@sam Just to follow up after more field testing, I believe that the previous implementation that was reverted is definitely much more effective against motivated spammers. I’m still getting a significant amount of registrations using these permuted gmail tricks.
I’m very grateful that the current protection was implemented, which is very effective. However I think it’s a bit of a hole to allow unlimited accounts to be created using the same email until they are specifically noticed and manually banned. It is more burden on moderators (who can’t see account emails by default unless enabled I believe), especially in the absence of bulk account removal tools (e.g. select several accounts from the accounts/search list with checkboxes and ban/remove them all). Which means a moderator will need to manually navigate to each individual account to remove/ban them. That is especially difficult when searching for accounts with permuted emails.
Seeing the previous implementation was optional (off by default), has already been developed and worked as intended, then removed. It just seems a shame that it’s not available anymore for communities that would want to use it for additional anti-spam protection against motivated spammers.
