A quiz and a day’s wait before adding a new user is another option. Make it something that a regular lurker who read the rules would be able to pass easily, but a rando couldn’t. SCP wiki did something like this, it seemed to help with quality control.
Rotate through 3 different quizes, or scramble the quiz order sometimes, if you want to make automated sign-ups annoying for mobs and spammers. Have the web people track the number of sign-up-quiz fails (it’s a nice metric for “is there a mob at the doorstep”).
(Edit: Ah, someone already proposed a more-elaborate variant using GPT-X. Simple quizes with a few mild gotcha-questions should be enough of a screen for most cases, though.)
A proposal I think I haven’t seen posed is giving new members a “trial period.” If an average (or randomly-selected) post doesn’t have a karma score of at least X by the end of the period (or if it dips below Y at any point), they’re out and their stuff is deleted. Ban them from handing out karma until after the trial, or this quickly breaks. This probably still has weird incentive consequences that I’m not seeing, though...
...it does mean having a bit of an evaporative-filter for quality-ratings, and it means links to crappy posts turn into deadlinks in just a matter of time.
A quiz and a day’s wait before adding a new user is another option. Make it something that a regular lurker who read the rules would be able to pass easily, but a rando couldn’t. SCP wiki did something like this, it seemed to help with quality control.
Rotate through 3 different quizes, or scramble the quiz order sometimes, if you want to make automated sign-ups annoying for mobs and spammers. Have the web people track the number of sign-up-quiz fails (it’s a nice metric for “is there a mob at the doorstep”).
(Edit: Ah, someone already proposed a more-elaborate variant using GPT-X. Simple quizes with a few mild gotcha-questions should be enough of a screen for most cases, though.)
A proposal I think I haven’t seen posed is giving new members a “trial period.” If an average (or randomly-selected) post doesn’t have a karma score of at least X by the end of the period (or if it dips below Y at any point), they’re out and their stuff is deleted. Ban them from handing out karma until after the trial, or this quickly breaks. This probably still has weird incentive consequences that I’m not seeing, though...
...it does mean having a bit of an evaporative-filter for quality-ratings, and it means links to crappy posts turn into deadlinks in just a matter of time.