Registration Discussion

[Flagg]

I've got nothing but free time so I'd be happy to suck up volunteer for this too.

[Hotfoot]

Is it working now?

Edit: Smilies still won't work, not that I'm particularily choked up about it. And I think I know what I did now in any case.

Give the word and I can turn those both back on for you for those two posts. You had "disable BBCode" and "Disable Smilies" set up on your posts.

[The Romulan Republic]

Is it working now? :?:

Edit: Smilies still won't work, not that I'm particularily choked up about it. And I think I know what I did now in any case.

Give the word and I can turn those both back on for you for those two posts. You had "disable BBCode" and "Disable Smilies" set up on your posts.

Sure, thanks.

[Coyote]

How about:

- A $1 registration fee for new members-- just enough so that someone has to enter a name on an account that can be traced. Now their username may be "haxor the indomitable" but somewhere we know their Bill Fudpucker that paid with account #123456789.

- Crippled accounts (no 'start thread' ability; no 'post pictures' ability except in AMP) until, what, 500 posts?

[Bounty]

How about:

- A $1 registration fee for new members-- just enough so that someone has to enter a name on an account that can be traced. Now their username may be "haxor the indomitable" but somewhere we know their Bill Fudpucker that paid with account #123456789.

- Crippled accounts (no 'start thread' ability; no 'post pictures' ability except in AMP) until, what, 500 posts?

#1 is going to put a lot of people off from joining simply because of the hassle of paying (yes, I know it's just a click with Paypal - but not everybody has Paypal). Besides, what will this achieve that registering with an educational or ISP address can't?

#2 is simply going to encourage spamming and low-content posts. In any case, a limit of 500 is excessive, and punishes those new members who post sporadic, high-quality posts in favour of zero-content spammers.

Again, the old system seemed to work fine apart from the workload, and that can be alleviated with software tweaks and delegation. I don't see the need to come up with new, even more complex means of trying to weed out the spammers 'automatically'; it can't be done, it won't be done, and any attempt to do it will lead to what happened last night. The only registration system that's guaranteed to weed out at least a majority of trolls is one with human oversight.

[Edi]

Paid ISP and/or educational institution email accounts only and manual approval, while a hassle to do, can be done fairly easily and serves for the time being.

[The Jester]

Does the board software support automatic filtering of new posts like how a spam filter works? If so, then it's possible to automatically flag (or purge) new posts which are suspicious.

EDIT: Actually if the board does allow for this option, then I believe it would be very effective. Simple checks such as post count, message length, join date, previous post time, contains URL, contains image will probably very effective in filtering out invaders.

[Coyote]

If there is going to be an arbitrary post floor, I'd say make it 50 posts - matches up with the transition from Redshirt to whatever is after it.

Makes sense.

Newbies starting new threads is the whole reason they exist. A newbie's purpose in life is to kickstart a discussion that the rest of us wouldn't start (maybe because we've seen a similar variation before years ago or the thought just never crossed our old minds) so the smart posters can come in and contribute substance in the following debate...

Ray245. Case closed.

[Lord Revan]

what I think cripping new accounts should be limited is, no images on posts, no links on posts (and maybe no avatar and/or sig) make those something you need to earn.

and yeah 50 posts as a limit sounds good but anything above 100 is just exessive.

[Invictus ChiKen]

That does sound like it would work. This Plebe supports it!

[Thanas]

To be honest, I do not see the need for taking extreme steps. A few idiots tried to trash the board, they were caught and banned in short order. End of story.

[Bounty]

To be honest, I do not see the need for taking extreme steps. A few idiots tried to trash the board, they were caught and banned in short order. End of story.

Child pornography gets plastered all over the board and you think this doesn't show a severe failing of automated registrations?

[Formless]

To be honest, I do not see the need for taking extreme steps. A few idiots tried to trash the board, they were caught and banned in short order. End of story.

Child pornography gets plastered all over the board and you think this doesn't show a severe failing of automated registrations?

It does, but I think it also shows that giving the mods the ban was a good idea. If this had happened when we had stricter registration, but mods couldn't ban the stupid fucks, their invasion might have lasted longer an taken longer to clean up.

[Thanas]

^What an excellent way to read my post. EDIT: directed at Bounty.

No, what I am saying is that the mod team did their job and dealt with the infestation rather quickly. I await your argument that somehow, one invasion (which was the only one for five years, mind) does not merit going back to creating so much work for the mods with regards to individually checking every new email.

Especially since the invasion failed to do much damage to the board at all. As someone else mentioned, they did not even succeed in pushing back any topics beyond the second page.

[Bounty]

I await your argument that somehow, one invasion (which was the only one for five years, mind) does not merit going back to creating so much work for the mods with regards to individually checking every new email.

Despite that sentence making no grammatical sense, I'll give it a try:

If applications were still manually checked, this invasion would not have worked since all but one of the participants wouldn't have gotten past the registration stage.

Thanks to the (very, very new) automated registration system, someone could register with "anonlulz" and post kiddie porn.

This is a bad thing.

Is any of this particularly hard to understand?

The extra workload is the only point against manual verification, and at least five people here have volunteered solutions to make it manageable.

Especially since the invasion failed to do much damage to the board at all.

You have a peculiar idea of "damage" then.

[Formless]

Question: in any of the boards previous invasions, has child pron ever been used as a weapon of the trolls? I think the issue that bounty is trying to get at is that the fact that it was CP meant that it inherently could have dealt more damage by nature than mere spamming. But again, this could be moot if previous invaders did indeed use child pron.

[Rogue 9]

Rather than count them out, I'd brace for the weekend. But if moderation efforts continue to be as effective as they've been and the populace by and large continues to not publicly react, they'll get bored and move on soon enough.

[Thanas]

I await your argument that somehow, one invasion (which was the only one for five years, mind) does not merit going back to creating so much work for the mods with regards to individually checking every new email.

Despite that sentence making no grammatical sense, I'll give it a try:

If applications were still manually checked, this invasion would not have worked since all but one of the participants wouldn't have gotten past the registration stage.

Thanks to the (very, very new) automated registration system, someone could register with "anonlulz" and post kiddie porn.

This is a bad thing.

Is any of this particularly hard to understand?

Of course it is not. That was not my point, but thanks for explaining it anyway.

The extra workload is the only point against manual verification, and at least five people here have volunteered solutions to make it manageable.

Congrats. Now, do you propose we promote those five to admins? Or do you suggest a bureaucratic model with people getting the email addresses to check them out and report back? (which would still force the admins to do extra work by reading the reports and acting upon them). I see a huge problem with "outsourcing" such tasks.

Especially since the invasion failed to do much damage to the board at all.

You have a peculiar idea of "damage" then.

When it comes to board invasions? Yeah, I guess I do. The damage was contained and eliminated within a few hours, thanks to the efforts of the mods. No threads or posts by regular members had to be deleted in order to do so. That should be sufficient proof that the current system works when it comes to the role of dealing with those trolls.

Manual registration would keep out obvious trolls like "anonlulz" but what about trolls like "Raoul Duke Jr"? Or trolls with foreign freemail providers? Manual registration is not the tool to end all troll problems. And now board policy is supposed to be changed after one invasion in five years?

Why don't we all sit back, take a breather and revisit this topic in a few weeks in order to determine if this was at all necessary?

[Edi]

Rather than count them out, I'd brace for the weekend. But if moderation efforts continue to be as effective as they've been and the populace by and large continues to not publicly react, they'll get bored and move on soon enough.

Missed the part where GR said registration's been disabled, didn't you?

[Havok]

Why don't we all sit back, take a breather and revisit this topic in a few weeks in order to determine if this was at all necessary?

Wait... WHAT?
Thanas, what is this LUNACY you speak of? Let cooler heads prevail?! DON'T FREAK OUT?!?! Such nonsense.

[CmdrWilkens]

Echoing Thanas' point this was the first concerted attempt to invade the board in quite some time and so it bears note that:

1) By all indications we likely have time to come up with any changes that may be neccessarry

2) Going back to manual approval will not neccessarily weed this out, as he poitned out it will catch obvious names but the more creative types in a true invasion will still be able to appear genuine, all an invasion would require is some patience

3) Limiting posting abilities for new joins (either image posting restrictions, new topic restrictions, whatever) would be a far better path AND, since it would be automated, keeps the workload down.

4) That said as with point #1 above there is no need to act now so I think it best if we continue to mull this over for a while.

[RedImperator]

To be fair, we don't know if there were any invasion attempts in the long period where we had admin-approved registration. Anyone signing up with a throwaway email never got through the front gate.

[Rogue 9]

Rather than count them out, I'd brace for the weekend. But if moderation efforts continue to be as effective as they've been and the populace by and large continues to not publicly react, they'll get bored and move on soon enough.

Missed the part where GR said registration's been disabled, didn't you?

No, but I'm not discounting sleeper accounts.

[Bounty]

2) Going back to manual approval will not neccessarily weed this out, as he poitned out it will catch obvious names but the more creative types in a true invasion will still be able to appear genuine, all an invasion would require is some patience

Precisely.

Your average /b/tard isn't patient. Quick, automated approval just makes the board an easier target. Keeping this broken system in place is going to do nothing except keep the door wide open for an encore, and crippling new posters is going to turn off fresh blood (really, no topic creation? We want new members to just +1?).

I'm not so thick as to think manual approval is going to work 100%. I'm just noticing that the automated registrations are barely in place and we get this mess.

[Edi]

Manual approval didn't keep all trolls out, but it certainly made eliminating any that got through quick and easy. With the old system, only people with verifiably paid for ISP accounts or other similar got through, because despite what some people here may think, checking those was easy. Foreign freemail or not. That meant that anyone who did sign up was traceable in real life if any investigation was ever necessary, which would prevent anyone but the stupidest fuckers from trying to pull shit like the /b/tards did.

Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but Bounty, just shut the fuck up. For a large part you have no idea what you're talking about and you look like a hyperventilating moron and therefore I'm going to treat you like one if you keep this up.

If someone has actual technical knowledge on how to implement something on the board to make things easier, by all means share it. If someone has other workable ideas that are something different than "Go back to the old system", by all means share them. But as new regs are currently disabled, running around like a chicken with its head cut off is not going to do anything but irritate people. Aside from that, we have yet to hear from the admins and from Mike on how we're going to proceed. Patience.