Hi!
Firstly, I'm sorry to bring up a topic once again, that has been on the forums probably over 9000 times.
Recently, there were a few outbreaks of adbot registration and adspam in threads. Knowing the advancements of web development tools available to the general public including script kiddies, I would once again like to recommend the compulsory use of CAPTCHA for registration. That would be a great deterrent to automated registration, and less work for the moderation staff, enabling them to focus more on user experience.
Also, the servers must be expensive with the current loads, as more and more nations register, consuming bandwidth, CPUs and hard drive space. To augment the existing advertisement and microtransaction based financing, I would also like to suggest implementing an SSO technology, like the now-populat Facebook connect. Facebook is the largest advertisement database (next to Google) known to man. Most users tend to blindly agree with any app permissions, so NationStates can use Facebook Connect to analyze the user's page information and showing them personalized ads (which users are more likely to click, thus bring more revenue), as well as passing on their facebook data to third parties for advertisement/market research purposes.
Before accusing me of being an advertiser myself, I'm not an employee of facebook, Inc.; Google Inc.; nor their affiliates or an advertiser company. I just know we live in a capitalist world.