[Discussion] Do we need some kind of condition to make votes count?
Well, title says it clear. We might need some condition to prevent trolls from creating a lot of accounts and taking over whole instance. I'd like to discuss ideas for this. Like, amount of days on instance could work, but I'm not sure if it would work out very well. Anyway, please share your opinions on this whole subject.
EDIT: There's a lot of opinions, but, at least for me, looks like whatever system we'll come up with, it will either be based on time from account creation or on activity(or maybe both). Correct me if i wrong.
I'd like lurkers to be able to vote so long as they meet a timescale. It could be like 2 months since account creation for lurkers, or 2 weeks + a certain post/comment threshold for more active participants of the instance.
On the EH vote I saw at least 10 accounts with 0 other posts and comments so probably not a bad idea to have at least a condition where the account needs to be older than the vote and has previous activity
There are a few ideas with varying levels of reasonability and freedom. Nothing will be perfect though.
We could have timed verification, “karma” limits, both, lock it behind an application, allow al but be very pre-emptive in our moderation taking a ban-first stance, randomly checking voters history, only select participants, or only community mods.
I'd prefer the karma and time gates, but application only could work more effectively if we had more moderators.
I wish I knew the best solution. I think having a captcha for signups would help lower the amount as well as an activated email address, though that's relatively easy to game. I don't really know if having a minimum account age would help a lot though, but it probably would. Having a minimum karma is useful on the old site, but I don't think that's accessible here.
I wasn't been able to see a reputation score when I looked at my profile, just the number of posts and comments. That may be easier to see on the site admin side IDK. I guess a combined post/comment score could be used as a way to avoid people using inactive accounts over the minimum account age to vote, but it's not an ideal solution IMO.