this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
22 points (84.4% liked)

Asklemmy

49064 readers
567 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I plan to have people type an application to register but will deny creeps and obviously bots. What would be the best questions to ask/way to tell that someone is a creep with ill intentions?

I have some ideas, but I’m looking for more, actual ideas from the Lemmy community. Ex: (if I make it a 13+ instance) What age range do you plan on interacting with? What do you plan on talking about with these people? What do you plan to do here?

all 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

At some point, the vetting process will end up being more time consuming than actively moderating the instance, it will still not be 100% effective.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You still need to actively moderate the instance no matter what, but having registration applications makes it easier to weed out most of the bad stuff. It also stops a cross-instance spammers who makes multiple accounts with the same name from posting until they get approved (which I check when the application form is somewhat generic).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Make it invite-only.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Pre-register the UniversalMonk account and all his sock puppets.

Not a complete list:

  • UniversalMonk
  • DonaldJMusk
  • Area72
  • realcaseyrollins
  • barrygoldwater
  • sekxpistol

At the very least this strips them of any notoriety.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Only one of those is me though. I have nothing to do with those other people. I don't have any alt names; only alt instances.

People are totally free to block people on that list if they want to, but has nothing to do with me, friend.

Your account is only 5 days old. So seems like you have some sort of alt thing going on.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Some weirdos are private about it. In that case, approve them if they appear “normal” but if they’re caught being weird (with proof), ban them.

For the weirdos who will be open about it (ex: I’ve seen some people in their bio who say stuff like 35M looking for 15F or younger), they may outright tell you who they plan on interacting with and what they plan on talking about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Be careful asking too many questions as most people won't read and you'll end up denying perfectly fine users. You'll also end up reading essays for each application, which is tedious at best. A simple, "what about makes you want to join us instead of another instance?" would probably work perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

most people won't read and you'll end up denying perfectly fine users.

I think that is a good outcome and that any such people are absolutely not "perfectly fine," correspondingly. I also think the count of such people would be very low in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

How many people do you want on it? If not so many manual registration might be the way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'd just have users submit pictures of their feet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Not sure if it's still the case, but I recall my instance had a phrase hidden within the rules page that you had to find and include in your application.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I was planning similar, but just for me instead of allowing registrations at all, not sure how viable that actually is though.