Also, new registrations are asked to pay a certain evil fee here as penance for a crime one never committed. Altcoinstalks is free registration.
Actually, the evil fee you are referring to isn't something that everyone has to pay when they are creating an account on Bitcointalk, but it's only added or asked for accounts that are created using an IP address that was previously used to create an account, and that account got banned. When an account gets banned, that IP and some nearby IPs get an evil score. This is what @theymos said about it:
When you register, the IP that you used when you submitted the registration form is used to calculate your evilness. The more frequently this IP or its neighbors were banned, the more evil is associated with your account. The amount of evil associated with an IP decays slowly over time, but the amount of evil associated with an account does not. You must pay or be manually whitelisted to enable posting on one of these "banned" accounts.
We also have some reputed members, such as @LoyceV, who can whitelist users upon request in their thread, and then they won't need to pay the evil fee. Still, there is no guarantee that one is going to get whitelisted only by requesting, because @theymos said that the process shouldn't allow people to evade bans. Still, it should be a relief for those who didn't do anything wrong but got an evil score because of someone else doing something wrong around them:
If any very-veteran members want to volunteer, I can give you the ability to whitelist users. (All Staff can already whitelist users, as well.) Perhaps then someone could create a topic like "List of email addresses for people who can whitelist you for free", which I could link-to on the evil fee page. However, these IPs have evil for a reason. If it was sufficient for them to just solve a captcha or something, I'd have them do that. Before whitelisting someone, you have to do something to be pretty sure that they're not evading a ban and just going to get banned again. You may get the impression from complaints on the forum that everyone hits the fee and it's never warranted, but this is selection bias: the fee is more rare, and the vast majority of accounts that hit it should not be whitelisted.
So, it's something to punish the rule breakers and not for every new and normal user.
