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I'm highly concerned about putting up any impediment to real humans accessing the private forums. Without that we are going to lose people who will be underwhelmed by this place on day one because they are missing a critical component of the community. We should not expect them to be motivated to pursue our membership policies to gain access to something they've never seen. If we are too conservative about this it could easily result in the slow and inevitable decline of our population.
I don't think new members are going to be offended if they can't instantly participate in our governance. But locking them out of certain forums is extremely significant in comparison.
21 of 30 current 1st page threads in SE would be in public forums on CoRe
And in DND, 20 of 30 threads currently on the first page would be in public forums on CoRe.
Obviously in G&T that number is basically 100%.
That answer's likely different for each person, and some people don't care at all. For me, my biggest concern personally is just ensuring we pass the legal sniff test to be able to say we aren't fully "Open to the Public" in a meaningful way. Some other folks are more concerned with exposure and doxing or harassment, or scraping of data, or mining of artwork by AI crawlers, or whatever.
The art forums because artists are (rightly) concerned about AI scrapers stealing their shit.
The politics forums because we want some sort of impediment to drive-by toxic bigotry masquerading as political discourse.
Chat threads because people often post personal details of their lives that they are comfortable sharing with people they know and trust in a semi-private place, but don't want blared to the world at large. (Imagine having a conversation with a friend in the park. If you say something very private, you might lower your voice a bit versus shouting at the top of your lungs. A dedicated spy could figure out what you're saying, but you have a reasonable expectation of a certain privacy that makes you comfortable sharing.)
A thread about coffee isn't really private, but it makes the most sense to lump it in with the chatty stuff given that there's no longer an "on-topic" forum, and we don't want to create additional subforums for "this is conversation stuff but we don't care if the world sees it."
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Politics I can see being more restricted because people are sharing anti-establishment sentiments on there. But for Chaos, I don't see the point. You need to be careful about the PII you're posting into a semi-public internet forum no matter how we restrict it. I think this fear of malicious lurkers is really overblown. My understanding of the bad scenarios we've had in the past is that they've involved long term community members, not randos. We should be concerned about death by obscurity.
I share bits about my personal life, and I'm sure that with enough work and intent someone can probably piece together something that would serve as a decent summary of who I am as a person, perhaps even to the extent that they could, in theory, identify who I am if they spent enough time and money. If I wasn't comfortable with that idea then I wouldn't be sharing that information in the first place. If you care about your privacy then the only true solution is to not share something you aren't willing to have public - this includes linking to other accounts outside of CR which might themselves have identifying information.
If you spend any time at all dealing with the applicant queue it swiftly becomes incredibly obvious what signups are spammers and what ones aren't. The vast, overwhelming majority of people filling in that "why do you want to join?" box are transparently obvious spammers or bots, to an extent that a typical person would be able to tell at a glance. Marketing copy, random keyboardmashing, babbling about SEO, obviously autogenerated emails, broken ad-libs scripts trying to give an answer and inavertently giving all of their possible responses instead, frequent flyers in the anti-spam systems the forum uses (think "this is the 73rd attempt by this email address to register here"), the list goes on.
Here's some excerpts from the applicant queue:
I promise you that, of people who get to that "why do you want to join?" page an fill anything at all in that box, these are entirely representative of at least 99.9 of responses in the last few months.
I am not, in the least, being hyperbolic here. If I reached into the Bucket Of Applications and pulled a thousand out at random, I would expect to see maybe one that isn't typical of those examples.
Also as Jeffe notes, a surprising number literally say, straight out, "to post spam on forum" or something like that. They generally assume a human isn't looking at the attempts and think filling anything in there is the same thing as defeating a captcha or whatever.
It's not that the private threads don't have value to us as a community. But (1) they aren't the only threads of value and the public threads can easily demonstrate value to people long enough for them to get around to clicking "register". and (2) they have value to us, as a community, but are not necessarily the business of people driving by. I don't think someone just stopping in really cares about all our butt troubles in [chat], until they actually decide they like the people here enough to hang around for a bit. At which point they are welcome to come in and share their own butt trubbs.
We are going to need new members in order to survive as a community, and we should put our best foot forward to them. They aren't going to be falling over themselves to post here, we need to persuade them. You can't do that without being trusting and taking some small risks. The alternative feels far too much like a NIMBY retirement community to me.
What if we made a public subforum called "Butt Trubbs" and it just consisted of a single thread for butt trubbs and all of the posts in there were about butt trubbs.
We would have a lock on the untapped butt trubb market.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
I'm old enough to remember when the new user expectation was "lurk a bit, then make an account, then lurk a bit more, then post some, then post some more, then lurk, then maybe you can make a new thread without getting yelled at"
If "hang out in the public area for a few days" is NIMBY then bring on the HOA.
Strangers? There's a clear fear about the moral quality of these hypothetical people who went to the trouble to show up here and make an account, and the need for them to prove themselves. It's a vague and ill-defined fear that if they get in here they're going to do something bad. We've already established that the New Member status is not our mechanism for keeping out spam - this is about humans who we feel are somehow malicious.
So we already legally have to have a barrier to entry. That's a legal requirement to maintain our status as the specific type of legal entity we are
As long as we have to do that anyway, a lot of folks are advocating we make that barrier useful to us as a community as well.
I need to hear more about these legal requirements, but I doubt that hiding content is really part of it. We're all agreed that full membership must be earned to be able to vote on policies/elections. But I feel strongly that it would be destructive to our community to put up new obstacles to participation. We can't live in fear of bad people sneaking in to our exclusive club, we need to trust our moderators.
PSN:Furlion
As I understand it (mostly from this thread), the IRS requires that membership not be open to the public for an organisation to qualify for tax-exempt status (as CoRe has claimed). So some sort of barrier to full membership has to exist; activity is the gate CoRe is using.
The full list of discussions around having private forums mostly occurred in the initial forum structure thread, I believe. In my head it picks up around page 30, but it's raised several times before then, I think.
The fact that some forums are private is, to me, a settled argument, based on the forum structure thread and voting.
People voted overwhelmingly for a structure that included private forums; the only thing left to establish is the level of activity to gain admission, not that they exist. That would be a forum restructure issue, covered in KD01-C as a supermajority item (subject to approval via this poll).
I'm not disputing the existence of private forums, those are the forums that require a verified account to see, as opposed to being fully open to the wider internet. This idea of a minimum time/post requirement to be eligible to view the private forums is fairly new though, not part of the vote.
How does an account become verified and how is that process different in your mind from becoming a Member of the legal org?
The mods have to review their application and approve that they appear to be human, correct? This is how we're keeping bots out. That is not the same thing as earning voting rights as a full member, and people continue to conflate these ideas.
I'm in favor of reserving voting rights to more established members by whatever criteria we choose, I don't really care that much how stringent it is. That should satisfy our legal requirements from what I understand. But withholding forum features and community participation until then is something I'm vehemently opposed to, unless the lawyers tell us we literally must do that.
Not to dismiss the value in each and every unique soul, but if we’re talking ‘we average one new real user per quarter’ or something in that ballpark, I’m definitely going to continue proposing we err on the side of providing a meagre barrier to entry over worrying about whether annual actual new person #5 has to wait a week or two to see the artist forum and the political/chat threads.
Like, are G&T and the 2/3 of SE/D&D they would see not good enough to keep folks around? Because it seems like they have been to the tune of millions of posts over the years.
Something seems to have recently unbroken on the Manage Users section of the dashboard so I can sort of threaten it into returning useful information at times again, so let's see here...
Since the first of December we've had thirty-six new users who haven't bounced off the spam queue. Two of those are doing TT things and three of the others immediately stepped on rakes, so that's down to 31.
Of those, let's break them into three broad categories (and I'm being informal here): accounts who've been present and participating since registering; accounts who are lurking but engaged enough to do regularly; and currently idle accounts. I'm defining the last of those as accounts with no or few (say, 1-2) returning visits, or people who clearly create an account for one specific purpose like a PAX-related question and then stopped visiting.
Of that sample, we have three regularly participating posters and ten regularly returning lurkers, with the rest of the accounts being idle. Some from the latter group might just be idle so far, e.g., someone who pokes at a forum every few weeks but signed up on the 18th so I can't see a pattern yet.
That is an environment which no longer exists. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the internet at large has changed a bit since 2010.
As you can see, we do need some sort of barrier. If we don't have that, then it would mean that the US government would get some percent of the money donated to the forums, given how unpopular the idea of having any sort of paywall content is. So we might as well mold those barriers into something that is useful. The private forums requiring accounts to not run afoul of the rules and anti-bot stuff until they either meat a minimum activity time, meet a minimum post count or get sponsored, seems the best way to meet that criteria.
I'm hoping someone has run this through a lawyer though to make sure we're good. I would suggest having a one or two contingency ideas on hand, so that if it isn't good, said legal advice can look at those and maybe one or a combination of proposals together will pass the sniff test.
The main sticking point is that if they have full access to our "facilities" (in our case, essentially, the forums), they would have to be "Members", and Members have voting rights in this type of organization. This makes a middle-ground membership status of "has full access to everything" and "but can't vote" kind of a tricky position.
Probationary member feels like a normal thing?
Yeah, but that's basically what "New Member" is. Access to some, but not all facilities, and no voting rights until they are accepted as full Members. I'm just not sure of the feasibility of creating a third class that has full access to facilities but can't vote -- not to mention that it just adds another layer of complications to the process that muddies things further.
some of the most active threads among all three subforums to be honest
And to add to this, part of the challenge is how much do we want to see if we can get away with before getting hit by the IRS over it vs. hiring a lawyer and spending money to make sure it's all kosher vs. just making reasonable, but relatively minimal, restrictions for anyone new registering with the forum.
I don't see that there would be some new middle ground - the number of user types is the same: Anonymous, Registered, and Member. The only question is what privileges you assign to Registered users in the forums. There's no additional technical complexity in letting them post to the private forums.
If it's necessary to restrict their access to our "facilities" in some token way to demonstrate for tax purposes that they aren't real members yet, can it just be the political forum?
I feel like to a certain extent a lot of this conversation revolves around which sub-forums should be considered "private" at all.
e: To expound, a "private" sub-forum isn't really going to be private if someone can register -- something that will be easily accomplished if you're not a bot -- and view the forum without any other obstruction. It's an unlocked door.
Thanks all for participating. The turnout was a solid improvement over the previous round, and we feel like a lot of great feedback was provided. Looking forward to presenting the next batch for you all.
Just going to bang this sign again, folks.
I haven't seen anything so egregious that I want to hand out infractions but there have been some posts that could've been better.
There are multiple applicants that literally say "I'm here to advertise X business", which includes things like pipes (like, plumbing) and call centers.
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
It also includes things like pipes (like, not plumbing).
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
Your questions and concerns here are valid. I have similar thoughts about the art forum specifically. But I'm not an artist, so I defer to people who are.
The point I want to make here is that bot protection and new member restrictions, while technically separate, do have some overlap. It's much easier to whackamole bots and scrapers when they're required to sign up for an account; whereas if they aren't and they remain anonymous it's pretty easy for them to circumvent (for example) IP bans.
So you're right, that while we shouldn't conflate the two topics and they aren't strictly equivalent, they aren't fully distinct either and they are related to each other.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.