17
votes
Open Tildes day?
Apologies if this has been discussed already.
I had this idea of a compromise between Tilde's need to grow, and the desire to avoid an Eternal September. Couldn't we make Tildes open to registration one day (or one week) a year?
This avoids a lot of the problems associated with open registration websites. For example, a spammer/troll can't just re-open an account after being banned. Of course, they could have opened several accounts and re-invite themselves, but I think these could be easier to track (especially with invite tracing).
It would also give time to train new users before the next batch comes in.
Of course, the exact timing could be tuned. It could be a day a month, for example.
What do you think?
It's kind of redundant for Tildes itself, Deimos can tweak things easily enough. In the context of Tildes being an open source project, where many websites using it might open up, it would be quite useful to have a more robust way of doing it.
I think this degree of flexibility is entirely reasonable. We don’t know how things are going to go down and it would be unreasonable to commit to a single approach.
I do disagree with having a a week of registrations a year, as I stated previously.
This seems excessive. People interested on Tildes would not mark that on the calendar and wait to sign in, they would just forget about it.
It would also be extremely frustrating. If a website made me wait a whole year to register I would probably think I don’t deserve that treatment and avoid it out of spite.
Besides, IDK how open registrations will work exactly. Maybe we should deal the problem when/if it happens.
I wouldn't expect people to mark it on their calendars. Rather, we could announce it on other media (Twitter/Reddit/...) when the time comes. It would also be an opportunity to promote Tildes every once in a while.
And of course, we'd keep the invite system around.
This might work for highly sought torrent trackers, but Tildes is not in such a high demand and probably never will be. We’re a highly moderated text oriented community that is not on Stack Exchange. We don’t need to make an effort to hinder growth, we’ll most likely grow slowly by default.
You said "hinder", but this would be in addition to the current invite system. It would be another way for tildes to get new users.
What about some sort of timed system, where a user is free to sign up but can't comment for a certain amount of time, or can't create a post for a certain amount of time? This is how NeoGAF used to do it back in its good old days.
I thought about this too, but can't bad guys just provision new accounts continuously? I think this would just discourage newbies without many advantages.
You can apply a similar objection to your original proposal and many like it.
Not really. In my original proposal, new uninvited accounts are only created once a year. That gives you a lot of time to detect and close bad accounts.
In both proposals bad actors can infiltrate and cause havoc. And nothing prevents an individual or group from creating hundreds or thousands of accounts.
Something to deal with either way.
My thought was that it would be easier to detect, group and delete these accounts if bad guys don't get a new chance to try every day. Of course this remains to be proven :)
Yeah. My impression is that you’re overestimating how much and how fast Tildes will grow, as well as the attention it will receive. We’ll see.
If that's the case (and I agree it can very well be), then we should probably allow open registration soon. But in previous discussions, it seemed like a sizeable portion of the community feared an "Eternal September". Hence my proposal.
I see. I do disagree with a few tendencies and overall consensus here on Tildes. There’s a sizable tendency towards purity with which I only partially agree.
I think this sounds like a fine idea.