I have made a decision to alter and/or remove various restrictions on Voat. I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s something both @Atko and I believe needs to be reevaluated.
Voat has always had a problem with spam. @Amalek would spam posts and hijack the new queue making it unusable. MH101 and then later @SaneGoatiSwear would hijack comment pages making them unusable. The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.
Voat will not keep in place a system that permanently limits a segment of users from debating and conversing. This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.
Voat will shortly be going live with a new code base, and I want to have a new system designed and ready for when this happens, so I am posting this announcement to get feedback from the community.
The main areas of concern:
- Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments
- Limiting any account that spam comments
TL;DR
We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.
How do we do it?
All options are on the table
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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VoutGuy ago
The real problem is alts.
Require 3 captchas to register. Require unique email, maybe? Anything to minimize automation of account registration.
New accts: 2-5 posts a day, for a month.
As to voting. I dunno. Allow a certain number of votes early on. I'm more concerned with 3-4 alts plastering all/new with the same spamporn site than who gets points.
Crensch ago
Easily gotten around, and even botted.
Make 50 accounts today, 50 accounts tomorrow, 50 accounts the next day, and in a month, you have 150 unrestricted accounts.
VoutGuy ago
Captchas can be automated/circumvated?
Crensch ago
Edit: *
I'm pretty sure I came across a wave of news articles about this, actually quite long ago. So I have to say, yes.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, Captcha-brand captchas were found to have a bug that allowed circumventing them. I don't* recall hearing that it was fixed.
Regardless, how long would it take you to make 50 accounts with 3 captchas each?
captainstrange ago
Captchas dont really test what you think they do. See Bots 'move the cursor' and navigate the page differently from what an actual human does. The captcha checks to see if navigation is straight-line perfect to the submit button, like it has been automated. Meanwhile humans never draw a straight line with their mouse. Captcha bots creators figured this out ages ago and use it to buy up all the concert tickets for example. Pretty standard stuff actually. When you do captcha the system is just measuring how 'human' your mouse movements are. The task you do to complete the catpcha is largely meaningless, and in fact the designers of captcha take your hand-labelled image data and sell it to machine learning companies, getting you to do the work for them. Funny that.