Feels like there is a bit of disconnect as well. This isn't everyone has to have thirty active days before they get to see a third of the forum. This is just giving lurkers a path to hit full membership without having to post. So it's either meet the minimum post count before having 30 days of activity or have 30 days of activity without hitting that post threshold. I think the 30 day thing is fine, given that it's far easier for someone to fly under the radar essentially doing nothing.
I would say that we probably should split things up so that we have another membership level in regards to voting stuff because 30 active days is way too damn short. I also wouldn't have that tied to post count at all. A minimum of 60 days of active membership before being allowed to vote on community decisions, seems reasonable. 30 days is also probably too short for most people to get a good read of the community, even if they are acting in good faith.
So maybe something like:
-New Member, an account that has less than X posts and has less than 30 days of activity. Can post in all public boards, but no access to the private boards. Also cannot vote in community decisions.
-Member, an account that either has more than X posts, more than 30 days of activity or both. Can post in all public boards and can also access and post in all non-administrative private boards. Cannot vote in community decisions.
-Full member, an account that has 60 or more days of activity. Same access as a member account, but can vote in community decisions.
I’ve got some people from various spaces I’ll probably point this way, mostly from my local tabletop community.
It’s overwhelmingly LGBTQ+ and I imagine they would want to connect with that community here.
It was talked earlier about making it time or post gated for access to the private forums.
If the idea is for it to require logging in and tracking separate days then I would say you would want that to be 7 days at most, or say ten/twenty posts.
If the tools are granular enough extend voting to be 30/60 logged in days so they have a sense of the community then sure, but boxing them out of community threads doesn’t make much sense when you want them to become a member of it.
The primary goal of all this is to cut out spammers, scrapers and people with particularly strong opinions about papists
Mods could probably confirm more concretely but ten posts is enough to determine if it’s a spam account.
Maybe turn off DMs during the probationary period.
Kelor on
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
edited February 24
No, this was specifically stated as also getting rid of the 20 posts option as a way to get full member access.
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.
Quetzi on
+2
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
Feels like there is a bit of disconnect as well. This isn't everyone has to have thirty active days before they get to see a third of the forum. This is just giving lurkers a path to hit full membership without having to post. So it's either meet the minimum post count before having 30 days of activity or have 30 days of activity without hitting that post threshold. I think the 30 day thing is fine, given that it's far easier for someone to fly under the radar essentially doing nothing.
I would say that we probably should split things up so that we have another membership level in regards to voting stuff because 30 active days is way too damn short. I also wouldn't have that tied to post count at all. A minimum of 60 days of active membership before being allowed to vote on community decisions, seems reasonable. 30 days is also probably too short for most people to get a good read of the community, even if they are acting in good faith.
So maybe something like:
-New Member, an account that has less than X posts and has less than 30 days of activity. Can post in all public boards, but no access to the private boards. Also cannot vote in community decisions.
-Member, an account that either has more than X posts, more than 30 days of activity or both. Can post in all public boards and can also access and post in all non-administrative private boards. Cannot vote in community decisions.
-Full member, an account that has 60 or more days of activity. Same access as a member account, but can vote in community decisions.
I guess I would ask how we'd set up voting that was accessible to full members while also being blocked off for new members?
Would all elections be hosted in one of the private sub-forums? Would elections be sent to all full members by way of a private message?
Feels like there is a bit of disconnect as well. This isn't everyone has to have thirty active days before they get to see a third of the forum. This is just giving lurkers a path to hit full membership without having to post. So it's either meet the minimum post count before having 30 days of activity or have 30 days of activity without hitting that post threshold. I think the 30 day thing is fine, given that it's far easier for someone to fly under the radar essentially doing nothing.
I would say that we probably should split things up so that we have another membership level in regards to voting stuff because 30 active days is way too damn short. I also wouldn't have that tied to post count at all. A minimum of 60 days of active membership before being allowed to vote on community decisions, seems reasonable. 30 days is also probably too short for most people to get a good read of the community, even if they are acting in good faith.
So maybe something like:
-New Member, an account that has less than X posts and has less than 30 days of activity. Can post in all public boards, but no access to the private boards. Also cannot vote in community decisions.
-Member, an account that either has more than X posts, more than 30 days of activity or both. Can post in all public boards and can also access and post in all non-administrative private boards. Cannot vote in community decisions.
-Full member, an account that has 60 or more days of activity. Same access as a member account, but can vote in community decisions.
I guess I would ask how we'd set up voting that was accessible to full members while also being blocked off for new members?
Would all elections be hosted in one of the private sub-forums? Would elections be sent to all full members by way of a private message?
I would expect an entirely separate "legislature"-esque subforum for motions/bylaws/whatever to be voted on?
+1
ToxI kill threadsDilige, et quod vis facRegistered Userregular
I understand we want to have a probationary/ "new user" period. I like that.
But we should just have the one. So you have New member and Full member. Any more tiers than that will begin to get unwieldy
maybe the real panopticon was the friends we made along the way
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.
I, on the other hand, would consider this a failing
Would you consider the loss of people because of burnout from dealing with spambots a failure? I don't know that that's what will happen but it's a valid concern.
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
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.
I, on the other hand, would consider this a failing
Would you consider the loss of people because of burnout from dealing with spambots a failure? I don't know that that's what will happen but it's a valid concern.
spam accounts specifically are basically a solved issue. Probably hundreds try signing up each month, but we rarely have any get through here on PA, and having one manage to get through AND make more than 1 or 2 posts before getting nuked is an order of magnitude more rare. And Coin Return's gatekeeping tools for that stuff are at least as good, if not better, than PA.
minor incident on
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
Anyways as I see it. We want to deal with the bots and spammers and we do seem to be keeping ahead of those with the current tools. No guarantee that will hold up, but Imagine that gets a bit more reasonable if there is also a lead up time before they can use the PM system. Then there is dealing with bad actors that are either creating sock puppet accounts or are some asshole tourist doing driveby shit. Again, that's stuff that is also mostly dealt with, maybe entirely, by the tools meant to deal with bots and spammer.
That leaves us with the those that either have very sophisticated bots, which we'll probably see more of, and those that are pathetic enough that they are willing to dedicated time towards just being obnoxious. That latter one is a big reason why I'm not wild about fully community vote rates being accessible at 30 days because they'll be quite able to wait long enough to get voting rights and then they'll try to shit up community voting decisions. I also fully aspect that if CoRe survives long enough, we probably do start to get known around certain circles for our level of inclusion, which means we will absolutely end up dealing with assholes that try to sneak in and shit things up at the organization level. So need to find a way that doesn't needlessly exclude new members, but also provides enough of a lead time that most assholes will fail out before they can really become a serious issue in regards to board governance.
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
edited February 24
I'd personally be in favor of keeping the "make X posts" (20?) as an option for promotion to Member status as well. Some folks had some concerns about that, but if people are confident enough in our moderator team to be vigilant around those probationary members to keep them from gaming the system, I think it's an overall win to allow active participation to speed up the process.
(remember, we'd basically be doubling the number of active moderators compared to what we currently have, and it's not like we get a TON of new user signups)
minor incident on
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
I'd personally be in favor of keeping the "make X posts" (20?) as an option for promotion to Member status as well. Some folks had some concerns about that, but if people are confident enough in our moderator team to be vigilant around those probationary members to keep them from gaming the system, I think it's an overall win to allow active participation to speed up the process.
(remember, we'd basically be doubling the number of active moderators compared to what we currently have, and it's not like we get a TON of new user signups)
Could accounts that meet the post # set be flagged, and a moderator goes in and looks and says yeah these are quality 5 star posts approved? or these are clearly all shit posts, double approved? or no these make me think this person is a spammer not approved?
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?
Bad actors linking it from another place for a raid?
is that something that's happened enough here to be a serious concern?
that's a genuine question, I can't remember the last time anything like that happened and I'm not aware of any current situation that would make it likely going forward but maybe I'm just out of the loop
if this is something that has a realistic chance of happening regularly due to some anti-us group I'm not familiar with then yeah I guess we should definitely be mindful of it
To be honest I'm genuinely surprised that we haven't had this happen already: a time-displaced gamergator finds us as a gaming webforum, talks about games for a bit, starts whining about Aloy not being hot enough, and gets shut down.* He goes back to his subreddit and tells them "get a load of this libtard forum" and people start coming over to troll.
*this part definitely still happens, but the next part doesn't seem to have been a problem but seems like it could happen any time.
Actually this may sound super paranoid but we live in the dumbest timeline, so I could 100% see the Second President getting bored and high and having one of his underlings scour the web for posts about him, finds the thread about him here, and weaponizes the US Government against the people here. Not that a time delay on joining necessarily prevents that, but just to point out that an excess of caution with the content we are gating off is merited.
+1
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited February 24
I don't think forum raids still exist, honestly.
I think everyone that's got a username here that migrates it to CR starts posting day 1, and anyone who signs up has a two week grace period, and that's that. (or 30 days I don't really care about the specifics if it's under 30 days)
As for lurkers, PA migrated lurkers are the cream of the crop, new lurkers, I dunno I lean toward yeah, you need to make post to be a member, in whatever form.
We're not a blog. We're a comments section
(edit: that was in agreement to Houk, not arguing with RD, we just posted at the same time)
It was mentioned ages ago, but a site notoriously full of absolute shitbirds has had the forums in their sights for a while, so it's a non-zero possibility.
However, we had some very long, in depth discussions about wanting the private forums to remain private to some modest degree in an effort to avoid personal information from being too easily accessed while discussing things on potentially sensitive topics, and also avoid AI scraping.
We cannot simultaneously have a barrier in place to reduce the chances that folks show up to start hoovering up art and potential personally identifying information, while also leaving a key to the door and a 'please don't be an asshole' note on a table beside it.
I'm not saying it should be a Herculean effort to join, but ANY barrier is going to deter some folks, but at the same time we had a *lot* of people very vociferously declare that a (reasonable) barrier was highly desired.
And maybe there is a fine point on the spectrum that specifically covers both the 'keep out the scrapers/bots/trolls that aren't at least a bit dedicated' and 'just come on in, y'all'. Maybe that's not 20 days, maybe it's 19, maybe it's 13, maybe it's 27 or 42 or whatever.
If someone joins and enjoys the forums as they are (with, again, 2/3 of them openly available) and talks games and sports and movies and shows for a month (or whatever), and then abruptly a set of other forums are abruptly available one day, maybe they explore and see what else there is.
If the rest of the forums aren't interesting enough to keep their interest, I doubt that overnight access to start throwing Hawt Taeks in the political forum is going to help, and even if it is, I have doubts they have a strong enough grasp of the culture that this is necessarily ideal anyways.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
To be honest I'm genuinely surprised that we haven't had this happen already: a time-displaced gamergator finds us as a gaming webforum, talks about games for a bit, starts whining about Aloy not being hot enough, and gets shut down.* He goes back to his subreddit and tells them "get a load of this libtard forum" and people start coming over to troll.
*this part definitely still happens, but the next part doesn't seem to have been a problem but seems like it could happen any time.
Actually this may sound super paranoid but we live in the dumbest timeline, so I could 100% see the Second President getting bored and high and having one of his underlings scour the web for posts about him, finds the thread about him here, and weaponizes the US Government against the people here. Not that a time delay on joining necessarily prevents that, but just to point out that an excess of caution with the content we are gating off is merited.
If the US government wants to mess with a US corporation operating a website under US jurisdiction... what do you think anyone here can do about it?
Honestly as far as user verification goes I'd be happy with "account signs up, is seen as Not An Asshole in the first few days of posting, someone with access to the user backend notices this and clicks a checkbox." A multiple-month probationary period independent of actual behaviour's absurd and is indicative of paranoia and hostility to any newcomers more than actual security.
Something stricter might be necessary if we weren't getting a couple of new, non-troll, non-lurker users every month or so, but barring CoRe getting a weirdly high profile post launch I think we'd be fine with something like that. It's perfectly within the abilities of people here right now to decide "this guy's okay, that guy's obviously a troll (*zot*), and this guy we're keeping an eye on for now."
Actually this may sound super paranoid but we live in the dumbest timeline, so I could 100% see the Second President getting bored and high and having one of his underlings scour the web for posts about him, finds the thread about him here, and weaponizes the US Government against the people here. Not that a time delay on joining necessarily prevents that, but just to point out that an excess of caution with the content we are gating off is merited.
While the topical forums like D&D weren't loginwalled, that was basically happening here. Some current-events term poked the forum in a way that a thread wound up high on search results and some redcap would create an account to own the libs or whatnot. The overwhelming majority of those accounts last approximately one post; it's something well within the capabilities of the current mod team to deal with, much less a larger one working with a technically superior system. Larger-scale forum raids are super rare and trivial to see being spun up, especially on a forum that gets a handful of registration attempts a week.
I don't think it's worth trying to think about how to harden user verification against state-level actors, especially with a public forum. If someone at that level's going to have a go at the forum they're going to have a go at the forum and that gets dealt with when it happens. Short of locking the whole forum down to complete privacy (somehow including vetting the existing lurkers) you're not going to be able to plan against that effectively.
So there's a couple of different reasons for the membership limitation.
Fulfill the membership requirement for IRS rules under a 501(c)(7) to reduce the tax liability for the organization.
Limit voting to members of the community invested in making sure the organization is sustainable long-term.
Preserve privacy for the 'off topic' forums so that people feel safe when making posts on the forum.
Cut down on spammers/scrape bots.
Mitigate brigading/bad actors from other communities from getting involved.
Balancing these things against also being an open forum is the main point of contention. In terms of priority, I put those in descending order of concern.
Any kind of limitation will meet points 2 through 5, but the longer the limitation the more likely you meet #1 and effectively do #5. To me, the 30 days of activity feels like it does a decent job balancing the concerns. It's long enough that it should be sufficient to meet IRS requirements, and also mitigate any bad actors or brigading -- who wants to wait 30 days to do that kind of thing?
Another idea we've mulled around is essentially the 30 days of activity OR a sponsorship model. If your friend really wants to join, you could sponsor their meeting the membership requirement. If they get banned or do something shitty, maybe you lose that privilege in the future.
So, with the comment period coming to a close tomorrow, I want to ask about timeline.
According to the proposed KDs, We have to submit a call 1 month prior to the elections, and then 2 weeks after that we have the poll to actually gather names, and at the end of that we have the election itself that will run for 1 week.
So 5 weeks total from start to finish per these KDs to elect a Board.
Same timeline exists for Mods, so 5 weeks.
Assuming that we roll into the full vote for these KDs with the changes suggested by this Friday, add 1 week to vote on that.
So our timeline looks like this:
Feb 28th - Mar 7th: KD vote
Mar 7th - Apr 4th: Solicit nominees and collect names for the Board
Apr 4th - Apr 11th: Board SVT Election
Apr 11th - May 9th: Solicit nominees and collect names for Mods
May 9th - May 16th: Ratify Mods
Seems like we’re cutting it awfully close to the shutdown date. Should we maybe consider a shorter Nomination period for both Board and Mods for this initial election? We could also in tandem have shorter terms just for this initial period (1 year? Less?) to allow us to use the full process for installing Board members for the full 3 year terms.
If I'm way off base/misreading these requirements, feel free to correct me!
Yeah, unless we want to start opening applications onto CoRe with some kind of holding pen for folks, it does feel like we need to abridge some timelines if we want to end up with an elected Board and Mods in time to start bringing folks over with a buffer zone of time for stragglers.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
We did have occasional forum raids. (Both on the giving and receiving ends.) It just hasn't happened in like two decades.
The afforementioned shitbirds have caught wind of geebs leaving and the lights being flickered and a target has definitely been mentioned. Whether they'll do anything remains to be seen. Forums are still being used and are making a comeback as folks burn out on algorithmic social media. A slightly burdensome membership+ approval process will probably be okay. Not being able to engage with the more raucous topics isn't going to really drive new users away. But I like the sponsorship idea.
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
We did have occasional forum raids. (Both on the giving and receiving ends.) It just hasn't happened in like two decades.
The afforementioned shitbirds have caught wind of geebs leaving and the lights being flickered and a target has definitely been mentioned. Whether they'll do anything remains to be seen. Forums are still being used and are making a comeback as folks burn out on algorithmic social media. A slightly burdensome membership+ approval process will probably be okay. Not being able to engage with the more raucous topics isn't going to really drive new users away. But I like the sponsorship idea.
Do you have any more details on this? Because I haven't heard anything about it yet, and as someone who currently approves membership applications here I'd love to know if there's a credible threat that I should be watching for.
A meaningful probationary period for new members seems like a good way to not get new members. Stability requires at least replacement level new blood and random web forums are not a boom industry these days.
Styrofoam Sammich on
+1
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Speaking of active days, this poll closes in a little under 24 hours, yes?
A meaningful probationary period for new members seems like a good way to not get new members. Stability requires at least replacement level new blood and random web forums are not a boom industry these days.
Sounds like they should lurk more to better learn/understand the culture of the forum.
As has been said previously, 6 of the 9 sub forums will be open to newcomers. It’s not like new blood will be mournfully posting in the admin section or something.
Perhaps an argument could be made to include the chat forum as well, though there was some pushback to that.
The art sub being hidden to deter easy scraping of folks work is reasonable.
Given the driveby assholes and alts that have wracked up some staggering ban numbers on political topics, not having at least some reasonable barrier to entry would be foolish for that sub.
Actual new blood needing to get to know folks for a couple of weeks chatting about movies and music before they deep dive into whatever fresh clusterfuck is happening around the world seems unlikely to be a make or break factor in the forum’s future.
Also, there are good odds we will not acquire replacement levels of fresh blood through anything but actively recruiting among friends and likeminded sorts. If someone’s WoW guild has a handful of people who might want to join, waiting a bit to expand the topic selection isn’t unreasonable.
I’ve been on forums where the political sub is literally hidden until you know to ask for access.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
+3
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
we have discussed doing the candidate soliciting for the Board and Mods at the same time, electing the Board, and then the elected Board handling the Mod selection process for the simple fact we don't have an extra month to do them separately
Maybe I missed this but was there a proposed procedure for what happens if a board member just goes radio silent or doesn't show up to meetings? Are they considered to have resigned? After how long?
We did have occasional forum raids. (Both on the giving and receiving ends.) It just hasn't happened in like two decades.
The afforementioned shitbirds have caught wind of geebs leaving and the lights being flickered and a target has definitely been mentioned. Whether they'll do anything remains to be seen. Forums are still being used and are making a comeback as folks burn out on algorithmic social media. A slightly burdensome membership+ approval process will probably be okay. Not being able to engage with the more raucous topics isn't going to really drive new users away. But I like the sponsorship idea.
Do you have any more details on this? Because I haven't heard anything about it yet, and as someone who currently approves membership applications here I'd love to know if there's a credible threat that I should be watching for.
yeah tbh this sounds like a bunch of vague nothingness. like I still don't know who these shitbirds are, why I should be worried about them, or why their suggested existence should influence how we do signups for our weird little corner of the internet
a "slightly burdensome" (it really does suck as proposed) membership approval process without justification feels kind of unnecessary, is my feeling
but I'm also in the boat that feels like we're going overboard on several parts of this process so maybe I'm the one out of touch, I dunno
thinking about it more, I feel like we're all accepting that we're sunsetting our community as a whole. we're putting up so many walls and barriers to the very few new people that might want to join whatever this is, it kind of just feels like an HOA or retirement home
which is whatever I guess, I've been here for 20 years so I'm going down with the ship, but man I am just apparently completely out of sync with how others view the process of developing and fostering a community. I feel like we're so focused on edge cases that we're losing the forest for the trees.
In any of the proposed situations, the majority of the forum would be immediately available to anyone with or without an account, to read and then (with an account) to post. Notably, all of the threads which are mostly likely to actually attract new people--ie the friendly, on-topic discussion threads. I don't think it would seem burdensome at all. I don't think a brand new person would really be interested in the hangout spaces where we talk about our weird poops and if they are here for the politics first, they are probably here for the wrong reasons. The game and movie threads are the ones with the most appeal to new people, and the best chance of bringing in new blood, and those will be available from the jump. Then if you're here for a little while, you get let into the back room. It doesn't seem arduous to me.
Posts
I, on the other hand, would consider this a failing
I would say that we probably should split things up so that we have another membership level in regards to voting stuff because 30 active days is way too damn short. I also wouldn't have that tied to post count at all. A minimum of 60 days of active membership before being allowed to vote on community decisions, seems reasonable. 30 days is also probably too short for most people to get a good read of the community, even if they are acting in good faith.
So maybe something like:
-New Member, an account that has less than X posts and has less than 30 days of activity. Can post in all public boards, but no access to the private boards. Also cannot vote in community decisions.
-Member, an account that either has more than X posts, more than 30 days of activity or both. Can post in all public boards and can also access and post in all non-administrative private boards. Cannot vote in community decisions.
-Full member, an account that has 60 or more days of activity. Same access as a member account, but can vote in community decisions.
It’s overwhelmingly LGBTQ+ and I imagine they would want to connect with that community here.
It was talked earlier about making it time or post gated for access to the private forums.
If the idea is for it to require logging in and tracking separate days then I would say you would want that to be 7 days at most, or say ten/twenty posts.
If the tools are granular enough extend voting to be 30/60 logged in days so they have a sense of the community then sure, but boxing them out of community threads doesn’t make much sense when you want them to become a member of it.
The primary goal of all this is to cut out spammers, scrapers and people with particularly strong opinions about papists
Mods could probably confirm more concretely but ten posts is enough to determine if it’s a spam account.
Maybe turn off DMs during the probationary period.
I guess I would ask how we'd set up voting that was accessible to full members while also being blocked off for new members?
Would all elections be hosted in one of the private sub-forums? Would elections be sent to all full members by way of a private message?
7 days seems sufficient if it’s logged in days then.
I would expect an entirely separate "legislature"-esque subforum for motions/bylaws/whatever to be voted on?
But we should just have the one. So you have New member and Full member. Any more tiers than that will begin to get unwieldy
I won't rest until we have ultra premium members who link their phone and pay $15 a month
Would you consider the loss of people because of burnout from dealing with spambots a failure? I don't know that that's what will happen but it's a valid concern.
spam accounts specifically are basically a solved issue. Probably hundreds try signing up each month, but we rarely have any get through here on PA, and having one manage to get through AND make more than 1 or 2 posts before getting nuked is an order of magnitude more rare. And Coin Return's gatekeeping tools for that stuff are at least as good, if not better, than PA.
Anyways as I see it. We want to deal with the bots and spammers and we do seem to be keeping ahead of those with the current tools. No guarantee that will hold up, but Imagine that gets a bit more reasonable if there is also a lead up time before they can use the PM system. Then there is dealing with bad actors that are either creating sock puppet accounts or are some asshole tourist doing driveby shit. Again, that's stuff that is also mostly dealt with, maybe entirely, by the tools meant to deal with bots and spammer.
That leaves us with the those that either have very sophisticated bots, which we'll probably see more of, and those that are pathetic enough that they are willing to dedicated time towards just being obnoxious. That latter one is a big reason why I'm not wild about fully community vote rates being accessible at 30 days because they'll be quite able to wait long enough to get voting rights and then they'll try to shit up community voting decisions. I also fully aspect that if CoRe survives long enough, we probably do start to get known around certain circles for our level of inclusion, which means we will absolutely end up dealing with assholes that try to sneak in and shit things up at the organization level. So need to find a way that doesn't needlessly exclude new members, but also provides enough of a lead time that most assholes will fail out before they can really become a serious issue in regards to board governance.
(remember, we'd basically be doubling the number of active moderators compared to what we currently have, and it's not like we get a TON of new user signups)
Could accounts that meet the post # set be flagged, and a moderator goes in and looks and says yeah these are quality 5 star posts approved? or these are clearly all shit posts, double approved? or no these make me think this person is a spammer not approved?
is that something that's happened enough here to be a serious concern?
that's a genuine question, I can't remember the last time anything like that happened and I'm not aware of any current situation that would make it likely going forward but maybe I'm just out of the loop
if this is something that has a realistic chance of happening regularly due to some anti-us group I'm not familiar with then yeah I guess we should definitely be mindful of it
*this part definitely still happens, but the next part doesn't seem to have been a problem but seems like it could happen any time.
Actually this may sound super paranoid but we live in the dumbest timeline, so I could 100% see the Second President getting bored and high and having one of his underlings scour the web for posts about him, finds the thread about him here, and weaponizes the US Government against the people here. Not that a time delay on joining necessarily prevents that, but just to point out that an excess of caution with the content we are gating off is merited.
I think everyone that's got a username here that migrates it to CR starts posting day 1, and anyone who signs up has a two week grace period, and that's that. (or 30 days I don't really care about the specifics if it's under 30 days)
As for lurkers, PA migrated lurkers are the cream of the crop, new lurkers, I dunno I lean toward yeah, you need to make post to be a member, in whatever form.
We're not a blog. We're a comments section
(edit: that was in agreement to Houk, not arguing with RD, we just posted at the same time)
However, we had some very long, in depth discussions about wanting the private forums to remain private to some modest degree in an effort to avoid personal information from being too easily accessed while discussing things on potentially sensitive topics, and also avoid AI scraping.
We cannot simultaneously have a barrier in place to reduce the chances that folks show up to start hoovering up art and potential personally identifying information, while also leaving a key to the door and a 'please don't be an asshole' note on a table beside it.
I'm not saying it should be a Herculean effort to join, but ANY barrier is going to deter some folks, but at the same time we had a *lot* of people very vociferously declare that a (reasonable) barrier was highly desired.
And maybe there is a fine point on the spectrum that specifically covers both the 'keep out the scrapers/bots/trolls that aren't at least a bit dedicated' and 'just come on in, y'all'. Maybe that's not 20 days, maybe it's 19, maybe it's 13, maybe it's 27 or 42 or whatever.
If someone joins and enjoys the forums as they are (with, again, 2/3 of them openly available) and talks games and sports and movies and shows for a month (or whatever), and then abruptly a set of other forums are abruptly available one day, maybe they explore and see what else there is.
If the rest of the forums aren't interesting enough to keep their interest, I doubt that overnight access to start throwing Hawt Taeks in the political forum is going to help, and even if it is, I have doubts they have a strong enough grasp of the culture that this is necessarily ideal anyways.
If the US government wants to mess with a US corporation operating a website under US jurisdiction... what do you think anyone here can do about it?
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Something stricter might be necessary if we weren't getting a couple of new, non-troll, non-lurker users every month or so, but barring CoRe getting a weirdly high profile post launch I think we'd be fine with something like that. It's perfectly within the abilities of people here right now to decide "this guy's okay, that guy's obviously a troll (*zot*), and this guy we're keeping an eye on for now."
While the topical forums like D&D weren't loginwalled, that was basically happening here. Some current-events term poked the forum in a way that a thread wound up high on search results and some redcap would create an account to own the libs or whatnot. The overwhelming majority of those accounts last approximately one post; it's something well within the capabilities of the current mod team to deal with, much less a larger one working with a technically superior system. Larger-scale forum raids are super rare and trivial to see being spun up, especially on a forum that gets a handful of registration attempts a week.
I don't think it's worth trying to think about how to harden user verification against state-level actors, especially with a public forum. If someone at that level's going to have a go at the forum they're going to have a go at the forum and that gets dealt with when it happens. Short of locking the whole forum down to complete privacy (somehow including vetting the existing lurkers) you're not going to be able to plan against that effectively.
Balancing these things against also being an open forum is the main point of contention. In terms of priority, I put those in descending order of concern.
Any kind of limitation will meet points 2 through 5, but the longer the limitation the more likely you meet #1 and effectively do #5. To me, the 30 days of activity feels like it does a decent job balancing the concerns. It's long enough that it should be sufficient to meet IRS requirements, and also mitigate any bad actors or brigading -- who wants to wait 30 days to do that kind of thing?
Another idea we've mulled around is essentially the 30 days of activity OR a sponsorship model. If your friend really wants to join, you could sponsor their meeting the membership requirement. If they get banned or do something shitty, maybe you lose that privilege in the future.
According to the proposed KDs, We have to submit a call 1 month prior to the elections, and then 2 weeks after that we have the poll to actually gather names, and at the end of that we have the election itself that will run for 1 week.
So 5 weeks total from start to finish per these KDs to elect a Board.
Same timeline exists for Mods, so 5 weeks.
Assuming that we roll into the full vote for these KDs with the changes suggested by this Friday, add 1 week to vote on that.
So our timeline looks like this:
Feb 28th - Mar 7th: KD vote
Mar 7th - Apr 4th: Solicit nominees and collect names for the Board
Apr 4th - Apr 11th: Board SVT Election
Apr 11th - May 9th: Solicit nominees and collect names for Mods
May 9th - May 16th: Ratify Mods
Seems like we’re cutting it awfully close to the shutdown date. Should we maybe consider a shorter Nomination period for both Board and Mods for this initial election? We could also in tandem have shorter terms just for this initial period (1 year? Less?) to allow us to use the full process for installing Board members for the full 3 year terms.
If I'm way off base/misreading these requirements, feel free to correct me!
The afforementioned shitbirds have caught wind of geebs leaving and the lights being flickered and a target has definitely been mentioned. Whether they'll do anything remains to be seen. Forums are still being used and are making a comeback as folks burn out on algorithmic social media. A slightly burdensome membership+ approval process will probably be okay. Not being able to engage with the more raucous topics isn't going to really drive new users away. But I like the sponsorship idea.
Do you have any more details on this? Because I haven't heard anything about it yet, and as someone who currently approves membership applications here I'd love to know if there's a credible threat that I should be watching for.
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Sounds like they should lurk more to better learn/understand the culture of the forum.
As has been said previously, 6 of the 9 sub forums will be open to newcomers. It’s not like new blood will be mournfully posting in the admin section or something.
Perhaps an argument could be made to include the chat forum as well, though there was some pushback to that.
The art sub being hidden to deter easy scraping of folks work is reasonable.
Given the driveby assholes and alts that have wracked up some staggering ban numbers on political topics, not having at least some reasonable barrier to entry would be foolish for that sub.
Actual new blood needing to get to know folks for a couple of weeks chatting about movies and music before they deep dive into whatever fresh clusterfuck is happening around the world seems unlikely to be a make or break factor in the forum’s future.
Also, there are good odds we will not acquire replacement levels of fresh blood through anything but actively recruiting among friends and likeminded sorts. If someone’s WoW guild has a handful of people who might want to join, waiting a bit to expand the topic selection isn’t unreasonable.
I’ve been on forums where the political sub is literally hidden until you know to ask for access.
yeah tbh this sounds like a bunch of vague nothingness. like I still don't know who these shitbirds are, why I should be worried about them, or why their suggested existence should influence how we do signups for our weird little corner of the internet
a "slightly burdensome" (it really does suck as proposed) membership approval process without justification feels kind of unnecessary, is my feeling
but I'm also in the boat that feels like we're going overboard on several parts of this process so maybe I'm the one out of touch, I dunno
which is whatever I guess, I've been here for 20 years so I'm going down with the ship, but man I am just apparently completely out of sync with how others view the process of developing and fostering a community. I feel like we're so focused on edge cases that we're losing the forest for the trees.