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Gettin' all Herodotean up in here!
Posted by: Zealot Tony
You used the word "sometimes" which would mean that implementing this feature would be targeted at the minority who post above X limit for the purposes of spamming.
The idea here is to post freely within the rules as much as to ones content; limiting posts draws away from this idea (and we have already been restricted in terms of creating threads and waiting a small amount of time between two posts).
You most likely wouldn't even be able to prevent the problem. Finding the aforementioned X is pointless; as all you need is a few posts to allow for noticeable spam, and even then there is nothing stopping someone from safely switching accounts and allowing the problem to occur again and again in a simple cycle.
This. People who want to spam will always circumvent a spam filter in some way, and the only people who would actually suffer are the people who are actually trying to contribute. You'd be better off giving the mods the power to institute individual post limits, but even then, why would you? They've already got the banhammer at their disposal, and if someone is blatantly spamming, they've violated the terms of use and rightfully should be banned.
Putting a post limit on these people would be like giving them a ticket for not having functional brake lights after they just intentionally ran down a pack of school children on the sidewalk. You're policing the minor crime, it's a wrist slap when they obviously can and should get prison time, and a forum-wide post limit would be detrimental to the people who actually contribute rather than the people who spam.
The spammers wouldn't care; they'd hit the limit and leave until tomorrow. But if I'm in the middle of a particularly satisfying debate with someone and I hit a post limit, I'm going to be pissed. What, just because SOME members do annoying stuff I'm supposed to remember everything I was going to say and wait until tomorrow? It punishes the people who are behaving and doesn't really do much to the people who are breaking the rules.