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While I'm sure this isn't the norm, I'm also confident it's not an isolated example:

Looking for a film about a youth who gets cut off from his family and goes off to Italy

This question was asked by an unregistered user with 1 rep point and no information in their profile.

Obviously, it was some juvenile getting their ya-ya's about being able to post a swear word on a website. Although on a site with little traffic (maybe 10 questions a day), just one is a small bother but it can quickly escalate into a bigger hassle.

Is there some check in place that minimizes this type of activity? If not, could we have some minimum requirement for posting, such as requiring the user to achieve an Informed badge? I mean, it's a good badge to have and it's easy to get, and it might just dissuade some rogue punk who thinks it's fun to post profanity just for the sake of posting it.

If someone really has a question, I don't think that requirement is going to make them run to another site.

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  • 1
    Also this question
    – Andy
    Mar 12, 2015 at 15:59
  • as far as I know, asker's registration can be turned on per-site, when there is strong enough desire of site community regulars, eg per meta discussion (example at Prog.SE meta). FWIW, it's safer to not expect wonders after getting it at your site (follow-up overview at Prog.SE meta)
    – gnat
    Mar 12, 2015 at 20:10
  • ...an interesting option to consider is to force new users to go through How To Ask page; they say that Server Fault has this. If you're interested, consider checking at SF meta how it worked for them
    – gnat
    Mar 12, 2015 at 21:12

2 Answers 2

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Making users jump through hoops doesn't help much in increasing quality. Requiring the informed badge wouldn't mean that all those new users would suddenly read the whole tour. It would just filter out anyone that can't be bothered to scroll to the bottom of that page.

Some sites require registration, but from what SE employees have said about this it didn't do much to increase quality. You could ask SE to have registration required on your site, but I doubt they would agree that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages in this case.

In cases of users trolling or vandalizing the site, there are some pretty powerful tools available to moderators, triggered by the destruction of spammer or troll accounts.

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At the time of this answer, 245,692 Stack Overflow users have been awarded the "Informed" badge, but there are roughly 3,734,700 users. This shows how few people actually read the "Tour" page (~6.579%).

While not every user posts questions (some just answer), I am certain more than 6.579% of users have asked questions. If you are going to ask a question, you should read it.

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