Quote from: Daniel91 on July 17, 2021, 12:47:01 PM

In the last few years, I have suggested this forum to three of my friends.
Two of them did not even manage to register to the end due to evil fee rules.
When they saw the message that because of the evil fee they had to pay some amount to be able to post on this forum they just started laughing and said there was no way they would pay any money for the right to post on some forum.

I've always felt the same way: I'm pretty sure I can consider myself a contributing user, but there's no way in hell I would have joined this forum on February 26, 2015 if I would have had to pay for it. At that point, I owned maybe a few bucks worth of Bitcoin, and I wasn't going to hand it over.
Luckily, I didn't need to pay an evil fee (and I had no idea it even existed at the time).

Considering how many spammers we have, it's obvious the captcha and evil fee doesn't stop them. Since the Merit system now makes account farming pointless, would it be worth to try running the forum without evil fees for a while?
Consider this:

Quote from: theymos on June 25, 2018, 03:16:59 AM

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

Daniel91's personal experience confirms evil fees are damaging to the community, and many scammers/spammers have shown it doesn't stop them. I can't believe I'm saying this, but: can we go without evil fees on new users?

Quote from: Daniel91 on July 17, 2021, 12:47:01 PM

However, I believe that a large number of new members have dropped out of this forum due to the evil fee and the hostile welcome of older members.

I've seen this too, and I think I've become easier on Newbies over time. Of course there's the obvious scammers who deserve no mercy, but I try to Merit anyone who looks like a real user, and help them out whenever I can. I also try not to be trigger happy on the negative trust, and like to ask myself: "Does this makes Bitcointalk a better place?" before tagging someone. I would for instance not tag Newbies for asking for a loan: anyone who's dumb enough to trust a Newbie has only himself to thank, but more importantly the Newbie can learn how the forum works later on and still become a contributing user. A negative tag right from the start isn't encouraging them.

Quote from: CryptopreneurBrainboss on July 17, 2021, 01:21:29 PM

We are losing because this generation aren't familiar with this format the forum is using.

I like this forum format, and don't need it to become "more modern". But I also know many people easily fall for flashy looks (that's probably why every ICO scam site looks about the same). I don't like Reddit, it always makes me feel like they want to decide what I get to see. Social media in general are even worse: there's for sure an algorithm that determines what the user sees.