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Comment by axod

18 years ago

Ever considered just shutting the door to new registrations at peak times to throttle growth? or at least only allowing new members that have been invited from existing members?

I've seen some really whacky comments the last week or so.

16 comments

axod

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chris11  18 years ago

That might work.Sure it will probably make the site hotter, but as long as potential users are evaluated, it probably won't hurt the quality of the site.

If we shut the door to new registrations, we definitely shouldn't make an invite only available from a member. I'm sure I would have had trouble getting an invite that way.

What might work is deciding on a growth rate that can be handled by the site and the community, and then limiting the number of sign-ups each month, or even day. We could just use a list of email addresses for new users and send out X number of invitations a day.

And we could also do more discourage those wacky comments. We could have new users do a short test, something trivial that requires them to have actually read the user guidelines. Maybe a multiple choice quiz where they have to distinguish between a trollish comment and an acceptable comment. Also we could start them out with a probationary account with stricter rules. Maybe if their account is newer than 5 days, and they have less than -8 karma, they get banned, or forced to read the site guidelines again before they posted more comments.

Though if the site does implement anything like an invite system it's going to be hard. Some people are going to accuse the site of being elitist. So it would have to be communicated that any rules are solely for all comments civil and professional, not because we are trying to exclude anyone. Hey, I like some of the pun threads on reddit, and trolls on yahoo answers, but I think this site would get ruined if even a few trollish comments were allowed.

3pt14159  18 years ago

Or include some fairly simple auto-generated questions.

"At what point does y = 2e^(2x) cross the line x = 2, accurate to 2 decimal points? y = __.__ x = __.__" Extremely simple for a hacker, daunting for the general public. (answer: tinyurl.com/b95cdw rounded up with x = 2.00, of course)

  • chris11  18 years ago

    That might backfire. I might think less of a site that thought doing trivial math problems was a sign of my level of intelligence.

    And making it harder might also be bad. If they are too hard, you'll get people who are just signing up for the entrance test. Just think about how much press google's puzzles on their billboards got. And somebody will of course put the answers on the internet.

  • aarongough  18 years ago

    You might also get the occasional serious hacker who is just retarded at math (like me!)

    • timknauf  18 years ago

      I would go further, and venture that 'serious hackers who will make good HN citizens' and 'people for whom the above problem is trivial' are two different sets (though the intersection of those sets might be significant).

ph0rque  18 years ago

An invite-only strategy might actually backfire and make the site even hotter (see gmail, etc), although it will be interesting if the feature only turns on at certain times/due to certain conditions.

  • axod  18 years ago

    I'd say the most irritating could be people who:

      * See link to HN somewhere, follow it
  * Sign up, post some lame comments, never come back.

    So my thought was just adding some sort of barrier to sign up, to deter some of the people who only want to sign up so they can post a pun or some other non-HN worthy comment.

    (NB. This is only a hypothesis, I don't know how many people sign up post a few lame comments and never return).