As many of the older members around here might have noticed, during the past year or so, there has been a dramatic drop in the users' confidence when they decide to offer their invites in public.
This comes from the fact that FST is a site with open registrations, and a lot of people create many accounts to fit their own agendas. It's quite hard to control this, when most of them lurk in the shadows and attack via PM, and ask for the invite, without being scrutinized in public.
Let's face it, some sites don't care at all about what users do with their invites, and some do care a lot. To each, their own.
The perfect situation would always be when you invite someone you know, but as we know, it's an utopia.
The fact is that if we removed the giveaways section, it would be done somewhere else. Same happens with the trading, but that's a whole other issue not to be brought to this thread, and that will be addressed in a nearby future in its proper section.
The bottom line is this: we are considering being more active when helping members to decide whom they should give their invites to. And we have a situation to discuss with you all, so that we can tweak it, before practicing it.
Here it goes:
The member A decides to do a giveaway and offer one invite.
Members X and Y apply for the giveaway accordingly to the conditions A decided earlier.
Member Z decides to contact A via PM and not to expose himself in public.
Member A reaches the conclusion he doesn't know whom to pick.
He can then contact one of the mods here and get a return status about each member that would fit into any of these categories:
- Unique account
- Dupe account of some previous one
- Proxied or shared IP
This obviously won't solve the issue of the bad invitees who won't use the tracker, but it will help the members to make a choice having certain conditions under their control. This is done to help the members who want to share invites, but who are in the wild when they see members they never heard of, or that seem suspicious.
So, bring on the fight. Is this a good idea, a crappy one, what would you change or add? This is not even nearly a foolproof situation, but it's a measure to help minimize certain... hazards that emerge.
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