Topic: Can we restrict user registerations somehow? - page 2. (Read 853 times)

The rules are the rules and it states that multiple(unlimited)accounts are allowed,if we're to implement your suggestion,we will be changing the rules on that(which we wouldn't do)
Thus it's up to any user whether legitimate or "illegitimate" to own as many accounts as possible as long as such accounts do not break the forum rules,only when they do can they be tagged illegitimate and punishment meted out

This forum upholds user anonymity and would never request for phone number verification

I think you are right in that most people won't be familiar with it. But I think those that are spreading viruses and posting advertisement spam are probably more that familiar with Bitcoin and this forum. Spambots probably wouldn't notice. But don't spam bots just post 1/2 posts and then just create another anyway? even if they don't do this right now that would be a way of getting around it.

I think any system we put in would be beneficial even  if there are ways around it. A good example of this is when shadowbanning every newbie until they have been whitelisted. This would actually require the spambots or malicious users to post constructively first of all before they start their spamming and they would have to do this for every account which I think is the best possible way of reducing this. Not many people will be willing to go through all of that wait a few hours just to get their accounts banned right away.

I think that's the best solution and there's no real need of any other restrictions or anything.

They'll work it out eventually, especially if they have alts, but my suggestion isn't really to leave them languishing in some sort of digital limbo, but just to stop bots and malware spreaders from being a nuisance. They'll either just be accepted, or banned straight away if they're a bot or spreading malware. Users who post rubbish or break the rules in some other capacity like posting a ref link or something could be warned so they don't continue their behaviour.


He put it under the ok category:



I agree my suggestion would be useful and is pretty much one of the only ways to eradicate spambots and other nefarious characters, but I disagree with what you suggested and it wouldn't stop people spreading malware as they still get the chance to spread it before we catch them. Just giving people shadowbans after the fact isn't a great idea. If they break the rules then they should be banned, not just take up server space until they figure it out.


Spambots won't be aware of this and most people won't be aware of this feature who are just signing up to the forum. Most people won't even notice it as is the nature of shadowbanning, but it will catch all those who aren't familiar of the forum and how it works and it doesn't penalise everyone in the process.

The bold part is exactly what I was hoping to be suggested. The aim of this thread was to maybe brainstorm and collect some ideas. I never wanted to propose that registrations would just be completely stopped and just limit to invite only. Thats stupid in my opinion.

What you have suggested though is actually a pretty good idea. If users don't know they are banned and their posts aren't showing up to the public then this might actually prevent them from realizing it and creating new accounts. People who are aware of shadow bans might check with another browser which isn't logged on. But what we could do is display shadow banned users to the public but not to registered users. This would then require them to actually make a new account to check whether they are banned which I doubt a lot of people will do if there are no indications that they are banned.

I don't know the best way to go about this or if theymos has said anything about it. But shadow bans could be pretty damn useful in my opinion. I would do it differently to how you suggest it though. I think instead of shadow banning every newbie until they are whitelisted you could just issue shadow bans when someone is breaking the rules. This way they won't expect that they are shadow banned. Or you could combine the two. I like your idea because it prevents bots from just posting garbage but would certainly increase the moderators work load. If the workload can be managed combining both of these could be a great idea.

The issue with your proposal is everyone is going to know they need to be whitelisted until their posts show up so they will make constructive posts for the first few and then they'll continue on their spamming ways. If we combine this with a shadow ban that moderators can issue then a lot of the users won't even notice.

But what exactly are you suggesting? It's useless just saying 'restrict 'registrations'. Restrict them how? And how do we not penalise everyone else under the same net? If people are spreading malware then just keep reporting those threads or posts but until you're going to propose something feasible then it's pointless even disusing (especially given the fact that theymos is almost certainly not going to implement any restrictions that hurt everyone).

One thing I've suggested in the past is that all new users are essentially shadowbanned until their first post or two has been verified by staff before they go public. That way spam bots wouldn't get through and anyone spreading malware could be dealt with before they get the chance to infect everyone.


Don't click the links unless you trust them. We are not responsible for users personal security and that is something only the individual can protect against. People really should be more careful with what they click, download, or who they send their money to.

I have already mentioned that I think restricting user registrations would probably be a little bit too overkill. But the fact remains and that is we have a massive problem with spamming and virus spreading. I have seen the altcoin board myself and there are many fake announcements trying to act as another project and trying to compromise users via a virus. They get banned and the topic gets removed and then they create a new account and do the exact same thing and the worst thing is people are falling for it and getting their systems compromised.


None of these solutions prevent users from creating a new account to post their viruses/advertisement. Something has to be done about it as its kind of out of the moderators hands as all they can do is ban that existing account. Then it takes them 2 minutes to create a new account and expose their malicious post to another few hundred people.

There has been lots of suggestions on how to reduce spam - restrictions from starting threads, higher merit requirement to enable signature, limited to specific boards and lots more, and majority of these suggestions are targetted an new entries and members with newbie rank.

This rank constitutes a bulk of the members here and hence contribute largely to spam. But if we take it by percentage, we may be surprised that a higher percentage of other, higher ranks could be spamming more than the newbies.
Newbie generalization on the forum is reaching an all time high, and the prejudice would discourage lots of eager members.

The system is good as it is now, as long as we keep reporting spam posts. Any major shift could have significant long-term effects.

I'll agree on theymos's decision towards this thing. His intention of why this should not happen is pretty clear and fair.

This forum should welcome all type of new users. We should not get the opportunity for those who wants to learn or discuss anything about crypto by the reason of because most of the newbies just toxicate the community.

In fact we have a lot of newbies right now probably rank FM bellow are actually contributing more than the higher ranks (which are actually more toxic. I know that you know some of this higher ranks)

We have been chewing this topic for more than a year now. It is clear that more restrictions will not come any time soon ( or at all).
Basically you have two main problems :
-Money from advertising.
-Scammers.

When you have money involved like for advertising the genuine idea is really brilliant but also very utopian. It's almost impossible to stop those who try to abuse them and there is no way to control anonymous entities to follow some rules based only on moral values.
The only way to fight them back is just to scratch them off the forum. The Ann section has to go, together with the bounties,airdrops,and sig. campaigns, then the bots will be gone (almost, part of them will move to service section, but just for a while, keep reading).
Then your spam, bot and shitposting problems will be solved.

Then we have to focus on the scammers problem. Again, there is no way to stop the scammers (for the same reasons I mentioned above) if you do not take their playground away- the Markedplace, which will be a disaster for many people but again, this is the core of the problem, there is no way to go around it and apply some "fixes". They just gonna fail, again...

If those 2 problems are solved, the forum will turn into a quite place for discussions and development, and 99.9% of the active users at the moment will be gone. Ivory Tower will be blossoming again, and the Off-topic section will have only The Round- Earth Speculation thread active

No money = No problem.

BTW some of the old users may return. Maybe satoshi will show up again, if he likes the new environment

1) Theymos isn't going to do this (and nor should he) and 2) Restrict them how? I agree we have a huge problem with spam here but there are better ways to tackle it and without penalising everyone else. Any restrictions you put in place will just scare off genuine users whilst the ones who are here to abuse the forum will jump through whatever hoops you put in front of them time and time again because they are financially motivated to do so. Imagine you're new user and you come here and you struggle to post or are banned straight away (or restricted heavily in some way)  and all you wanted was to get an answer or genuinely talk about bitcoin. Those users will think fuck that and likely leave to never return. For those users who come here solely because they've been told they can earn good money here those are the ones that won't be stopped by a few hoops and will continue to create accounts and evade rules and bans etc. There are ways we can tackle the spam and many have already been suggested but heavily restricting users isn't really the way to go and it's futile even discussing it because theymos is dead against these sorts of restrictions. We can start by tackling the cause of the spam which is lazy campaigns. Requiring more than one merit to get a signature would also help (I think it should be a minimum of ten).

It's not a perfect system This explains it a bit:
My suggestion would be to add evilness retroactive. This too isn't perfect, but might help a bit too.

This is a forum firewall package for SMF, and it is one that I am considering using for the Fit to Talk project.

https://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2815

Is not clear to me how this thing works in the case of a person with a dynamic IP (when they can change IP simply by resetting the router).
The unit of evil in the case of one user is banned is calculated on the old ip (the one which he made the infraction) or with the new IP of the new connection?
If the case is the second a simple change of ip after each session is the easiest way to avoid this punishment, you will get 1 account banned ant the others without EVIL IP.

Read this:
I'd love to have less spam, especially from bots, but I don't expect theymos to add more restrictions to new registrations.

I would like to see much more bans. If I check some random spammers on BPIP, many of them have many deleted posts, but aren't banned. Even posts reported for plagiarism don't always lead to a ban. The chances of getting caught for plagiarism or spam are low, as it's humans fighting against bots. If those spam bots get second, thirth ... and even tenth chances, it feels very demotivating to report them.

You can report the posts that quote spam or off-topic posts too (that's what I do)

Considering the fact I've seen "incidents" where there are suddenly 6000 more registrations than usual on one day, I wouldn't be against banning all Brand New accounts that are more than a month old. Make this a one-time thing, so spam bots don't get a reason to start spamming with their new accounts, and this won't hurt many real users, while disabling hundreds of thousands of sleeping spam accounts that are waiting to be activated.
As an alternative, it would be good to add "units of evil" to existing Brand New accounts, even if the IP wasn't evil when they registered. That means a spam bot that registered many accounts at once will be punished on all accounts if some of his accounts get banned.

The thing is that there are so many already unbanned inactive registered accounts, that even if you wanted to restrict accounts from registering, setting into motion whatever set of verifications or restrictions, we’ll likely get a lot of already inactive registered accounts coming back to life with a market for them.

We have asked several times to solve this problem but so far apart from requesting a merit to reach the junior level, nothing has been done.
A solution to this problem could be to remove the possibility of posting without limits (apart from the temporal one based on the activity) for the newbies.
Yes I know that it's not just them the problem and not only they are the spammers and not only they try to scam but I think 90% of the problems are caused by them.
An additional step also this suggested several times could be to raise the minimum merit to reach the rank of junior, one merit is a lot for they majority of newbies but it is also a low amount at the same time and apparently reading here on the forum can be easily bought.

In my opinion restricting user registrations might help but I should prefer on bitcointalk.org to promote the website for the cryptocurrency enthusiast that until now do not have the idea of this website for cryptocurrency discussions. I bet we can gain more especially on pumping bitcoin market price. I myself can attest to this because at first I do not want to invest in bitcoin and just will do bounty hunting but later on I decided to invest on BTC.

Email verification of accounts won't be as good as SMS verification. Like what the OP said banned members know how to create new accounts with new email addresses via a VPN network so email verifications at this point is useless. SMS verification although it might be more effective I don't think that new users would like the idea giving away their number to register an account in a forum, it might even discourage potential good members to even join the forum. Honestly I really don't have any good idea on how we will separate the spammers from good members when it comes to account creation without sacrificing the convenience for all of them, including the people who are not spammers in the first place.

I'm a bit ambivalent about anonymous members. I might be mobile, but I don't try to conceal my identity (ies), and it wouldn't be too difficult to track me down. However, I'm in England, and I understand the limits here. Members in countries like Venezuela have a lot more of a problem, and they have to be circumspect in their comments, and I can understand their need to remain anonymous.

I believe that anyone promoting an investment programme, or looking for payments from other members should forfeit their anonymity though.

Emails can be hidden and not exposed yo public view, having a confirmation requirement does not reduce anonymity of a user or the number of alt accounts they can own.
And for the security of your account, it's best to have access your the registered email. Although implementing this would only raise the difficulty a little for the bot account creators but it's still easy to go around it.
For now we can only report such posts when we see them, and maybe a report profile option (or post history) should be made available, this would give the mods a list of suggested profiles to ban