My concern would be that although at any given time there may not be a
spam
campaign that we notice, it would require keeping a close eye on IRC
lest it be
flooded when no one with the power to stop it is around. I know when we
enabled
the option to require registration, Freenode was having a huge spam
attack.
I've disabled the need to register for now and will keep an eye on
whether
we're buried in spam.
- Steve
What about creating a channel, say #freenet-turing, and letting anyone
join there?
Then, when spam hits, you lock the ordinary channels, and if someone
wants to post they first have to say hello in #freenet-turing. Then an
oper PMs them and does a brief ten second Turing test.
You could also restrict yourself to requiring voice to post and only
giving voice to registered users, unregistered users who passed the
test, or unregistered users who posted normal messages when it was open.
That's a bit more polite, I think.
Of course, a spammer could still spam #freenet-turing. But it'd take
some amount of creativity, and all it'd accomplish would be to block
registrations for the time being.
