Flamebate Fodder used to be based purely on thread replies. The same character could not post twice in a row, but as long as replies were alternated it would count. It was changed after several members of Knights of LOL made scripts to auto reply to each other in klan threads. By the time the 4th person did it, the number of posts needed had been run up into the thousands.

The change to one post per character and not including “in klan” posts might be publicly annoying, but seems far more fair.

Same thing sort of happened for the popularity peen. At the time Bigguyinblack had it pretty solidly locked at 1000 friends. A couple of players decided to script friends request via player ID numbers. Not sure if it was coordinated or a coincidence that both decided to do it at the same time, but both ended up asking ET to cancel all their outstanding requests when the method was changed.

The request spamming is actually considerably lower since the change.