possibility of making it harder for people to post in the discussion area. Clearly it would suffice to limit posting privileges to those who have a positive karma balance. If that seems too draconian, as it did to some people in the previous thread, it would probably be enough to limit posting privileges to those who have ever received a single upvote on any comment they have ever posted.
Would any administrator care to undertake this? If so, many thanks.
(My apologies if an unfinished version of this post briefly appeared on the site some hours ago.)