Prevent meaningless messsages and threads that only contain hi or alternatives for hi

Please block the posting of new topics and messages that only contain "Hi", "Hey", "Hello," "Hallo" and similar greetings or repetitions of these greetings. These messages needlessly bump old threads, add no meaning to active threads and don't add anything meaningful to any topic. These messages are posted just to get the participant achievement, at the cost of polluting the forums with nonsense.

See for example the effect that such messages have on the main view of forum topics, where a thread containing just "Hi" is at the top of the Endgame Study forum:

It’s a good proposal

Alternatively, remove the incentive for this behavior by removing the participant and conversation starter awards.

Or both!

True. Though I doubt people would stop, because for e.g. the social butterfly award was removed a long time back but people still post threads asking people to friend them so they get the award.

aye

I guess I disagree. Many people posting here are young and inexperienced or may not speak English. Their “hi” may be their first attempt at participating in the community.

If I see that they posted “hi” in a bunch of threads, I would attempt to discourage it.

ii

How exactly would you discourage it? Because those "hi"s are a real pest.

Moderators can warn users about spamming and mute them if they do not respect the warning.

The moderators don't catch every instance of spamming. I'm even under the impression that reporting it doesn't help, because I did that a few times.

Below is an example of the effect of spamming from 1 May:

Ok

That's good

Of course we don't catch them all. There are 250 million members.

But I think that that what we do does help.

Now we are trolled by a guy who started a "hi" spam thread...

just ignore the idiot - that's it