ToxI kill threadsDilige, et quod vis facRegistered Userregular
You can also somewhat actually choose what info from your PA account (like badgers) to migrate.
maybe the real panopticon was the friends we made along the way
+1
ToxI kill threadsDilige, et quod vis facRegistered Userregular
Also I don't think new user sign ups are going to be allowable at launch. Iirc the intent was you had to have a PA account in good standing (ie not banned)
maybe the real panopticon was the friends we made along the way
0
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
Also I don't think new user sign ups are going to be allowable at launch. Iirc the intent was you had to have a PA account in good standing (ie not banned)
this is news to me
Allegedly a voice of reason.
+9
ToxI kill threadsDilige, et quod vis facRegistered Userregular
It is extremely possible I am misremembering / conflating so please don't take my word for it.
maybe the real panopticon was the friends we made along the way
Really? How dare we choose to build a wall in front of the people who want to sell us tarot reading services and questionable supplements and very very questionable penis enlargement products?
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?
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Is there going to be a relaxation of the new member / member restrictions for a while at launch? We're all going to be "new" on the forums.
Anyone who migrates their account from PA to CoRe automatically becomes a full Member.
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.
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.
I would download a car.
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
Is there going to be a relaxation of the new member / member restrictions for a while at launch? We're all going to be "new" on the forums.
Anyone who migrates their account from PA to CoRe automatically becomes a full Member.
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.
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.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
Anyone under a self ban is still a user in good standing so I'm not sure what the issue is there?
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.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I'm still not clear on what "new users" can/can't do. The document seems to just say "they can't vote", but posts in this thread are suggesting that they also can't read/post in the private forums, send DMs, etc?
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)
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I'm still not clear on what "new users" can/can't do. The document seems to just say "they can't vote", but posts in this thread are suggesting that they also can't read/post in the private forums, send DMs, etc?
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.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
What do they look like if you're not a full member?
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
And on that note, after a bunch of conversations with folks (and I apologize, I don't remember who first floated this idea, but it's a very good one, we think), we have a new proposal for how the New Member/Member system could work. A lot of folks seem to be concerned that a 30 day wait / or 20 posts is too easy to bypass for bad actors, but at the same time we don't want to put an absurdly high burden on legitimate lurkers or new users who actually want to be part of the community.
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?
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
+11
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
And on that note, after a bunch of conversations with folks (and I apologize, I don't remember who first floated this idea, but it's a very good one, we think), we have a new proposal for how the New Member/Member system could work. A lot of folks seem to be concerned that a 30 day wait / or 20 posts is too easy to bypass for bad actors, but at the same time we don't want to put an absurdly high burden on legitimate lurkers or new users who actually want to be part of the community.
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?
Maybe a bit more than a single page but I do like that idea much more than a simple timespan waiting period.
0
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
And on that note, after a bunch of conversations with folks (and I apologize, I don't remember who first floated this idea, but it's a very good one, we think), we have a new proposal for how the New Member/Member system could work. A lot of folks seem to be concerned that a 30 day wait / or 20 posts is too easy to bypass for bad actors, but at the same time we don't want to put an absurdly high burden on legitimate lurkers or new users who actually want to be part of the community.
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?
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.
And on that note, after a bunch of conversations with folks (and I apologize, I don't remember who first floated this idea, but it's a very good one, we think), we have a new proposal for how the New Member/Member system could work. A lot of folks seem to be concerned that a 30 day wait / or 20 posts is too easy to bypass for bad actors, but at the same time we don't want to put an absurdly high burden on legitimate lurkers or new users who actually want to be part of the community.
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?
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.
minor incident on
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
+6
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
What do they look like if you're not a full member?
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
That entire private subforum group is simply not visible to you, basically, as if it didn't exist.
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.
+1
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
What do they look like if you're not a full member?
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
That entire private subforum group is simply not visible to you, basically, as if it didn't exist.
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.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
What do they look like if you're not a full member?
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
That entire private subforum group is simply not visible to you, basically, as if it didn't exist.
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.
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 know there's a lot of hesitation about putting anything behind a pay wallet, and for good reason. But would having a 30 day delay for full membership only for free members be an option? This could address the privacy concerns just by virtue of being a small barrier to spam accounts or sock puppets.
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.
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
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".
0
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I know there's a lot of hesitation about putting anything behind a pay wallet, and for good reason. But would having a 30 day delay for full membership only for free members be an option? This could address the privacy concerns just by virtue of being a small barrier to spam accounts or sock puppets.
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.
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.
That's fair, if the accounts aren't somehow linked to patreon or similar than my suggestion wouldn't be feasible.
0
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
It's worth noting that a waiting period in and of itself for membership is not a significant deterrent to bots per se, as it costs nothing for the bot to wait out the delay. The real barrier is that the person using/creating the bot has to account for the delay. So what you're stopping here are the lowest common denominator - people screwing around, people using bad/stupid bots, etc.
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.
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I do think it's important to note that everything we're talking about is very different from a full on waiting period to participate. New Members can read and post all they like except in 3 out of our 9 main subforums (not counting administrative forums, etc). They're only kept out of Politics, Arts/Crafts, and Chat/Etc.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
I don't mean to speak for anyone else but I was under the impression that the waiting period before accessing the "private" threads was less about keeping bots out and more about user safety and keeping out bad actors who have not yet demonstrated whether they are a fit for the culture here.
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.
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I think a waiting period or screening period can be useful as that sort of tool, I just disagree on the extent, particularly for flat waiting periods. 30 days seems like a lot to me, essentially, and longer than that feels truly onerous. If it's 30 days or 20 posts, that's fine, that has a way you can actively fulfill it, but the idea of just having to wait that long to talk to people about certain topics I think truly sucks. Especially if you consider that we already have people here today who mostly post in politics threads or personal life threads or similar--that could be understood to be the point of the forums for them, I would absolutely argue that it is one of the major thrusts of the forums as they stand currently.
If the barbarian hordes weren't battering down our walls while we're still linked on the PA front page, they're probably not going to do it when we're a unaffiliated forum off on our own.
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.
If the barbarian hordes weren't battering down our walls while we're still linked on the PA front page, they're probably not going to do it when we're a unaffiliated forum off on our own.
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?
If the barbarian hordes weren't battering down our walls while we're still linked on the PA front page, they're probably not going to do it when we're a unaffiliated forum off on our own.
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?
I dunno, this is why I view the restrictions as reasonable and good. Realistically, we're not getting many new users. It's just not going to happen. We weren't when we were associated with an actual known entity, and we're definitely not as a random upstart.
If 99% of the people who even want to pay attention to us are spammers, trolls and bots, I consider thwarting those to take priority over making it super easy to view a third of our more sensitive areas.
If it cuts the number of legit new users we get per year from 10 to 8, I mean, okay. I'm fine with that.
Would you say I had a plethora of pinatas?
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
What do they look like if you're not a full member?
Like, are they still visible and you just don't have access when you try to click on them, or are they hidden?
That entire private subforum group is simply not visible to you, basically, as if it didn't exist.
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.
Just put an under construction gif there until they hit full member
At some point I nuked my reddit account and made a new one and a bunch of the spaces I tried to interact with had either account age bans or karma point bans and tbh, both of them sucked. But at least with the post/point ones I could engage in other spaces and knew when I had gained access to the blocked one. The account age meant just not using the spaces I actually was there for for a month. That's more than enough to get me to just stop using the thing forever.
New users should be able to validate accounts for full access based on their actions. There are a lot of tools, as basic as a checkbox or a verified email address or whatever.
It's could just be a validation checklist like:
1) verify email
2) set up your profile
3) explore these subforums
4) make post
5) survive
Bad actors will beat all of the tools but that doesn't mean make it worse for people trying to use our thing. The current mess of vanilla already seems to catch almost every bot or obvious troll/alt and it does that without us having to bar the gates to that one new real user a month.
Posts
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.
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
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?
I think 20 days makes sense to me as a prolific work day visitor, but i also don't think 30 days is *too* extreme either
I dunno, this is why I view the restrictions as reasonable and good. Realistically, we're not getting many new users. It's just not going to happen. We weren't when we were associated with an actual known entity, and we're definitely not as a random upstart.
If 99% of the people who even want to pay attention to us are spammers, trolls and bots, I consider thwarting those to take priority over making it super easy to view a third of our more sensitive areas.
If it cuts the number of legit new users we get per year from 10 to 8, I mean, okay. I'm fine with that.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
New users should be able to validate accounts for full access based on their actions. There are a lot of tools, as basic as a checkbox or a verified email address or whatever.
It's could just be a validation checklist like:
1) verify email
2) set up your profile
3) explore these subforums
4) make post
5) survive
Bad actors will beat all of the tools but that doesn't mean make it worse for people trying to use our thing. The current mess of vanilla already seems to catch almost every bot or obvious troll/alt and it does that without us having to bar the gates to that one new real user a month.