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[–]magnora7 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I like both those ideas. Although the first idea could be a problem if like a university shares an IP and lots of people want to sign up, or something. Or a lot of people sharing a VPN.

Making registration harder makes a lot of sense. Maybe just a better capcha even. I have a feeling our captcha is easily solvable by bots these days. I almost wish the registration process actually took a couple minutes and was semi-difficult. So it would guarantee a human being would have to pay close attention for a couple minutes for the account to be created. If we could do that without making it too annoying to deter real users, and put up an explanation of why we are doing it, then I think it could limit bot and vote-manipulation activity without limiting actual users.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

maybe we can make people sit there and stare at a spinner and a YT video for two minutes, "Creating your account...". so it would theoretically work in browsers only. I don't think I've seen it before, maybe it's next level shit.

edit: or a bitcoin miner/POW thing to register

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

or a bitcoin miner/POW thing to register

That's an awesome and hilarious idea. And so is the spinner.

I worry that with passive timer things like this though, they're easy to bot. They can just open 10 tabs and have them overlapping until the timer is over.

Maybe it could be a little html5 video game and you have to beat a randomly-generated level that takes about 3 minutes? Then it might actually be fun instead of annoying

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

If it's taking into account ip address, then your 10 tab example will not work.

but yeah non passive sounds better. a game would be fun but that wouldn't be the main security measure since all we're gonna get is a 'user has finished game' signal. Maybe a series of continue buttons with a wait in between would do it.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

a game would be fun but that wouldn't be the main security measure since all we're gonna get is a 'user has finished game' signal.

We could engineer the game to have a series of checkpoints that each send a signal to the server, and the server has to get all 10 signals spaced apart in time correctly, for it to activate, or something like that