This has been due to a very persistent spammer attacking the public network. Since adding policy servers (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/) as a way to preemptively block content and other measures (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/) things have improved at least in public rooms - assuming the admins enable policy servers. We sincerely apologise to everyone who has got exposed to this, and are continuing to improve the trust & safety apparatus in Matrix (although could really do with funding for the Foundation to help folks work on this as their day job).
It's been a while, I vaguely recall something about credits or levels or karma points or something, was this a matrix setting?
For my matrix rooms I really want a default karma = 100 to be seen by others in the room,
people can adjust this higher or lower
Might be interesting to have an option for others to donate 20 karma to new people they know are cool or something.
I get it that that destroys the conversation for new people and new people are what many groups really want - but we could be transparent about it.
I have two spammers over the years that I spent many many hours blocking ip cidrs and such.. this was actually easier with the old RealChat program (simple right click by moderators) - not sure if that has gotten better in recent year or so.
A cool down for new users and making it so we stop multiple 'cool in / warn up' accounts from same subnet would be nice too.
