Fair enough concerning punishing lurkers.. I suppose a single upvote counts as some sort of contribution.
I know the XP system is currently quite innocent - but if you feel you need to start ranking/restricting users I assume that's what can and will be easily 'weaponised'.
With this in mind, do you think the XP score really measures what it should?
Edit: I'm not suggesting discarding XP altogether, something like that based on popularity is expected from a reddit-type site. A contribution-based score could be introduced in parallel.
The problem is how do we define contribution? I would be in favour of scrapping votes completely, but they do serve some purposes, like sorting posts. We have tried to come up with ways of handling different post sorts and votes, but all of them have problems equal to or worse than the current system.
I looked at a lot of sites to see how they were doing it, and none of them have figured it out yet. we may be better off just fixing problems with it when they arise.
I like the role of votes in sorting posts.. on some websites the reverse sort is most useful. Again, I'm not suggesting getting rid of votes or replacing their function sorting posts and comments. I'm suggesting measuring contribution to the website in a better way, just in case you need to restrict user rights at some point in future.
Contribution should be defined according to what you want phucks to turn into. In the absence of a detailed explanation of what you want, I assume you'd like to steadily grow a varied community of individuals who enjoy communicating their interests and viewpoints while at least being tolerant of the views of others. The xyzw point system above is basically compatible with this. I think choosing to measure contribution based on popularity (as done on voat) is incompatible.
At the moment, the "invite only" system involves shutting off registration completely. I don't think there is any invite functionality, though I may be wrong. Of course, admins would get invites by default because they have the ability to do anything to the site, including adding new users. If there was a period where we needed to go invite only, I don't think it would last long anyway.
Almost all of the accounts on Phuks are people who were invited from Voat privately, or they are some of the few who saw it mentioned either on Voat or Reddit. Those accounts aren't a problem, we know who most of them all are anyway.
XP is calculated by total amount of Phuks taken, which is affected by downvotes. So yes, downvotes count towards XP levels. At the moment I think we only have two restrictions based on XP. Sub creation can only happen if you reach level 2, and you get a captcha until you reach level 4 or 5. You don't lose the ability to downvote, and your posts/comments are not restricted in any way. I don't think they even get hidden like they do on Voat and Reddit.
I am not enthusiastic about the idea of punishing lurkers. When I used Reddit, I barely posted/commented, and would have been pissed off if that affected my account.
Alt creation can not be stopped. We briefly talked about stuff like browser fingerprinting, but it is far too invasive for users. In the event that Phuks was forced to hand over user data, it would probably be better for everyone if there was as little as possible stored on the site. Having said that, there is a function that admins can use to see who upvoted/downvoted different posts. If it was tweaked a little to make it easier to see trends, groups of alts and brigaders could be easily identified.
Edit: Polsaker just informed me that we do have an invite system, but there is only one invite code for the entire site. Obviously the invite system would need some work before we used it to send out invites.