This will require people, be it editors or moderators, to decide if the journal entries are good enough to lift probation. I wouldn't trust user points, someone with four accounts could mod up the journals to get the user accepted if you go by user points.

Perhaps a new user que needs to be added that only editors and moderators can assign points to probationary new user accounts? So they can look only at journals of users on probation. Make someone work to get a new account off probation rather than give them full access for nothing.

New users again...great [eg]

AS for the concept of sponsorship being well stupid... I disagree: I think it could be done effectively with other changes. I don't think the implementation described/planned would have been a good idea though.

the problem is, there is nothing automatic about it, it requires constant human intervention: there just isn't any automated technical answer to problems of trolls (although a complaint reporting system and a mod threshold, say those who continually get below 0.5, that helps: it flags accounts for human scrutiny and judgment)

now dupe accounts are a bigger problem, because if you think about it, there is no technical or human solution to this

ip addresses don't work (dynamically assigned ips, many computers behind a firewall, spoofing, etc.)

the problem is, on a site with democratic ambitions like kuro5hin, the ability of someone to greatly influence the outcome of an ideologically contentious story is a real serious problem: there is a strong incentive for someone who loves a bad story with an ideological slant they love or who hates a good story with an ideological slant they hate to register dupe accounts and fire away

at the VERY least, rusty should implement a delay of one day on accounts to have voting abilities... this creates a damper on impulse-driven voting rage

but even combining human intuition with some well written log analyzing tools to catch lazy dupe account holders (4 accounts in half an hour with the same ip voting against a story), is a LOT of hard, concentrated work

if you think about it, a determined dupe account holder will get by any system you implement (randomize their access times, spoof their ips, use different machines: work/ home/ mobile access, etc.)

but you CAN greatly raise the bar on dupe accounts and make it very difficult for dupe account holders to do their mischief

one idea: i think rusty should implement a threshold system for voting

that is, only users who post at a certain frequency (at least a couple of posts per month, for at least a month, for example: proving they are a living breathing account with interest invested in the health of the site) and only accounts that get modded above a certain score on average (say 1.5)... those are the only accounts that should be allowed to vote on stories

again, dupe account holders can get around this, but at least it makes them work harder to do so, and that really means something: the harder it is for a dupe account holder to manipulate story outcomes, the better

rusty used have a system about allowing 0 modding of stories, and used to have a system whereby certain high-frequency, high-modded users could review and reverse hidden comments... so he has half of the code necessarty for such a system in hand already

you can never get rid of the dupes completely, but you can apply pressure with some clever ideas here and there and reduce their influence significantly, to the point where no one can rightly gripe about them, greatly increasing confidence in the site and pleasure with the experience here

and one more thing: NO MORE MOD BOMBERS!!!!!!!!

if an account never posts, and continually rates comments at 0, or 1: KILL THE ACCOUNT

Give us some tools for seeing what kind of ratings people have and what kind they make, and create a 'smart matching' function which seeks out users who's reading habits, ratings, and postings match up well with our own, thus we can sort out our own 'sub-communities'.

What? Really? ... Really, Really? You raised over USD $70,000 in a few weeks and you have the audacity to say that we're generally not interested in it? Or are you saying that we were simply outright stupid to have gone along with your "idea."

Maybe I have missed something but I don't see any more info on the CMF. Probably also a stupid idea. In fact, the whole thing was so stupid that it would be a waste of time to account for that money at all. You've so magnanimously re-opened new user accounts because why? Your statistical analysis of posts determined to be inflammatory by a specialized Bayesian filter crossed the "cooled down" threshold? The phase of the moon? You're just in the mood now? You also sound less than enthusiastic about attempting to do anything to make things better.

So some asshole posted demeaning *fake* pictures of your wife. So trolls and flooders suck and they're wearing out your delete button. Somehow that outweighed all the good will and hard earned cash that so many hundreds of other people gave you earlier? Having neglected to fulfill any of your promises except to keep K5 technically operational, you decided to ignore working on it when things got a little too frustrating and do something sexier and more profitable. Great. So glad you chose the neglect-and-check method instead of working on a solution or taking one of the billions of ideas floated here and just running with it. Don't give us shit about how you were worried that a change would kill the site. Killing off new user-ship and conspicuously failing to post site news was surely one of the best ways to decrease traffic on a site that lives by stories and commentary from users who are obviously interested in seeing changes made.

So what do you need? A mechanism to identify users and raise the barrier to entry enough so that the perverse asses of the net don't get to shit on our picnic. That sounds to me like a credit card number. $1 for 2 years. Add a $20 charge for getting kicked off of the site, decisions to be vetted by a random selection of "successful" story authors. You make up your own numbers and variations. Devise a way implement a web of trust. The friggin ideas are there and you've read more of them than I have.

I was teetering on the edge of signing up to k5 when the new users were banned, but have kept reading (I get pretty bored at work), and was elated when I saw this story!

Because of this it got me thinking.

I know ther are a lot of ideas about different ways to keep out the "bad" users, signal to noise, etc.

My idea is:
Do this once every few months. Disallow user sign up as a rule, and then spring it randomly for a few days or a week, then go back to disallowing. This way you will definitely get new users who have been paying attention, and hopefully filter out a lot of the folks trying to be an asspain.

This is just an idea, and I'm sure it will go the way of most other proposed solutions to the problem. :)

Dagnabbit.

Close the hole.

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stalinism

look man, it's real easy to solve this place's problems. all you have to do is stop being a pussy about kicking people out. if someone posts nothing but inane, intentionally useless crap, throw them out immediately and ip ban them. and if someone professes to be someone you've banned before, ban them for it.

also, from what i understand, there are ways to detect proxies by portscanning them. you might consider giving that a try. you know, unless you're an established user, no proxy use. it might keep some legitimate new users away, but most of the users with uid's higher the 50000 post nothing but crap anyway.

_____

stalinism

Now I have to come back ...

--
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell

Also... next time, consider using the edit queue. In short:

s/tmenezes/tmenezes'/
s/a stupid/an incredibly misbegotten, horrifically stupid/
s/chnace/chance/
s/who/whom/
s/There's/There are/

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k5 is not the new Adequacy k thnx bye