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Answer by user161778 for Should Stack Overflow be more restrictive about new user registrations?

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No (mostly, anyways), because I believe there are better solutions. SO/SE is the most restrictive service I have ever used for new registrations. Many times before I reached 200 rep, I considered just giving up out of frustration because I couldn't do anything (all my friends had). I'd imagine the current restrictions already push a lot of quality answerers and askers away, which I'm assuming we want more of.

Restrict email providers?

Legitimate users who use a blacklisted provider will be inconvenienced. Illegitimate users will be mildly inconvenienced, and not stopped at all.

Force phone verification?

Anyone who doesn't have a cellphone plan is out (me). Many/most illegitimate users who are multiple offenders may be stopped, but at a huge cost IMO.


After dealing with the immensely annoying pre-200 rep life on SE, the fact it's even being talked about making that worse makes me feel like many here are out of touch with reality. Something I never imagined would be considered. I was honestly hoping for less restrictive registration so I could actually convince human beings to use this service.

After reading some answers and comments I think the best ideas are:

Force questions below a certain rep to be user-moderated before being completely public

I'm not savvy enough here to elaborate much further, but that doesn't seem terribly inconveniencing. As a safety mechanism, the question could go automatically public in 1 - 3 hours so people aren't stuck in long queues.

Tag questions posted by new users and badge them visually

Credit: @dgatwood

This way they're easy to avoid if you don't want to answer potentially obvious questions and to make questions asked by new users automatically get archived after a few weeks unless either the question gets upvoted by a non-new user or the new user gains enough rep, thus reducing clutter.

Educate harder

When I signed up with the app, I had no idea as to the level of quality expected in questions/answers. The kicker? Can't even delete my own posts. I'm obviously not alone on this.

The only reason I learned what level of quality is expected was reading the Meta SE sites. I think a reasonable solution would be to force people to do a tour. The tour doesn't have to be fancy but it should be mobile friendly and force input from the user. This would at least weed out most uncertainty that the user doesn't know any better.


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