Subject:
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Re: BZP hits 7,000th member-Lugnet is lagging behind.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Sat, 31 May 2003 19:21:15 GMT
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Viewed:
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692 times
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In lugnet.general, John Henry Kruer wrote:
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The purpose of the email-posting gig is security. Anybody can just hack
your computer, type a post and click the send button. But they (hopefully)
can’t access their email.
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Most people are likely to leave their e-mail password always-on, so they don’t
have to bother with it whenever they want to check for new messages. If you
have access to the computer, you probably have access to the e-mail as well.
The only real security offered by requiring validation through an e-mail message
is that anyone can fake your e-mail address without having to hack your
computer, but the validation response gets sent back to the actual e-mail
account, not to the fakie sender.
A lot of the LUGNET system seems to hearken back to the early nineties, when
most of the traffic on the internet was hardcore computer geeks playing with the
latest computer geek toy, and there was less reason to be paranoid about such
things. At that time, there was a sort of “honor among hackers”, where they’d
leave each other alone (probably in part because they knew they’d get back
anything they dished out). When the general public got ahold of it, that no
longer meant anything. People didn’t have to worry about the average internet
user being able to do anything serious in retaliation, and some people came to
the conclusion that the internet was a prank-player’s paradise. LUGNET seems to
have tweaked the existing system in a way that could deal with this (another one
that I remember from the Galoob BBS was that you had to enter your user name and
password for every post, but you couldn’t sign in once for a multi-post
session), whereas the common method of getting around this nowadays has evolved
into the standardized account log-in. Anyways, as long as any person in the
world can tell their own passwords to any other person, nothing can be truly
secure.
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The owners of Lugnet could of just opted an ‘all or nothing policy,’ in which
you need to be a Lugnet member to post.
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That would have been a bad direction to go in, since most people are going to
want to test the waters before they pony up a cash membership fee. Other people
simply can’t supply it for a variety of reasons (unable to send it in USD,
forbidden by parents, can’t afford it), and denying people the right to
participate just because they can’t pay might drive away some of the people who
could pay. Part of the reason BZP is so popular is because they’re so
popular. It sounds like circular logic, but when you consider whether to sign
up for an account, part of the decision has to be based on how healthy the
existing community is. If there are three people posting, it’s really hard to
get a fourth person to sign up (and even harder to keep the first three
posting), but if there are 1000 people posting, there’s a fairly good chance
that any new members will be able to find at least a few people to interact
with.
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The only alternative to email-posting I can see would be to create a
password-type cookie that allows you to post after logging in. But that’s a
bit close to the Lugnet membership... remember that Lugnet is a service, not
a privilage.
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It’s primarily a community, and communities usually benefit from new blood.
Reserving ease-of-posting for paid subscriptions isn’t going to help the
community to grow. Besides, there’s already a plan in motion to convert all
unpaid non-member subscriptions over to “basic membership”. There’s no good
reason why one person should have a harder time posting than another person.
Requiring a paid subscription for a cookie-based log-in is more likely to
discourage new participants in general than it is to inspire them to pay the
fee.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: BZP hits 7,000th member-Lugnet is lagging behind.
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| (...) Don't forget to look at the title of this thread... "BZP hits 7,000th member-Lugnet is lagging behind." Which indicates a sort of compitition. I know that the topic of Lugnet member posts is a very old, beat up topic, but I guess we might as (...) (21 years ago, 29-May-03, to lugnet.general, FTX)
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