Dear WSO - the spam is truly getting out of hand. From both "sides" it's starting to get ridiculous and frankly suspicious.

I have seen easily half a dozen posts in the last week where some random new account that's <24 hours old is posting about how right-wing/hateful/bigoted/racist WSO is while simultaneously seeing dozens of other new accounts with cringe edge lord names like KKKing69 pop up and start commenting/posting genuinely heinous trash with no attempt at starting a conversation, instead aiming for shock value. It's really bothersome seeing how that's able to derail conversations on some topics and frankly could start to reflect badly on WSO to anyone browsing Off Topic. It's also a bit suspicious just how many new accounts are highlighting other new accounts and how quickly they do so...

I like to think 9/10 times I'm the free speech guy. I'm not saying that we should start banning certain conversation topics or anything like that. But I do think there is a serious argument to be made for reducing the spam by there being either a Banana requirement or an account age limit of like 6-9 months (maybe both?) implemented to be able to comment or post in Off Topic.

There are tons of younger kids in HS/Uni who use this site as a valuable resource - I was one of them - but with that comes the opportunity for some immature trolling which is what it kind of feels like we're going through lately. It's made all the sweeter for the troll because they're not juts messing with run of the mill randos on Reddit, they're messing around with people who work in "finance". To be frank, I think it makes sense to have new users stick to the professional forums for a while and prove that they can have some other degree of contribution to discussions elsewhere before being able to just post about whatever pops off the top of their head. In my opinion it might even end up bettering the overall discussion content for the Off Topic forum and encourage greater contributions on the other forums to drive traffic for people who want to be able to participate in conversations here. 

Separate but tangentially related, as some other senior users have mentioned a block or mute feature would be freakin incredible. I have no doubt WSO already has stuff in the works, I just wanna put that out there.