(Photo: WhiteHouse.gov)

After a slew of stupid petitions cluttered the White House's official petition platform We the People, the administration has decided to raise the bar for the amount of signatures required to elicit a White House response. Now, instead of 25,000 signatures (a number easily attainable by Redditors and 4chan enthusiasts), a petition will require 100,000 signatures in order to garner a response.

The White House is too polite to admit that this is largely because they had to take time to write a response to a petition about building a Death Star, and instead argues that We the People has seen explosive growth recently, and it makes sense to raise the signature bar accordingly:

"In the last two months of 2012, use of We the People more than doubled. In just that time roughly 2.4 million new users joined the system, 73,000 petitions were created and 4.9 million signatures were registered....Most petitions that crossed the threshold collected 25,000 signatures within five days of their creation. More than 60 percent of the petitions to cross threshold in all of 2012 did so in the last two months of the year."

This isn't the first time the White House has upped the ante: previously they raised the signature requirement from 5,000 to 25,000.

Our sincerest condolences to Pokemon enthusiasts.