The menace of new accounts
lkcl writes some advice on creating new accounts that would, if followed, save legitimate accounts from being deleted, and certs jbaker up to apprentice.

ncm summarises the spammer menace:

My experience is that the account deletion threshold is set so (artificially) high that the only way to get a spammer account deleted is to mark them down as spammers unless it's dead clear they're not. Even then lots of fake accounts get through. Mostly the real spammers don't start spamming immediately; they appear to be accumulating fake accounts and holding them in reserve.

Well, fair enough, this shoot first, ask questions later approach will certainly reduce the conceivable possibilities for spammers to abuse Advogato, but it's not how the spam rating feature was meant to be used, and the history of Advogato has been to apply fixes, rarely needed, when problems actually emerge.

You're advocating aggressively marking accounts as spam without articulating a clear threat to Advogato: what are spammers going to do with their arsenal of cert-juiceless accounts? I'm bothered that it makes Advogato less friendly to neophyte developers without serving any useful purpose.