Are the Fluther gods planning to reopen the borders any time soon?

I have no idea, but I would like to throw my vote in to open the borders, too. We need fresh faces, fresh questions and fresh food.

Really! The chips are getting stale!

I don’t have any information.

Without a new technological fix to keep banned individuals from using a VPN to simply reappear and wreak havoc, I would rather keep it closed. The man who caused this closure was verbally abusing a female jelly. I do not want that repeated.

It is tedious around here of late.

Has been a touch slow, I do admit .

Well…I was happy to see a new meta question…

I would recommend having an id requirement for membership. So that we can file complaints to the authorities.

Maybe a referral from a Jelly, for membership?

Huh, I had no idea we were a gated community as of late. Makes sense why the spam stopped.

I know that a big problem was new users posting spam. Maybe there’s a way for Fluther to put a ban on new users being able to post links for a period of time (maybe six months would be adequate) and posts that contain certain words would not be posted via a filter (the way FB has filters for group admins, you can put any words in the filter and when someone posts with those words, it alerts mods – some possible words that wouldn’t be posted might be “SEO” and things like that). I’m not sure if that’s possible here on Fluther and more importantly, if the owners would want to put that work in to make that change, but it might eliminate the spam posts that new users often post.

I wasn’t aware we had an embargo on new members.
That decision makes me even more appreciative of Andrew and Ben keeping this site up.

I was unaware of the problem. I have been off Fluther for a couple months, so that may explain the tedium. Can we construct a Jelly Jail to enclose interlopers and poke them through the bars with sticks? Can we construct some kind of rudimentary lathe?

I think that a referral system is a good idea. Bluesky does that.

[mod says] I’ve forwarded this question to Ben – the only person who can possibly provide an answer on the timeframe. All I can say is that, last I heard, Ben was arranging talks on getting Fluther the necessary tech support to welcome new jellies, while maintaining protection against nefarious users. Legit users will be able to join easily (we don’t want to make that difficult at all). We’ll probably have certain limits to make incessant spamming and trolling impossible. Maybe new users can only ask one question and write up to three responses until they’ve been approved by a mod…something like that. We haven’t discussed the details yet because we don’t have a programmer to implement the changes anyway.

We don’t like that Fluther is on lockdown. It became necessary because the technical protection we have just wasn’t enough anymore. For a while, every time we left Fluther for more than ten minutes, we’d return to chaos. At least three new unintelligible questions. Sometimes dozens of inflammatory posts. Lurve gaming, fake accounts, and many flags informing us about concerning PMs.

That’s all I have to say on this, really. I know it’s probably not very satisfying. It’s definitely not a good situation.

@longgone We love our mods!

Thank you, @longgone,

You’re just wonderful @longgone…and we certainly hope you’re never gone long! see what I did there? I’m so silly

Better to have a referral system than an open system where we would get scammers and spammers.

Aw, you guys…

@smudges Spectacularly silly. But still better than the spammer who, years and years ago, kept calling me “Long One”. As in “You ban my question, Long One?” For the record, I am only 168cm long.

@RocketGuy I see what you’re saying. Noted, will be passed on!

I’m afraid that I believe in border security.
The Mansion should have high walls and machine gun nests, to keep out fentanyl, and terrorists…

#MFGA!

I invited someone today, so he wont be able to join? Yikes, I forgot about this Q.

^ We can help him with that.

@longgone Thanks. I have invited two people in 12 years, so I take it seriously. :)