Petition to revoke unrated account permissions to post comments/blogs

Revision en1, by SecondThread, 2020-07-10 04:18:57

Unrated Account Disaster

Recently there have been an obscene number of unrated accounts showing up. Several of them have inappropriate names, so I won't give examples because I want to keep this post clean, but I'm sure you have seen them in the comments. They are likely all by the same individual, possibly with a few copy-cat troublemakers as well.

Recently, certain ones have begun to spam useless comments on old posts to clog up the recent actions, effectively hiding all relevant conversations except on the blog posts they spam on. For whatever reason, these are overwhelmingly on Errichto's old blog posts. Occasionally there are also a flood of obscene blog posts made by the user themselves.

Here's an example of what I mean:

This is obnoxious and I would like to see it stop.

The current solution clearly doesn't work. As soon as they get banned or muted or whatever, they can just make another throw-away account and continue spamming tomorrow.

A slightly less extreme problem is that lots of new users have created alt accounts in order to ask fairly meaningless 'How do I get better', 'please solve this problem for me', et cetera type of questions.


Suggested Solution

Make it so that users who haven't competed in any contests don't have permissions to post blogs or comments. At the very least, this should deter a lot of these fake accounts from being created.


What about legit accounts who don't compete?

I know there are a few accounts used by companies/media which are used for public announcements, for instance: NercNews. In cases like this, if it is actually a legitimate news source, we can 'trust' these users with the GM 'trust this user' feature. As far as I know, there aren't really that many accounts like this that are run by large companies/media organizations. I think each of them should be able to find at least one GM who is either a part of the organization or can verify that the organization is trustworthy enough to not intentionally spam Codeforces.


Do you agree? If so, can you please tag some people who would have the ability to fix this so that this post actually gets noticed within the haystack of worthless spam?

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en1 English SecondThread 2020-07-10 04:18:57 2435 Initial revision (published)