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.