"Rate My Startup" Post Policy

"Rate My Startup" posts have increased dramatically in the last couple months, to the point where spammers started to post links with "Rate My Startup" prepended. Obviously we can't just allow any newly-created account to post a link to any site, no matter how offtopic it would otherwise be, with the claim that it's their startup (or weekend project, or whatever). And yet I would not want to ban RMS posts entirely. We need some way to separate legit ones, and it seems like the simplest policy is to allow them from established accounts but not newly created ones.

I'd been planning to consider ways to embody this in the software, maybe with a new type of item that (like polls) had a karma threshold, but I've been postponing dealing with it till I was done reading YC applications. In the meantime for the past several weeks I've been killing RMS posts that weren't from established accounts.

I really need to get back to reviewing applications, since today is the last day. In a couple days I'll revisit the matter.

I can definitely imagine lurkers creating accounts to show off their latest project, so auto-killing posts from newly created accounts doesn't seem like the best way.

Perhaps make it policy that all RMS submissions be text submissions explaining the idea to give it a bit of authenticity, and every RMS submission with a link in the title be auto-killed. I don't imagine spammers would go through the effort of writing out a description of their service, asking for feedback, etc. Also, adjusting the flag threshold to 5 on text submissions could help. People tend to be more accepting and less likely to flag text submissions because the chances of them being spam are less likely (due to a higher degree of effort put into them as opposed to linking to some affiliate site), so a reduced flagging threshold might get rid of those submissions more quickly.

What constitutes an established account? I rarely comment on posts but have had an account for 2.5+ years and regularly upvote posts and comments. Is my account "established"?

Is this a request for input?

I personally haven't come across any "rate my start-up" posts I'd considered spammy, but maybe that's because the measures that are currently being taking have been effective (marking as dead, lack of upvotes for spammy posts). Mostly I've only seen that kind of spam in comments.

As for RMS posts in general, I really enjoy seeing what other people have done. So I would be opposed to an outright or unnecessarily restrictive ban.

I'd rather see a fairly low karma and a few weeks or months account age thresholds, but then I'm biased, being mostly a lurker here.