Maybe have a special tag that you can add to the text for info that you only want karma users of a certain level or higher to be able to see -- ex. (karma>300)[Contact me at my@email.com], or instead of direct numbers, target people that are able to downvote, or have a moderate level of karma. People would post a link to the recruitment page/job description page on their website for all other users, which would hopefully work at deterring spammers from contacting them personally.
I think something like this would help you focus your recruitment efforts on those who have at least contributed to the community in some way, which should filter out people spamming every single email in the thread.
Another idea is to mask emails with a craigslist-like mailing address, which would give the end-user the ability to report an email as spam, and therefore tie that email to the offending party's hacker news account.
Edit: What I mean is that each hacker news account would see the email address as a different one, so when they emailed that account it uniquely identifies the account that originally viewed that email address. So, Spammer A sees Poster B's email address as hn-49384932842@ycombinator.com, and Legitimate Candidate C sees Poster B's address as hn-4494838943842@ycombinator.com. When either one emails that address, if Poster B reports the email as spam, and if enough reports accumulate, the HN account sending the spam can be docked karma and lower them below the threshold allowed to view further posts.
Nothing. HN is not a job board. Whatever you do to squelch recruiter spam on "Who's Hiring" threads is bound to have unintended consequences. Meanwhile: if the big problem is that recruiters use job posts as spam targets, everyone who posts an ad can come up with their own solution (if it's karma-locked, it can just be "mail your HN username here") and the best one will spread.
I'm open to that in this case, though in general people tend to object to karma requirements.
The Who Is Hiring threads belong to this community. If something needs to be done to protect them for the community, we'll do it. But we'd ideally like to see a consensus emerge.
We should probably discuss this in a separate thread (and probably not today, as I'm about to be traveling). And I feel bad for taking a Show HN further off-topic, so will mark this subthread as such (which lowers it), even though it's obviously an important question.
There is little correlation between the domain of a submission and the amount of points it receives on average. (The exception is the more niche posts by more renowned programmers)
The stories don't have to be popular to generate karma, as long as the domains are some articles will get karma from other people submitting the same links and manual upvotes too. Yesterday someone autosubmitted everything a dozen big tech sites published and got 100 - 200 karma without hitting the front page.
