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Posts
Anyone who migrates their account from PA to CoRe automatically becomes a full Member.
I'm reluctant to count reactions because I don't know enough about bots that I would not be surprised if it was super easy to make a bot that just spammed reactions. And even if not, even a hundred reactions wouldn't be hard, and it'd be reasonably easy to hide the spamminess by just browsing a "best of" or other type of "popular right now" type page.
for what it's worth, i proposed adding Accessibility onto the title and i had disabilities in mind as the purpose for including it
There's no point migrating since we're tossing our posts anyway. May as well start fresh.
Well, if you want to retain any of your PA info (username, join date, post count, status as a full Member), you migrate.
If you want to register a brand new name, you’re free to join up as a totally fresh account. Or you migrate to keep those benefits, but then just change your username.
this is news to me
Plus, if we're not accepting folks who aren't in good standing, how would people who self-banned in the last few months, whom I'm pretty sure have been mentioned as welcome to come back under CoRe if they feel comfortable doing so, actually do so?
Maybe just as an initial temporary thing, but presumably such a restriction would be measured in weeks if not days, not a long or even medium term choice?
I don't want to bring any of that. I could care less about stickers and post counts.
We're not moving the forums, we're making a new one.
It would be cool if I could still have an equal say as part of the new community.
Well, again, the easiest way is to just claim your PA username and you don’t have to carry over any of that other stuff. You’re free to change your username anytime you want, even immediately before or after the move.
There’s will be a manual approval/transfer process as well as a backstop, but I’d prefer to leave that for folks who have actual unavoidable technical issues with the registration process so that Delz doesn’t have to spend 2 weeks straight manually approving PA legacy users.
A self-banned user, if I'm not mistaken, can still come back and send/receive PMs, correct?
I should've been clearer when I was more referring to people who chose to have their accounts nuked, as presumably there is nothing left to log into in the first place for them.
Which is easily circumvented by simply creating a new account here for the verification process at some point in the next few months, among other routes, I suppose, assuming those people who self-selected out would be interested in choosing to return, of course.
Maybe this belongs in another document/thread, but "how will the private forums work" is also a bit unclear to me. Do they show up but show as "you can't read these until you are no longer a new user", or do they just suddenly appear 31 days after someone registered? Realistically speaking I don't think they'll be "secret" because all it takes is someone to post something like "...oh, yeah, I complained about that in the jobs thread as well..." in one of the public forums and now the existence of the jobs thread is public as well, even if the thread itself isn't.
(apologies if this is explained somewhere else)
That's correct, you have to become a full member before you can access the private forums. And really, they're more Private than Secret. We're not purposely keeping them a closely guarded secret at all. We just have them private to Members only to offer a little more protection from crawlers, scrapers, and drive-bys.
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
Instead, another idea is that the threshold for promotion to Member is 30 "Active Days".
How is that different?
Well, instead of an account getting registered on March 1st and automatically getting promoted to Member status on March 31st, an "Active Days" requirement means that the New Member would have to have 30 days where they logged in or loaded a page on the forums while logged in.
For lurkers and new users who actually participate or read the forums, this would feel pretty much the same. Maybe a few days longer if they don't load the site at least once a day, but not a huge imposition. For spammers and bad actors it would take an immense amount of commitment to manually cultivate their account for 30 days and would probably be enough of a burden that they'd just move on to easier targets.
Thoughts?
That entire private subforum group is simply not visible to you, basically, as if it didn't exist.
Maybe a bit more than a single page but I do like that idea much more than a simple timespan waiting period.
This seems like a much more effective gate to prevent crawler bots and malicious actors both. It would probably be easier to identify if someone amassing an astroturf bot voting pool as well, because the login behaviour would be weird, although the information for that is likely to be more difficult to find over time.
Is this '30 active days or 20 posts', or just '30 active days'? I kinda like the latter. Hell, I might even be tempted to drop the requirements to 20 active days. The marginal utility of the additional days seems a low value barrier; if someone's already logged in 19 additional times after registration, 10 more seems like an arbitrary barrier.
To be clear, this would eliminate the 20 posts option all together, as a few people have (validly) pointed out that this is trivial for a spammer or other flavor of asshole to knock out across a couple of busy threads with relative ease. And this would also make it friendlier to true lurkers who just like to read and rarely post.
Hmmm, this might be something we want to think on for like... awareness reasons?
Not a major concern, and kind of tangential to what we're talking about in this thread, but if we happen to get a true new member, someone who doesn't know the boards or know anyone on the boards, they might not realize that the private forums exist. Which could lead to stuff like someone creating threads that would fit better in a private subforum or similar elsewhere, without realizing that they're putting them in the wrong place because they don't have that visibility.
It's just a matter of making sure we have posts about it in a public place so that people know, and understanding that we might have the occasional mix-up or whatever.
That's a good point. Might be something solvable with a "You are a New Member. This is what that means: ______" message displayed to new members when they join, with a link explaining how Membership and private forums work.
Sure there are bad actors that will still login every 60 days and peruse the required number of pages to be considered active, but I figure that will be enough effort that the vast majority can't be bothered. Also might be easier to spot automation bullshit, if they have to visit a few pages anyways.
You'd probably want to add something in the rules forum too, so that they can still access it a couple weeks later after they've dismissed the notification and forgotten what it said.
I roll up to a new forum and I learn that I won't be allowed to read/post in half the threads for over two months
I'm probably not going to make an account in the first place, that sucks ass
I agree, at least having some kind of awareness for new members of what's gated behind the Private area would be nice.
There's a good cross section of most things in the public area. I would imagine that most "wait, why is that private?" from new people will be the Art stuff and anything that a new person wants to do that would go in Chat is gonna be of the "where do I post about ....?" variety. For the latter 30 days of activity is a decent compromise for enforced presence before you begin shitposting in the appropriate forum.
I very much doubt that there's more than a tiny handful of good-faith people that want to join up just to talk politics and current events.
I'm fine with a much lower threshold for actually accessing subforums.
My reasoning is that we definitely want to attract new members to the forum, including folks who may have fallen off PA a long time in the past and might not be able or willing to transfer their old user information.
I agree with Straightzi that a gated off section could be a deterrent to new recruits if it's for a long time.
Yeah, my tolerance for barriers goes as far as "I make an account, then I have to wait for an admin to click 'approve new account' in their admin UI somewhere before I can post", because that seems fair enough, but much more than that I'm not likely to bother, there are a lot of places online to talk about stuff, and while _we_ know that these forums are good, are they going to be so obviously good to random passers-by to convince them to keep on checking backj in for 30 days?
I've seen places where the "new account" page has a "prove you aren't a bot" field in there next to email address/etc, so I'll type in "I want to join this forum because I have questions about XYZ which you discuss here", or "I'm a fan of ABC so want to talk about it", or whatever. Sure, those can be answered by a malicious actor that wants to get in, but if someone is sufficiently keen to get in and do bad things, they'll jump through whatever hoops are necessary, those at least stop bots that automatically fill in forms. And I've seen forums where the new-member experience is "you can see the new-member forum, post there to say hello and then you can get at the rest", but I haven't seen anywhere that has this sort of "you must prove yourself worthy" criteria, even if "worthy" just means "willing to click on a page every day for 30 days".
I think the Transition Team (and a good deal of respondents within our initial survey) is really against any type of financial component being linked to any CoRe account.
Perhaps the more valuable thing you are doing is you are preventing immediate access from a bad actor. So, if someone gets banned and gets angry maybe they would normally create a bunch of alt accounts to troll/harass someone, but if they are forced to wait before they can even see posts or participate again, then maybe the cooling off period will prevent that from happening.
It's not completely worthless, but it is worth considering what the cost:benefit is to adding a delay. (People wrote entire thesis papers on the forum structure in terms of whether it would help juice incoming numbers but a waiting period is, by far, a much larger barrier to entry than any forum structure could ever hope to be.) What you really want to do is stop bots from creating accounts in the first place, and that's a much harder thing to solve. It may be worth considering whether we want to integrate some kind of prevention service that isn't Google's (which may require a subscription but could be worth it) as a more robust solution than an onerous waiting period.
FWIW I have been a relatively active participant but moving forward in Coin Return I anticipate being more of a lurker. If I was a brand-new visitor and I saw a 30-day waiting period I would likely just never come back.
An alternative I've seen in the Watchuseek Forums has been to force "constructive" participation in actual discussions (accrual of post points, etc.) before being allowed to participate in the member marketplace. I'm not sure there's a good analog for our situation but the best I can think of is letting people freely participate in the more social/fun parts of the forums before being allowed to participate in the more "serious" discussions.
Obviously any poster or lurker from here who ports their account over has already demonstrated that and can be given full access. I don't know how a "new lurker" demonstrates this or whether a new lurker would even be a thing. But I feel like new members needing to wait a certain amount of time and/or needing a certain number of sane posts in the safe threads is a fair bar before we unleash them on the more personal parts of the forum.
I think people are getting overly paranoid. Keep the new user restrictions light for now and if it proves to be a problem in the future, we can change it.
yeah to be honest, like...how would new people even find the forum or why would they want to post there? once we're uncoupled from PA we're just some random unaffiliated non-specific chat forum, how would someone wind up there without already knowing what it's about?