What is the best way to control trolls and spammers without a profile system?

Question

How do you control a growing community without profile systems (i.e. so users can't be warned, kicked, or banned reliably)?

I am making a website that is slowly getting around our school, but I have a few people that love to spam and troll. The site doesn't have profiles for users because I don't have a server to host my website (I use a free website called Glitch to make it public) so I can't use PHP or Node.JS to make profiles.

Because of this, spammers and trolls go unchecked and I have no way to stop them. We do have the user-input usernames for the chat room and the multiplayer game in our site, but those are easily changeable since they are prompted to put in their username each time they go onto the game, and because of that we can't reliably stop them.

Answer 1

Even with a profile system, e.g. as Stack Exchange has, it's possible for trolls and spammers to post nasty content. It's one of the reasons we (Charcoal) developed a way to automatically flag spam posts but only after they are published.

Before we had that, we already got rid of spam quickly by hanging out in the chatroom and reacting to reports of potential spam (and we still do, in case the system isn't almost 100% sure it's spam). And many community members help too, just by flagging spam.

So if you have a community that's keen on keeping their yard clean, and the platform has some tooling to enable this, community moderation might work for you. If it's possible, you can let trusted users delete problematic content by themselves (instead of requiring more than one 'flag', as here on Stack Exchange) - the downside of this might be that it could be abused for censorship or other forms of harassment.

There might be other technical solutions, e.g. blocking certain IP addresses, but those are easily circumvented with VPNs (and not really on-topic for Community Building anyway).