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We (SE, in general) get dozens of spam/bad answers almost every day. In particular, I'm interested in the ones from bots.

Would it be worthwhile to require some minor limitation to post answers?

I'm thinking something extremely minimal, such as requiring the Informed badge, and/or 2-5 rep. The Informed badge could grant a single rep point, if that's easier to code for.

Theoretically, this wouldn't put any additional burden on querents. And answerers (word?) SHOULD have done the tour, imo, regardless of spam bots.

I have looked over the following questions and feel that this is not a duplicate:

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    Good idea, but in practice, wouldn't help. New users would just scroll to the bottom, or perform the action required to register completion, and get on with their problem. Only rarely would they perform the task requested of them. – fbueckert Jan 11 at 17:09
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    @fbueckert which is why I said I was mostly concerned with bots, not lazy users ;-) – goodguy5 Jan 11 at 17:10
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    And bots will be programmed to do exactly that, as well. – fbueckert Jan 11 at 17:10
  • The way to keep out bots is a captcha, not telling them to visit a page. Captchas already exist, by the way. – Servy Jan 11 at 17:11
  • @Servy Do we have some sort of low-rep captcha requirement? Because I'd also support that. – goodguy5 Jan 11 at 17:12
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    @goodguy5 Why don't you do some research and find out? – Servy Jan 11 at 17:13
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    @Servy because this is a Q&A site not a lets all repeat tasks that other people have done and can tell us the results of rather than asking them & keep it to ourselves site (LARTTOPHDACTUTRORTAT&KITO site). – RyanfaeScotland Jan 11 at 17:16
  • @Servy I've been working on it for about 5 minutes, but it's harder than it seems. I only have the one email address... – goodguy5 Jan 11 at 17:16
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    @RyanfaeScotland LARTTOPHDACTUTRORTAT.stackexchange incoming – goodguy5 Jan 11 at 17:18
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    @RyanfaeScotland Just because this is a QA site doesn't mean every single question is on topic. Questions are expected to be well researched. We don't want people just repeatedly asking the same questions over and over again. Repeating readily accessible information isn't useful. If doing a simple search of your question is too much of a bother to get one's answer, then apparently the question wasn't really that important. – Servy Jan 11 at 17:19
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    @goodguy5 All you had to do was search on "captcha" if you wanted to know if SE has any form of captcha for posting answers. If that's too much research for you, then apparently whatever research you did was not enough to be "well researched". – Servy Jan 11 at 17:23
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    But he didn't want to know about captcha. It's all good and well telling someone all they had to do is search for this specific technology that is already in place to do what they are aiming to do AFTER they've been told of the term, but how are they meant to perform that search before hand? @Servy – RyanfaeScotland Jan 11 at 17:30
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    And besides, if the captcha already is in place goodguy5 clearly feels it's not working well enough (as we can tell from this question existing) which makes the question valid regardless if captcha is there or not. – RyanfaeScotland Jan 11 at 17:31
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    @RyanfaeScotland They literally asked me whether or not SE has a captcha. The question was, "Do we have some sort of low-rep captcha requirement?" – Servy Jan 11 at 17:36
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    Aww man, you expect people to research for questions in comments as well... – RyanfaeScotland Jan 11 at 17:40
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No, we shouldn't. There have been lots of users who have been able to post Good first Answers without reading the tour first, as this SEDE query demonstrates.

enter image description here

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Stack Exchange is built to allow everyone to contribute. If we started requiring new users to gain some reputation before answering, there would probably be a large drop in new user participation, partly because answering is one of the 3 main ways for new users to earn reputation (along with asking and editing).

Requiring users to read the tour page would not help. To get the Informed badge, you can scroll through the entire tour page without reading a word of it. New users are already encouraged to read the tour page because the first inbox message you ever get is linked to the tour page. Forcing them to before answering would not help matters.

And anyway, new users already have their first few posts reviewed through the First Posts and Late Answers review queues in order to help them learn how to use Stack Exchange.

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