…and the Europeople here will hold the line and meme about it! 
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Not much but some.
I also support requiring mod approval for new accounts
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There is no “so and so is first” with this group, they go for whoever they can get.
There are a lot of things in this world that aren’t a deterrent in reality but most people go for the lowest hanging fruit first so doing literally anything on that front makes you less likely of a target.
oh, i bet you do. why?
the internet is dying. especially the open one. lets capitulate for… reasons?
Oh no! The minuscule forum created to talk politics mainly with just the buddies we know online won’t invite as many randos that weren’t coming anyway! Freedom is at stake!
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I had ideas for trying to draw in more people, but I wasn’t willing to pull the trigger on any of them because the forum couldn’t figure out rules for self-governance.
Of course there are places they look first and certain ways they find people before others. Thinking this forum is MAGA’s way of finding enemies is ridiculous. There are literally millions of people on Reddit and Facebook that are easier to find and have said a lot worse about Musk and Trump. Making the forum private also doesn’t protect you if you are a target to begin with as everyone can access its history even after you make it private.
Anyway we had this discussion on SPE and that went private and it doesn’t matter to me either way. People here just have a weird perception on how dissidents are targeted and found.
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So can you answer my question in good faith? why did your site, spe, go private and what problems did that solve? if it’s so miniscule then it shouldnt matter - people can draw all sorts of hysterical scenarios up that arent founded in reality at all and i think this is a forum warz thing
more informed viewers here know this site is already scraped so im merely curious what problem is being solved here
It didn’t solve any existing problems, as you well know. It’s also not my site, as you well know. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
heh, yea, sure it isnt
alea iacta est
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Off to El Salvador for speaking all that Spanish.
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One, two, Donnie’s coming for you
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so one thing that people who definitely wasnt me learned during last admin is that police/military were using advanced techniques with cell towers and wifi networks to “ping” phones in a way that would cause many devices to overheat and get insanely hot. you’ll find comments like this all over reddit/bsky of people trying to figure out why from that time period.
the “why” is that, there is reason to believe, that if you have info about someone in say, a protest the government doesn’t really like very much, and you want to pick them out of a crowd, but this person has been trained to not use wifi and to turn location/data off, you can find them using thermal imaging + techniques like this.
anyway all this to say is that “they” already have and know more about you than you do about yourself, its up for grabs and has been even going back to trump 1.0, if you’re the type of person that has something to worry about, this website is going to be the least of your problems, and a login page isnt gonna do crap. as far as its supposed to deter scrapers thats also a farce. everything scrapes now. non mfa login page isnt stopping anything, especially users whose browsers from their logged in sessions may be scraping anyway. If you are actually having issues with scrapers I have some advice for you. Like I think I said a weird part of this AI boom for me has been dealing defensively with them.
I’m done writing about this, sorry.
Is it possible to make certain topics or threads private, such as the mental health/alcohol threads? Given certain users on this site like to weaponize posts people have made in those, I’d be (and honestly am) very uncomfortable participating in those with that going on, particularly if I was a user in some kind of a crisis. Those threads have been enormously useful to people over the years, making them private wouldn’t stop the behavior, but maybe would provide some additional thin safety layer in case people continue to be creepy about it.
Everybody still good in here? 
There’s essentially nothing to lose by going private.
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Requiring a login to see posts is such an obvious security measure at this point. Obviously it wouldn’t stop some concerted attack but it would stop some rando like J*ggsCasey searching for crap to report
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