This is long, but also important. Please read.
Okay, I see there's a huge confusion amongst people, including albert, as to what the goal is. The issue is that most of the proposals here try to solve the wrong problem.
First, what problem exactly do we have? It's that danbooru is perceived as a porn site, and people behave accordingly. Why's that? Because danbooru IS a great porn site:
1. It's vast
2. It's of good quality
3. It's well-tagged, thus also perfectly browsable by fetishes and preferences
4. It's easily accessible and linkable
#1-#3 are included in our goals, so we can't change that. This leaves only #4 for tweaks. Now why are fappers bad? Because they leak into the community and disrupt it. Thus to cure it, we can either get rid of fappers, or remove them from the community.
The solutions proposed fall into three categories:
1. Those that remove fappers
2. Those that remove them from the community
3. Those that do neither
So far, the majority of solutions are in #3. All the karma, points, scores, allowances and limits are worthless, because they do neither #1 nor #2. And all of them are harmful, because they hit good members as hard as bad ones. Please, stop proposing those. It's a well-known, yet rarely accepted basic management truth: you can't automate decency. EVERY score-based system you can come up with can and will be gamed, whether it's public or hidden, because that's what you make people do. You turn off their internal motivators and turn them into external ones, ones a machine judges. It will never work.
Besides, just think for a while what you're trying to do. You want to take all the bad people who register and make them into decent people? Why? That's just putting lipstick on a pig.
Now, having limited ourselves to methods from #1 and #2, we can categorise them along another axis -- how much burden do they put on moderators, good members, and bad members. Things like "moderate more", "do a quiz", "limit uploads", "limit comments" all put it on moderators, good members or both. Some of them even do that and don't put any burden or bad members!
What I'm getting at is, there have been exactly two proposals that don't have the above problems. One is スラッシュ's modification to the mod queue. It's good, because it exploits a mechanism we already have and depends only on the peer recognition we use anyway, so there's nothing to game in it. Additionally it makes life easier for good contributors and hinders bad ones, discouraging them.
The other one is, you guessed it, my original proposal. Here's why:
- It removes linkability. That means you can't just drop a link to danbooru porn in an IRC channel or send to a friend to fap to, because porn is not accessible for non-members. That kills #4 on the porn site features list.
- Normally the above would result in an immediate increased pressure on new signups, but we make it unattractive by not allowing fresh accounts to view porn. This should be stated in big, bold, red letters and easy language up-front, on a separate page before you're presented with the signup screen.
This effectively offloads the work of deciding who should join and stay from moderators onto users themselves. Because danbooru stops being attractive to people we don't want here, they will be unwilling to join themselves. That is a crucial point. They disappear because we stop being a place they want to be in. Notice how there's almost nothing to game. The grace period is fixed, so you can't try to cheat it. Of course you can sit it out if you're determined enough, but most people just won't bother. Even if you do, a ripened account becomes precious, so you sure as fuck ain't gonna share it in a channel or bugmenot where you risk getting it banned. The problem of bad users disappears because bad users disappear.
This is what we should be aiming at. We can't make bad users good or make them leave because we ask politely. Instead we should make it so that they stop coming of their own free will.
