I tend to agree with theymos, which is the point I was trying to make to actmyname. We can't protect everyone, nor can we prevent all scams. I'm in no way suggesting that we stop trying, but we're going to have to accept some risk.
Risk is perfectly fine, as long as the willing participants are given awareness.
I was under the impression that a welcome message - an introduction to the trust system + scammer indifference - could bring about that awareness and could be a very simple and non-restrictive measure. I don't think your liberty is going to be compromised with a few extra hand movements as a guest. It is not unreasonable to request a landing page for
guest users.
The internet is full of misinformation, and most of us have learned to be skeptical when researching solutions to our problems. I don't blindly copy and paste code from stackexchange without researching the commands, nor do I assume that the youtube videos about misfiring Fords are going to address my specific mechanical issues.
Are you able to leverage people's comments in accordance to their actual content via research, or do you place some bias on their site-based reputation? Similarly to as if someone were to trust a member based on rank, the expectation of some local reputation system is perfectly reasonable. Yet, who do you
actually trust? Sure,
staff can be trusted to some degree, but apparently even DefaultTrust is a bad measure of trust due to the legacy of past exit scams: I would even grant that someone new, having read through enough of the forum, would rather trade (and post) elsewhere unless they wanted to scam others.
Which other popular forums do you visit to where the rules are inaccessible unless you go to their
forum discussion board located at the bottom of the front page, view an "Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules" buried within
SIX sticky threads, and go all the way to rule 19 to find out that scams are not moderated.
In fact, unless you count an
warning to use escrow as a direct "scams aren't going to be removed and we're not going to do anything about them" message, then there's almost nothing said about forum policy.
Was it a programming issue, integrating a DefaultTrust rating as a guest view of trust (preferably with some description/links to explanations)? DefaultTrust is good enough for registered users, after all, and the only difference is a few minutes!
Or, is it instead a fundamental problem?