Quote from: marcus_of_augustus on July 03, 2017, 02:00:34 AM

Quote from: bitserve on July 03, 2017, 01:48:40 AM

I was being ironic (see the "Now seriously..." part). I have already stated I am against that sort of restriction. The only one that I would think reasonable is restricting *newbie* accounts... and even that is not something I really like.

The history of WO attacks are based on newbie accounts that were getting created by a VERY well-resourced entity. They were able to create up to 10 (or more) newbie accounts daily from seperate IP addresses that would spam the board and WO thread especially with pedophilia referenced posts, old-man porn, alt-coin discussion (mostly ETH) and other crap just to intentionally crap up the place and discourage new bitcoiners from reading useful information about pricing expectations.

The solution to that attack was to ping the newbie accounts for the Off-topic posts and then ban those accounts from the forum. They kept creating new accounts from separate IP addresses (do you know how much that costs?) and attacking WO ... you can ask Lauda who was moderating at the time to verify these facts.

Then when the Off-topic defence eventually proved effective then the attackers are now bashing the Off-Topic button to get regular users posts deleted, posts which are not disruptive or turn the place into a dump. Now the Off-Topic defence is getting attacked and the forum moderators are sick of defending those attacks we find ourselves locked out of WO (and arguing against potentially the same attackers trying to keep newbies disruption possibilities, disrupt this discussion and shut down the thread altogether).

I know where you are going. I remember those attacks, in fact I wasn't participating in WO at that time because it was a mess with all those "flooding posts" and the like. I don't care scrolling down a posts that I am uninterested in, but it was a pain having to scroll FULL PAGES full of ascii spam or whatever.

If that's what you want to prevent it would probably be enough with restricting *newbie* (the rank) accounts from posting. Creating new accounts from different IP's is cheap as fuck (more so when this board accepts TOR so you don't even need your own proxies)... farming their activity to even become Jr Member is expensive.

Also, I don't remember seeing that sort of attack (on a considerable scale) for.. maybe since a year ago?

I don't think you stop much more of that attack by also restricting Jr Member, Members, or Full members. And for the few ones that could happen, banning would do wonders (and it's more costly for the attacker).

Any restriction over "newbie" account seems overkill and unjustified to me. Maybe I am wrong.