Even such low barriers as a small form do wonders for the quality of people on the other side, you won't be missed. (if you genuinely can't be bothered)

Harsh but true, I remember telling my life story to sign up for text based message boards.

If that's the attitude on the other side, then I guess the feeling is mutual :).

From personal experience in running similar things, they aren't a good method of discerning quality of people.

I'm curious, what are the "good" methods for discerning/filtering quality of people? How are "good" and "bad" quality of people categorized? (binary? spectrum/distribution?) How can you estimate/measure the quality of the filter/method with precision?

I assume no filter is perfect and mistakenly filter out "good" quality people too, so if this method isn't good that suggest there's a metric and a more efficient method out there. In your personal experience what worked better?

> I'm curious, what are the "good" methods for discerning/filtering quality of people?

Observation is probably the best method. I rarely have found form options to be effective. A good chunk of 'good' people tend to get filtered out from my observation.

Generally the approach that has worked for me having a tier system. People who meet your criteria get greater access etc over time.

> How are "good" and "bad" quality of people categorized?

Generally, "good" is anyone that helps your community prosper. "Bad" are typically people who cause unwanted conflicts, create a toxic environment etc.

I've really liked metafilters $5 lifetime membership model. Seems to work

Bah, back in my day you had to send the sysadmin a postcard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Postcardware) to get your account approved ;)

The picture database of all the postcards is still around [https://freeshell.de/postcards/] .

What's this 'postcard' thing you speak of? I've heard a rumor people used to have slices of dead trees lugged around the world. But the latency would be enormous!!

The trick is to glue in some microSD cards. Trades bandwidth for latency.

(Long time tilde.town member here)

This is a fair criticism. There is a bit of a barrier to entry here. I think pengaru is unnecessarily harsh in his response.

The server has a limited number of admins (really only a single main administrator with a handful of volunteer helpers), and the process of adding an account is mostly manual at the moment, I believe (with some helper scripts, of course). There are efforts underway to improve this.

In the end, though, this is just one person's fun little side project. We're along for the ride, and I would like the admin to keep enjoying his project so I can share in that joy. If they don't have the time to address signup process improvements, I figure that's OK ... we're not in this for money or fame or anything, right? It's just ... fun (IMO).

Creating a user is luckily very automated, but we have had to increase the amount of information we ask to hopefully screen out bad actors who just want a shell account and then run bitcoin miners (which has happened several times).

Can't you block bitcoin miners via limiting CPU time per user?

As soon as a user hits x amount of minutes CPU per minute, you kill all his programs.

Not nice but effective.

Tilde.fun has a somewhat working ssh signup with an admin interface: https://code.tilde.fun/tilde/ssh-reg

Maybe we can work together and create a lightweight admin framework.

It's probably better like this, don't worry.

There are dozens or hundreds of other hosts in the tildeverse that you could check out. I'm a member of ctrl-c.club, which has a much shorter sign-up form.

Send me an email and I get you an account on tilde.fun.

It's pretty defunct right now but I'd like to have some actual users ;)

No need for any personal info besides your email address.

Thanks, I just wanted to play around so there is no real need to do that but here it is tadas dot subonis eta gmail dot com :)

Why do you need an email address? Reddit & HN don't.

I don't but currently the ssh registration script is nonfunctional.

Once that's working again you'd just have to give a fake mail address, but you won't be notified if we created an account for you this way.

Probably to send the credentials. An alternative would be to ask tasubotadas to post their public key.