There has been a recent plague of flakes at best, and trolls at worst. New accounts (or fairly new accounts), or ones with a very low post count coming on and posting Recruitment threads, coaxing everyone to post and build characters for about a week, and then disappearing. A certain poster seems to be connected to a lot of these, claiming to be a "friend of the GM" a lot of the time before the GM mysteriously vanishes, but I'm hesitant to call him out directly in case it is a coincidence. Though it's a coincidence that's happened about three times now.
Either way, I think the forum would benefit from some kind of limiter. Maybe an account has to be at least a month old and have 150 posts to create a Recruitment thread. As-is quite a few people have wasted many applicants' time and energy with a good concept for a game they seem to have no intention of following through with. Requiring the accounts to have a not insignificant amount of investment in the forum before they troll or abandon it seems like it would curb this tendency.
There's one person behind a lot of the recent recruitment threads, I think. S/he's been posting recruitment threads and disappearing for awhile now, even before the recent crop of gestalt game recruitments. I'm about 90% sure it is the same person. Many threads have a very similar writing style, similar rules, often have a friend involved in the recruitment process in some way (who I suspect may be the same person as the recruiter), have periods of disappearance followed up by an excuse (bad car accident, internet outage due to storm, sudden deployment overseas), followed by a final disappearance, before or at the beginning of gameplay.
I for one hate avatar bloat, and am now saddled with one avatar because I posted the 10+ times in the game's discussion thread that I was accepted into before the GM disappeared for the last time.
I'll happily PM a mod some of the threads that I think are from a related poster. S/he has wasted a lot of peoples' time and energy, repeatedly, over a period of months (if I am correct).
Perhaps it is possible for Paizo to track an IP address and ban that IP address rather than instituting some sort of limiter that could hurt new sales and/or participation in the hobby? I mean, they do this for theft of IP, right?
Please email community@paizo.com if you have any concerns like this.