We have talked about this before. Invite only for a week or two would probably be the go-to option because so few people know about the site, an influx would quickly disappear if account registration wasn't available. Another option would be raising XP restrictions for things like voting/posting/sub creation on new accounts for a while.
I don't know what you discussed previously, so please excuse my ignorance.
Details matter a lot...
Do all users get to invite, just users over some account score, or just admins? How many users can they invite and how many users can the invited invite? The website seems to be 80% inactive accounts. Many of those look just like me, and will have accumulated a modest XP level before falling silent. Some of those will be blatant sleeper accounts and can become active at inconvenient times.
Minor point: Do downvotes detract from XP scores at present? I hope not.
I claim the name XP is incorrect. If you tie a score to upvotes, it doesn't measure experience, but accumulated popularity. If you get a large influx of users who have the same ideological flavour they will quickly exceed whatever "XP" threshhold you wish to set. The stalwarts around here might have experience and have made great contributions to the website, but the newbies will be popular.
My first attempt at designing a ranking system that better reflects user contributions to the website over time is this:
If a user contributes x posts or y comments, all of which attract at least z upvotes (ignoring downvotes), over a particular w day period, they get 1 point for that period. If they contribute something, but don't meet the above conditions, they get 0 points for the w day period. If they don't log in or just lurk, they get -1 points for the w day period, down to a minimum of 0 accumulated points.
Under a system like this with numbers x,y,z,w; regular website contributors easily accumulate points over time, and inactive accounts have their scores steadily degraded. I think deleting completely inactive accounts after a certain time is probably a good idea as well. The system above (or a fair mutation) would more easily deal with a sudden rush of new users, and would be a fairer way to restrict the rights of some website users.
The problem of alts remains, and I have no idea how to solve that without impinging on users privacy.
Do all users get to invite, just users over some account score, or just admins? How many users can they invite and how many users can the invited invite?
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.
The website seems to be 80% inactive accounts. Many of those look just like me, and will have accumulated a modest XP level before falling silent. Some of those will be blatant sleeper accounts and can become active at inconvenient times.
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.
Do downvotes detract from XP scores at present?
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.
I'm hoping you guys will spend some time thinking/planning for this while you're small enough to be able to.
Maybe you can't stop a large group of one-sided users, but you can try to set it up so that group doesn't collect so much power that they can't be dislodged at some point in future. The rules at voat are set up to exclude people of certain opinions - I hope you're careful not to go down that path.