A friend of mine messaged be today that he wanted to sign up to this forum but he can’t find the sign up button.
I thought that he was just to blind to see it so I checked it myself and I can’t see it too, not on the desktop and also not on the mobile page of this forum.
Where is the sign up button?
Spam waves, registration is closed for now.
What did they want to ask?
I hope this is not a permant solution because it would prevent new people from joining the community and therefore hampering F-Droid`s mission.
You could fix the spam by giving the user’s the option to either verify with a phone number or to pay a small registration fee (which would not only deter spammers but also help F-Droid), preferably also offer privacy and FLOSS friendly payment options like for example Bitcoin Lightning.
We care about the user privacy. The forum asking for an email is the most invasive thing that we ask (when you look at client, mirrors, repo, website) so we don’t want to escalate this any more.
Fun/Sad fact: we opened registration after your last message but had to close it after 3-4 days 
I understand and very appreciate this position.
I would suggest to accept small registration fees paid in Bitcoin over Lightning.
Because this would allow to handle payments while respecting privacy and the FLOSS philosophy.
Privacy
If payment’s are made with Lightning, the receiver (in this case F-Droid and maybe its payment provider) don’t know which address has send the payment. This is not only pseudonymous (like On Chain payments) but totally anonymous for the sender.
Free and Open Source
Neither the user nor F-Droid would be forced to interact with proprietary software to make the payment’s.
User’s could chose from a variety of Free Software wallets and F-Droid could either self host it, or use a Free software based payment provider like Coinos which provides the backend and exposes the API’s to request and confirm payments.
Signsups for this forum appear to be disabled. My attention was drawn to this by reply in the fediverse. I logged out and had a look and I can’t find any way to sign up either. Are we both missing something or have signups been suspended, and if it’s the latter, why?
Too much spam. The moment we turn on, spammers are joining and creating several spam posts.
Let me know when you are online, and I will turn it on temporary and let the person join.
I have also replied to the fedi just now.
Providing an option to pay a sign up fee would fund F-Droid and deter spammers
Beware of unintended consequences. But a low, one-off fee, to join this forum, would indeed deter spammers, and trolls (like the guy who persists in taking huge steaming dumps all over the topic about MOLE Training policy anytime anyone contributes). Without deterring too many people who care about participating usefully here. I subsist on a disability benefit, and a small, one-off fee wouldn’t put me off, maybe 1-5 credits (how much and which currency to denominate it in would be up to the @fdroid team).
**EDIT:**
I would suggest experimenting with GNU Taler, for the same reason. I believe there’s been some big steps towards adoption of this in the EU, can anyone confirm?
and dig in https://ich.taler.net/
In essence I agree with this. However, to speak in a forum, if one has to pay, even if say 1€/$/GBP/INR takes away the essence of free speech.
We are grateful for any donation, but asking users to pay to signup and all, is not right. Moreover, not everyone can pay and not everyone has international cards.
I will check the right to speak for any new users, or say idle users to find what can be done to minimize spam.
Any help in this part is appreciated, by checking the discourse forums, or user guides.
Yes, this is my way of thought too.
GNU Taler is another great tool to do this, I am just not sure how available it is.
I not suggested Bitcoin because I want to shill for it, but just because it has the most availability and can be used to make private payments.
Compared to the current state, where new user’s can’t signup and therefore have 0 free speech (on this Forum) it would be a great improvement to give them an option that allows them to join the community, while at the same time deterring spammers.
Anyone can afford a one-off entry free of 1€/$/GBP/INR, or how can they afford a digital device and net access? Anyone who can’t afford that doesn’t have the luxury of spending time in web forums, they’re too busy figuring out where to sleep and what to eat. I know this, because I was in this situation for a big chunk of 2020.
This is a good point, which connects to another one; most existing forms of digital payment require identifying oneself to the payee. As @Leonardo says, it would be anti-privacy to make people doxx themselves in the process of paying a nominal fee. This is the strongest argument against the ‘cover charge’ proposal. I would only support it if there was at least one confirmed way to easily pay while remaining anonymous.
I’m not sure that’s true, unless other anonymising tools are added on top of the BitCoin ledger. For example, AFAIK GNU Taler can be used with crypto-tokens as well as fiat currencies (eg €/$/GBP/INR). So in theory, if F-Droid set up a Taler storefront to charge a one-off fee to join this forum, it could be paid using BitCoin, but also any other token people happened to have.
Full disclosure: I’ve never had the opportunity to test this, so I could be misunderstanding what I’ve read about how Taler works.
True. But the proposal is not for F-Droid to charge people to speak here, but to ask us for a nominal ‘cover charge’ to get in the door the first time. Ensuring either;
OR
Once we’re in we can speak freely, at any time, at no charge.
As @Leonardo says;
I think this is an idea worth exploring, because it solves 2 problems at once (reducing forum abuse, getting people using F-Droid to help fund F-Droid).
Best of both worlds? A $1 fee or you have to be manually approved to post by emailing someone? Something like…
Here at F-Droid we care about the users freedom to discuss. In order to make sure that that discussion is being had by real people and not bots and scammers we are asking for a $1 one time donation to verify your account. if this fee is preventing you from being able to participate please reach to {email} with the subject Fee Waiver and a body with enough words that we believe your a real human.
I agree with both side. Fees are scary but I’d give a dollar to prove I’m human for this resource
If it would be limited to On Chain transaction’s, then there would be privacy problems.
But if F-Droid accepts Lightning payment’s, the paying person would be in a very good privacy position.
Taler is also great.
But as far as I know its only really enrolled in Switzerland, and even there, only experimental.
If its enrolled, it should also be added as a payment option.
Sounds OK to me. Lightening is widely used on Nostr and elsewhere, and it wouldn’t hurt for the F-Droid project to build some bridges with those folks. Accepting Lightening payments could lead to more donations in general to F-Droid.
… for use with fiat currency. Because to convert a fiat currency into Taler tokens for anonymous payment purposes, the Taler storefront has to be able to accept payment from a bank account. But AFAIK any Taler storefront can accept any non-fiat currency with no dependence on the legacy banking or online payments system.
Although now that I think about it, it may not be possible to convert Taler tokens back into useful currency without the same dependencies on the banking system. Because it’s designed to preserve the privacy of the customer while exposing the payments received by merchants to traditional audit processes. In which case F-Droid would need a Swiss bank account to convert Taler tokens back into a currency they can actually use.
Anyone out there know more about Taler than we do? Can you please clarify how it can and can’t be used?
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that forum has more info on integrations and whatnot