show / hideContinuation of User Purges posted on 01/15/08 05:39PM by MattieTK
These purges we've done have been quite successful - we've cleared out thousands of members in order to make room for potentially valuable ones. However, in some cases, the reactions to our opening registrations have been less than satisfactory.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind you, our dear users, that selling invites, trading invites, and giving invites away to random strangers is not tolerated, and any users found doing so will have their invites revoked, along with their entire invite trees. This is for the good of the entire community.
The following activities, also, will get you banned:
Inactivity - Any member of the 'user' class who hasn't donated or logged in for 4 weeks is getting disabled. People with bad ratios (ie. peons) that haven't logged in for one week are getting disabled. People who have created accounts but haven't ever logged in are getting disabled.
Dupe accounts - we disable both accounts in these circumstances. Extensive measures are taken to ensure that we don't catch room-mates or relatives with the same IP addresses, so you don't have to worry unless you personally have multiple accounts.
Bad ratio - Keep your ratio above 0.4, and you'll be alright. At some point, I'm going to purge every single peon. There is no excuse for having a poor ratio - if your upload speed is slow, only download what you can afford and upload torrents to make up the difference.
Hit and runs - Seed the torrents you download (and stop complaining about it on the forums - this just draws attention to you). Ratio farming off Rosetta stone and hit+running everything else makes you a terrible user, in our books.
Being a moron - Trolling in the forums or IRC is extremely hazardous to your account. Complaining about staff decisions qualifies you as a moron. 'Giving advice' to the staff (eg. "LOCK THREAD NOW PLZ KTHX") qualifies you as a moron. 'Spamming' (eg. one line posts saying things like "lol fail") qualifies you as a moron. Flaming other users qualifies you as a moron.
Uploading crap - Any user who uploads a low bitrate torrent from now on gets his or her upload rights revoked.
Breaking the rules in general - The rules have changed a fair bit from what they were when we started. Even though you may not have read the latest version, you are still held by them. We urge each and every user to re-read the entire /rules.php, from top to bottom. Saying "oh, I didn't know" is not an excuse when your account has been disabled for breaking the rules.
Also, we are demoting all 'power users' with less than 15 gigs uploaded, and we are raising the minimum upload amount for power user status to 25GB. This will add exclusivity to the class whilst still allowing long time users with slow connections to attain this goal. It will also pave the way for new features we can implement.
If these purges go as well as we expect, we'll be able to open invites again, for more quality users.
show / hideInsane mass disablings, invites open again posted on 01/14/08 05:52AM by WhatMan_is_on_holiday
We've run some insane disabling scripts the past few days, and disabled a bunch of other people manually. This has pushed the number of users down to almost 40,000, and, as a result, we've opened invitations again. Feel free to invite people, but remember that we disabled the bad users so that you can invite the good ones - in other words, make damn sure that your invitees are going to be valuable users - otherwise, your invites are at risk.
If you meet more than one of the following criteria, your account is at risk of being disabled.
Inactivity - non-power users/donors who haven't logged in for 6 weeks are getting disabled. People with bad ratios (ie. peons) that haven't logged in for two weeks are getting disabled. People who have created accounts but haven't ever logged in are getting disabled.
Dupe accounts - we disable both accounts in these circumstances. Extensive measures are taken to ensure that we don't catch roommates or relatives with the same IP addresses.
Bad ratio - Keep your ratio above 0.4, or you could very well be getting hit with the banstick any day now.
Hit and runs - Seed the torrents you download. Ratio farming off rosetta stone and hit+running everything else makes you a terrible user, in our books.
Being a moron - Trolling in the forums or IRC is extremely hazardous to your account.
Donating makes you exempt from the inactivity rule, but it does not make you immune from the dupe account, bad ratio, or H+R rules.
These criteria are subject to arbitrary change. Be a good user, and you can keep your account. If you aren't a good user, you'd better turn that around pretty quickly.