OK guys, what if... hear me out... users had to register to post on the site?From my point of view, the single biggest problem with the site from the moderation perspective is that it's too easy to evade bans, especially in the phoneposting world. I've been jannying for years now and am constantly dealing with both overt ban-evaders and people I'm pretty sure are only shitposting because they're confident they can evade a ban easily.Suppose that in order to post on the site, you first had to register a username and password using a unique e-mail address. We could even build in a delay of, say, 24 hours to the registration. Posting would be exactly the same - the username has no bearing on what displays on your post, it's just required for you to log in to post.Outwardly, the site would be identical, but with this new barrier to posting, all of a sudden a ban evader needs a new e-mail address every time they want to shitpost again, and/or an additional wait time. The pain of doing this would make the number of ban evaders drop dramatically and post quality would skyrocket as a result - not because ban evaders make up a large proportion of posters, but because their constant shitposting fosters a culture of shitposting.Think about it. Tell me I'm crazy.
>>8145you are crazy. the vast, vasy majority of our userbase would quit the day that this went through. this will never, ever happen
>>8145who made this janitor a clown?
>>8146this is kind of what I wanted to say. Part of the magic of 4chins is that you can just *post* without giving your information over. There's no requirements. Unfettered communication. It's not perfect but it's good enough.
>>8146Honestly I doubt that the majority of the users would quit with this change. As a user of the site I don't really see how it would affect me. I'd have to register once and then I could just auto-login thereafter. I understand that our more paranoid or data-conscious users would be concerned, but honestly, we'd only be storing an e-mail, a username, and a password. It's no more than any other site stores and the actual posts would still be anonymous to the userbase.
>>8150And, adding on to this, granted I have no idea how our finances work but I would absolutely not mind if, say, a quarter of our userbase left. Some of the boards are too active right now and could do with chilling out a bit.
>>8150>>8151respectfully, I think you're wrong.>Honestly I doubt that the majority of the users would quit with this change.No other type of major website allows posting without a login. It's low friction, and on a website that thrives on posts (good and bad), having a whole signup and login process only gets rid of people who just want to speak their mind.>As a user of the site I don't really see how it would affect me.As another user, this would dissuade me from using 4chan. Being able to post with no visible record of what you're actually saying is extremely valuable in my opinion. It's part of what makes 4chan special.>I understand that our more paranoid or data-conscious users would be concerned, but honestly, we'd only be storing an e-mail, a username, and a password.This describes a huge portion of /pol/, which is one of the most active boards on the site. It simply would not work well with the people who 4chan is made for.Sorry to be harsh. I'm just not buying it. The whole proposal undermines a huge chunk of what 4chan was founded on.
>>8152Not harsh at all fren, it's a very civil and tactful response. I understand that it undermines the premise of 4chan in a way, I just feel like it's a very abstract sort of undermining; practically speaking it really doesn't feel all that different to me. I very much agree with your points.I think it's just that I have a hard time empathizing with the viewpoint that the site is no longer appealing if I have to log in to it to post; it feels farfetched to me. But if you do feel that way, it stands to reason that a large chunk of the site may feel the same, and the point about different boards being polarized on the subject is an interesting one as well.
>>8145>OK guys, what if... hear me out... users had to register to post on the site?No.If anything what we could use is an automatic range banner that offers thread specific 15 minute time-outs when it detects that a mobile carrier IP from a range that has an IP that has been BR or B& in the thread in the past 15 minutes after the request/ban was filed. I think this would filter most casual evaders if not even some career ones but the implementation would be cancerous and highly dependent on whether such ranges could even be identified without fucking over desktop users on the same ISP.
>>8145You're crazy.
>Suppose that in order to post on the site, you first had to register a username and password using a unique e-mail address. We could even build in a delay of, say, 24 hours to the registrationSo inviting evaders to farm accounts to not even bother resetting their rooter?I believe the main problem is trying to prevent ban evading. Once a user is banned, it's their choice if they want to respect the moderation or just continue posting, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. It's simply pointless to police over users for ban evading unless they are a known problematic dude or openly admitting evading.>>8150>As a user of the site I don't really see how it would affect me. I'd have to register once and then I could just auto-login thereafterThis can be controversial, but I think 4chan's appeal to many people isn't only the anonymity, but also the ease of use that comes by not having to fill a form to "sign up". I personally, would rather post with some kind of tripcode I can't rid of that would identify me over threads instead of posting anonymously with an "account".
ok we'll do this on monday
Is this the official thread of the April Fools 2022 Planning Committee?
>>8167imagine the response if we did this (for april fools), but only on /pol/ because something something extremist contenti feel like most would get the joke, but...
>>8145and you just killed 4chanask the average joe if they've heard of our site, many people will havethe same folk don't know about SA, most likelythere's a reason for this>>8166LOL
The best way to kill phoneposter ban evasion is to force them to use a pass.
>>8175I'd argue it's to force them to use an app. Just ban the client from posting when they're banned.
Wild ideas are always cool but honestly there's no need for this. Moderation is strict enough, punishments are strict enough, and getting any harsher isn't necessarily going to correlate to a better site - it's just going to piss people off and make them act worse. We should only consider lessening any degree of anonymity if the future of the site itself is at stake, and otherwise stay the hell away from that idea.
While I think a drastic solution like E-mail User Registration, no matter how anonymous, will not work well, I do agree with OP on that it's way too easy to evade bans.Serial ban evaders and bots have free reign on most boards and I'm sure everyone here has knowledge of it and encountered at least one idiot with a bunch of proxies and a mission. And it's not like setting up proxies is that big of a feat, as there's mobile applications any troglodyte can use.The most appealing idea I've seen thrown around was that IP addresses that have not posted recently need to wait 30 minutes before being able to post.All that is needed for this is a list containing the IP and two timestamps, "First Seen" and "Last Seen": IPs that are not on the list or were "First Seen" less than 30 minutes ago need to wait a short while before they can post. IPs that were "Last Seen" more than, say, 5 days ago, get removed from the list, and if they show up again need to wait 30 minutes before being able to post.I don't know how much the system is overburdened at the current time, but it's easy to assume that every post gets checked for captcha/pass, individual bans, range bans, filtered or banned text, copyrighted or banned images, and probably much more, and since the server is not dying every other day it must be quite efficient and not at its final limit.If a global thread creation timer of 30 minutes was set in place this would single-handedly stop all but the most sophisticated spambot or most resolute evader, while making evasion a time, money and patience-draining annoyance.A regular user who comes to 4chan to discuss actual interests and not to hurl insults at strangers or share the latest illegal content would still have to wait out those initial 30 minutes, but unless they get banned for willfully breaking the actually really lenient rules they would not be hindered that much from posting and have a good time on the site while still enjoying the very same anonymity as always.
It will always be an arms race. If you use some kind of identity verification (e.g. email), there will be services that pop up that will create a dummy email account that can just be thrown away. Throwaway email accounts already exist for sure, and a provider can easily make a handful of new domain names for a non-prohibitive cost - and that we have to keep a blacklist of. It's just trading one game of whack-a-mole for another. Compared to other platforms, 4chan is relatively simple and adding more complexity to that system just opens up opportunities for new issues down the road, and roadblocks for future posters. There's never going to be a 100% solution for ban evaders, and what we have now works remarkably well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
>>8207>what we have now works remarkably wellFuck no it doesn't, the website is absolutely riddled with ban evaders.>>8206This idea is interesting but I worry that it would produce too much of a hindrance/annoyance for users who only occasionally post and who would therefore constantly be getting timed out (relative to when they actually do post). Having to wait a half hour to reply to a thread is a huge barrier - a lot of people won't even be at the computer that long, or on a fast moving board the thread is likely to be pruned altogether by that time.
>>8206The other issue with this is that it would wreak havoc on phoneposters, because phone IPs change all the time, right? So I could imagine a hybrid model of this and the OP idea where you can either wait 30 minutes or you can log in. Or maybe you could try storing a cookie on the device to keep track of the last seen date.
>>8145Go back to >>>/reddit/
>>8156This idea isn't half bad.
>>8206A more appealing idea than OP's.>>8212A shorter timer, then.>>8213Phoneposters can dial 8.
>>8207>There's never going to be a 100% solution for ban evaders, True.>and what we have now works remarkably well. I don't quite agree with that.
>>8212>>8217>the website is absolutely riddled with ban evaders.>I don't quite agree with that.Obviously individual experiences may vary, but as a normal user I think most ban evaders are completely invisible or minimally if at all intrusive. If you're staring at the report queue all day of course you'll see them. But if you're just some anon browsing your favorite board, you can likely go weeks without knowingly seeing an evader. And when you do see an evader, you don't necessarily know if they are actively evading or waited out a ban, or are even just an individual instead of a collection of people.And even if anon does correctly identify an evader, even a prolific one like barneyfag, he's probably just going to ignore it or think very little of it; one or two posts in a thread of a couple hundred just don't mean 0that much. Just try to keep in mind that you spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at the worst of the worst (what gets reported). Also try to consider all the anons that you gave a simple post deletion, WR, or maybe even an off-topic BR to and set them back on course.The diminishing returns on fighting highly autistic evaders are pretty extreme; the goal is to improve the experience for as many people as much as possible, not finally defeat your arch-nemesis evader.
>>8218I have friends who are not jannies and they regularly spot evaders, though to them it's a funny joke to evade a ban.But yeah, user registration isn't the fix. 4chan's primary selling point is it's perceived anonymity. As soon as you ask a user to sign up to post, you destroy the main appeal to 4chan, and you'll see a mass exodus of users. If we were to do something like this, I propose a more invisible system.It's possible to identify a user using a number of details the browser exposes. Things like the IP address are baby stuff, but we can also use details like the useragent, the resolution of the browser, we can store and read cookies, and much more. Basically I'm describing device fingerprinting. If we can develop a system that fingerprints devices with sufficient accuracy, and we can use that fingerprint in a ban to identify potential evasions, we could likely see the end of well known evaders like Barneyfag and more. It's a damn sight harder to evade a ban when we're tracking more than just an IP.It's even harder if we can "shadowban" evaders, ie the site will respond as if their posts have made it onto the site, but it will only be shown to them, not to anybody else. That way we perpetuate the idea that they pulled a fast one on us, evaded their ban, and are continuing to stir shit however nobody is paying attention. Could also make life easier in detecting evaders posting screenshots around, however idk how viable this is conjunction with post limit, image limit, and the post counter.
>>8218>If you're staring at the report queue all day of course you'll see them. I signed up as a janny because I was tired of the rampant shitposting by chronic evaders. Being able to delete and BR them, and having them reported to me, that's great, but it only works so well.>one or two posts in a thread of a couple hundred just don't mean 0that muchI don't think you appreciate just how prolific some shitposters are.>the goal is to improve the experience for as many people as much as possible, not finally defeat your arch-nemesis evader.Sure, which is why I don't want anything as obtrusive as having to register an account, and why I'm always hesitant and in opposition to rangebans. That doesn't mean I'm very satisfied with chronic evaders aggressively spewing shit to degrade the experience of normal anons.>It's possible to identify a user using a number of details the browser exposes. Things like the IP address are baby stuff, but we can also use details like the useragent, the resolution of the browser, we can store and read cookies, and much more. Basically I'm describing device fingerprinting. If we can develop a system that fingerprints devices with sufficient accuracy, and we can use that fingerprint in a ban to identify potential evasions, we could likely see the end of well known evaders like Barneyfag and more. It's a damn sight harder to evade a ban when we're tracking more than just an IP.This is an interesting idea, though I wonder how prone it is to error.>That way we perpetuate the idea that they pulled a fast one on us, evaded their ban, and are continuing to stir shit however nobody is paying attention. That would be satisfying, but I feel that's also a deceptive measure, admittedly against someone who has no interest in following rules in the slightest, but nonetheless it brings to mind autosaging threads, a practice which isn't at all transparent.
>>8166based site tanker mod
>>8173speaking of SA rip lowtax
>>8152> Being able to post with no visible record of what you're actually saying is extremely valuable in my opinion. It's part of what makes 4chan specAnon's not saying the account name is shown anywhere other than the login screen. You still show up as anon.
>>8145I think this is a terrible idea and you should be ashamed for even proposing it. It takes only a crazed mod on a bad day to go from "you need to register to post anonymously" to "reddit-like dystopia where everyone is identified all the time, Jannies became Judge Dredd-like executioners and a certain Jap turned into a crazed power-mongering dictator selling personal info for dimes". Shame, shame on you. I'm telling your mom.>global timer 30 minutes thread creationFantastic idea
>>8250>"reddit-like dystopia where everyone is identified all the time, Jannies became Judge Dredd-like executioners and a certain Jap turned into a crazed power-mongering dictator selling personal info for dimes"This sounds great.
>>8145>>82494chan is what it is because it's an anonymous website. Even if your username doesn't show up, people will be unable to "feel" anonymous when they have to log in every time. Even though I know I'll show up as Anonymous ## Janitor I feel uncomfortable posting, knowing that this single post will be tied to my login forever. However, I also had to chime in to agree that this is honestly a bad idea and against the very essence of 4chan.
>>8145Just ban phoneposting altogether. At least 60% of ban evaders would be gone instantly.
>>8145this is a bad idea, dumdum
>>8270This
>>8156This idea is interesting, any chance this could be implemented on a trial basis on one board to see how it'd work out? Or is it not technologically feasible.
>>8219Shadowbanning is a horrible idea. A ban should be a ban. Mot only would it be very complicated to implement and deal with a system like that, but it would also damage peoples ability and want to engage in the site. The fear that there's a chance that nobody is even seeing your messages undermines part of the fun of posting in the first place. If you break the rules you should get clapped down and it should be clear why it happened and what the consequences are. While I agree that we do need to do something about prolific shitposters, shadowbanning isn't the answer, and neither is user registration.
>>8145The best part of 4chan is I can come here and fire off a quick post or casually engage in a conversation without having to deal with logging in or assigning my identity to any particular opinion. Accounts would be the death of 4chan.
>>8665>The fear that there's a chance that nobody is even seeing your messages undermines part of the fun of posting in the first place. If you break the rules you should get clapped down and it should be clear why it happened and what the consequences are. I agree with this, but at the same time it would also be funny as fuck to watch the schizos constantly testing to see if they're banned. For a few minutes, anyway.
>>8667I have no desire to literally gaslight the userbase.
>>8667They already do this without there even being shadowbans.
>>8145User registration is a terrible idea. Any idea that's just a blanket hindrance on the site is probably a bad idea. Boards like /ck/ or /an/ are generally fine compared to places like /v/ or /tv/ which are being raided effectively 24/7. The ability for mods to put a board in some kind of cooldown mode when its being blatantly attacked might work, but such a mode would have to be less intrusive to the average user than seeing the same 3 shit OPs.
How about more widespread use of autosaging for threads that aren't explicitly rule-breaking but are devolving into dumpster fires? It's a more subtle option that might not provide the immediately obvious negative attention that posters seek from jannies/mods, and also keep them confined to that one autosaged thread instead of evading and creating several more.
>>8753if you think a thread deserves a sage, you can always ask a mod to sage it
>>8755while we're on that subject, janitors can:> toggle spoilers (extremely light touch)> delete images (medium touch)> delete threads (heavy handed touch)> delete thread + mute poster and request warn/ban. (heaviest handed)i'm almost certain that perma sage falls somewhere within this existing "power" range, i don't see why janitors need to request it in discord. mods trust us to delete threads entirely but not to sage them?
>>8785This is just speculation, but I'd say it's because saging, for the most part, is invisible. Toggling spoilers, deleting images, deleting threads are all extremely visible actions. If there's a janitor making problematic decisions (intentional or accidental), misbehavior is a lot easier to notice when things are being being deleted (active) than being saged (passive).again, this is just speculation. take it with a grain of salt.
>>8786no need to speculate, the action is not invisible at all. it usually gets pointed out immediately by users in the thread. toggling spoilers is probably the sneakiest action one can possibly take
Maybe there could be a "soft" rangeban, that gives users a one-time cooldown of XX minutes before they can post, starting from when an IP accesses 4chan. It might help curb mobile IP hoppers without silencing innocents on the same range.
>>8145You're definitely crazy, but I believe the following things would vastly improve the user experience at 4chan: 1. change the captchas to something that doesn't require sliding. It's ridiculously bulky on mobile and its just needlessly difficult. I get that recaptcha charges a price but there MUST be an alternative that works. 2. Make 4chan gold more accessible. Majority of users don't have crypto sitting around in an exchange and the process is needlessly complicated, and overall a deterrent to buying gold. 2b. of course this comes with some implications, bookkeeping, accounting, 1099k, etc - but if there's already staff on 4chan's payroll they've probably got an accounting service it cant be that big of a headache. Even if you just accept paypal.
>>8991I still like this idea. Just make it so that phoneposters need to wait out a 5 minute timer before they can make a post, if this is the first time this IP is trying to make a post in 30 days, or 60 days, or whatever.This would maybe not do much for overall evasion, but it'd really slow things down for someone who's evading at a fast pace.>>8992Problem with 4chan Gold is that payment processors hate us, we're either the ebil gnotzy website, or some pic related shit happened and it's somehow our fault because they posted on the site once.We don't do it through crypto-only out of choice.
I hate evaders as much as the next guy, but this is too much.
>>9019I kind of agree, but it does raise the question of why even have bans if it's just an honor system?
some sort of lurk timer that can throttle high speed IP hopping is my selfish request. I dont know if this can be implemented without hurting general users
>>9066it seems the goal isn't to stop banned people from posting, it's just the flavor text of why a post was removed, and in the long run, 4chan only needs those posts to be removed to provide proof of reasonable action taken against illegal material (as another janny put it, 4chan may be the toilet of the internet but it's the sparkling cleaned toilet cleaned better than any other website), and as long as 4chan has proofs, then 4chan can survive
>even AI knows you're crazy OP
>>9068That was also me who said that, and that was specifically in regards to illegal material. The ability for phoneposters to completely ignore rules and moderator action at their (very easy) convenience is still an enormous problem which has grievously injured the entire website.We may react and act quickly to illegal content, but this shiny clean anus is currently heavily prolapsed.
>>9077i kneel>>9079grievously injured or business as usual? the 4chan anus has been heavily fucked since forever and for all the damage any spammer or rulebreaker may do, 4chan itself has survived remarkably intact, anons will post anyway
>>90661. a lot of people don't actually evade bans. the ones that do obviously cause a lot more problems and are therefore more visible, but there are plenty who don't.2. the ban/warn system is designed to be informative so people know when they're breaking rules. many people break rules unintentionally and just need to be made aware of that fact. we would have a much worse problem on our hands if people weren't even told when their posts break rules.3. certain things should always result in a ban regardless of any other considerations for fairly obvious reasons.ban evaders are frustrating for everyone but what you're doing still makes a positive difference. the state of things would be much worse if no one was deleting the rule-breaking content.
>>8206>>8212I think the 30-minute wait would work best for creating new threads. Some users like to casually post, they may even be at a location that isn't their home and want to make a quick reply to a thread. Having to wait 30 minutes just to reply would unfairly burden those users, but for creating new threads I assume this would be less of a problem. I don't think many people are creating new threads from different locations than their main one. And if they are, they either have enough free time to dedicate to the thread that they can afford to wait a half-hour, or have already been browsing for that much time. Or they are just using that secondary location/IP to evade a ban, in which case the half-hour cooldown slows them down.
Why not just have phone posters do 2 or three CAPTCHAs in a row? It's a mild inconvenience but no more so than the ubiquitous 2FA, it doesn't prevent airplane mode hopping but by making it marginally less convenient will make people think twice before casually evading. It won't stop Barneyfag types, but those characters wouldn't be stopped by anything anyway.
>>9093As someone who jani's from the computer but browses 99% from the phone, this is an absolutely horrendous idea. Mobile users already have a hell of a time with the sliding captchas, more would completely deter people from replying to threads.
>>90932CA... Devilish...
>>9098Huh, that's the point?
>>9100Why shouldn't mobile users get to enjoy 4chan? Most of the world uses mobile to access the internet now. I'd be interested to know what percentage of 4chans traffic is from mobile browsers. 4chan as a business wouldn't want to alienate that large of a segment of traffic especially since *typically* (at least in other segments of the internet) mobile users are the ones who are served more advertisements than computer browsers..
>>9102Because ban evasion, plus I'm not the one that made the original post, I'm just pointing out that it's obvious that phoneposters would heavily be impacted by it and that's okay because it's "based".
i almost exclusively browse and post from my phonesorry not sorrythe future is now, old man
>>9103>>9104having a double CAPTCHA for phone posters might encourage more to buy passu, which improves 4chan's war chest.
>>9105the single best thing 4chan can do if they want to increase passu purchases is to allow payment via something besides crypto. yeah yeah i know that means dealing with cc processors but they can just run the payment processing through 4channel instead of 4chan so they can choose a low-risk card processor.or, just exclusively accept paypal and not have to deal directly with the card processing.from my limited perspective this seems like a no-brainer. if they sell ads this means they already have bank accounts and pay taxes and probably have an accountant so really what is the drawback to allowing users to pay via paypal? (not asking you specifically, just thinking out loud). requiring payment in crypto precludes most normies who would otherwise have bought on impulse.
>>9102>Why shouldn't mobile users get to enjoy 4chan? Because they're the most prominent ban evaders by any measure. Should they be blanket banned? No, but there's more than enough users who freely exploit the ability to completely ignore moderator and janitor action to make 4chan worse for everyone.A single janitor against just two or three dedicated ban evaders with mobile phones very quickly becomes an uphill battle if they want to make it that way. It's not even arguable that bans are nothing but a bureaucratic formality for anyone who wants to put in even modest effort, most evaders simply don't put in anywhere close to the amount of effort of terminal hyperautists like Barneyfag, ACK, or Buizel.>>9103But more importantly this.>>9107I think we would basically need an intermediary to get Payment Processors to play ball, that's how I bought passes after crypto became the only option. Problem then is of course that any kind of out in the open intermediary service would easily be ratted out by whoever feels like it.
>>9109Tbdesu i'm kinda surprised Hiro can't set something up to buy passus, isn't he involved with multiple internet companies? I see Anons say often that they'd buy a pass if they didn't have to deal with fake internet monies. The last few years have trained many to avoid anything using the word 'crypto' with a twenty nine and a half foot pole.I also bought a pass from getpass before becoming a janny, on the billing statement it said something like "big game hunting" and i don't really see why someone in Corporate couldn't set up a shell company to avoid the "4CHAN COMMUNITY SUPPORT LLC" statement on bills
>>9109>dedicated bad evaders>dedicatedSo they are dedicated enough to solve 1 captcha but not dedicated enough to solve 2? Come on brother, use your noggin'
>>9113I'm not the one arguing for double captchas.>>9112>The last few years have trained many to avoid anything using the word 'crypto' with a twenty nine and a half foot pole.That's a problem, yes, I'm certain the sales on passes fell off a cliff when you couldn't buy them normally anymore.
>>9117market research generally says that each step between a user and a purchase is an easy way for the user to not make that purchase. For someone who already has crypto wallets set up and integrated with their browser, buying a pass is probably fairly easy. For anyone who doesn't use crypto already, they not only have a whole host of extra steps, they also have a load of research to do in HOW to get that done, AND they likely have some degree of bias (not here to argue about if crypto is good) against crypto.
>>9122Exactly, it's a very difficult sell.
>>8785i have always felt this too. deleting is a far more powerful and destructive tool, i have never seen why it is available to jannies but autosaging isnt.>>8145it should just be like SA you should have to buy an account :)
>>9196My guess is that a delete effectively makes a loud KABLAM noise and riles up alot of people when its done improperly. An autosage is a somewhat stealthy poison pill where incorrect usage might take longer to notice. Either that, or maybe it just takes more undesired dev work to serve this up as an option.
>>9202Maybe a janny-saged thread could have its post number turn red with hover text saying something like "Permasaged. This thread cannot be bumped."
>>9203This seems like a bad idea because it makes janny action more visible to users when we're not meant to be able to send any 'direct' messages save by deleting things. Also, nothing in the site FAQ or rules explains manual permasage as a mod power.I also don't think that we need to be able to sage things of our own accord. A Sage Request might be a useful tool, but as it stands, we do not delete threads wholesale unless they're unsalvageable, because it removes the thread for a lot of other users. Sageing is declaring that a thread is unsalvageable, but that deleting it immediately is likely to cause a splash - better to let the people currently in it finish whatever they're doing and then have the thread fall off faster.As I understand it, sageing a thread is a relatively narrow use case, which is why it's a mod power.
>>9202>>9196If it's automatic why do you have to manually request it?
Stop calling it autosage. They're called unbumparoos.
>>9213no, it's called "bumplocking"
>>9214perish in hellfire
It's called Benjamin Buttoning a thread, because it causes the thread to do the opposite of age.
>>9216I'll stick my dick up your benjamin butthole. stut the fuck up
