True, you are probably right.I just though that one part of the accounts I mentioned might have been be in that "never" group before waking up, since I noticed that those spamming groups for some reason like to use old accounts that have been completely inactive. On top of that, it looks like they have unlimited supply of those.
I would imagine that spammers who need some throwaway accounts to make a few shitbumps probably wouldn't pay the evil fee - not worth it. But what could happen is that someone has a bot to probe different IPs until they find a "clean" one (without an evil fee), then register a bunch of "free" accounts on it and keep them until needed. Or sell them to spammers in bulk. If that's what's happening - there should be a reasonable limit of how many accounts can be registered from one IP.
For some reason it became relatively common issue in Croatia. I have a few friends who got that evil fee thing (and I heard about more cases ) even though they had nothing to do with bitcointalk before I finally talked them into joining. Naturally, when they saw this thing they didn't want to have anything with the forum. Sure, they could circumvent this thing by trying registering from someplace else, but simple registering on the forum shouldn't be such a hassle, especially now when there are many different platforms and people can choose.
Yeah this system is quite rude to new users. Perhaps there could be an approval process so that instead of the evil fee the new user is placed on probation until someone reviews their posts and confirms that it's not a spambot. I think hilariousandco had suggested some sort of a newbie review system. This could be outsourced to the community to avoid overloading moderators.
Registering accounts itself dirties the IP and you can only get away with creating something like 6-10 accounts from a completely clean IP (a hospital for example
) before more accounts start getting charged the evil fees..
Even without doing anything “bad”, or even doing anything at all.. Creating accounts builds evil..
IME
Where did you get the data? Are they public?
I literally checked which profiles have "Never" as their last active date, like I mentioned in the OP. I don't know if that's entirely accurate but it seems unlikely that so many users would just register and never login for some other reason.
This will not predict if someone has to pay a fee. When you sign up for an account, you will get a message saying there was a "cookie error" and that if you just signed up, you need to login. At this point, there is no indication you need to pay a fee, and the profile last active date is "never". Once you login, there will be a message at the top of the page that you are unable to post with a link to the proxyban page that tells you how much you need to pay to get unproxybanned; once you login, your profile will no longer indicate your last active date is "never".
A profile indicating they have "never" been active means the person has never logged into their account, and does not know if they need to pay an evil fee or not.
I just confirmed the above procedure a minute ago and the above is correct.
I doubt you did it from TOR because it’s basically impossible now..
50 captchas and then they will refuse to solve, do that like 10 times and then it might finally work.. Half hour..
Choose an already used username? Start over..
Finally tells you to log in? 50 captchas that refuse 10 times to log in..
Get evil fee? Select new TOR IP..
Repeat..
Last time I tried it I gave up after about an hour and a half trying to create an anonymous account..
