Temporary community creation rate limiting

[denise]

This afternoon, someone called to our attention that a group of people are creating a high number of communities to "squat" on popular/in-demand usernames, then offering to give away, trade, or sell those usernames to the people who want them. While we don't want to place limits on the number of journals or communities people can maintain on Dreamwidth for personal use, bulk registration for malicious use like that falls into the category of exploiting the service, and in the interest of fairness for everyone, we do need to place limits on that.

We've renamed the accounts that were registered in bulk, in order to free up those usernames for legitimate use, and we've temporarily instated a rate-limit on the number of communities an account can create. For a limited time -- probably just during our open beta phase -- accounts will only be able to create up to three communities per week.

We think this strikes the right balance between encouraging legitimate growth and preventing automated abuse. If this limit turns out to be too low, we can raise it, and this is intended to only be a temporary measure. For the time being, though, we'd like to make sure that everyone has an equal chance to have access to resources.

Again, this isn't meant to place restrictions on legitimate usage. You're welcome to create multiple personal accounts, or maintain multiple communities. We're just taking steps to block things like people registering 100+ communities with popular usernames and then trying to trade or sell those usernames. If you run into problems with this rate-limit, you can contact us through Support and we can see what we can do.

Comments

[theresa]

If there a "repeal process" that people can go through if they think they have a legit community or should they just go to support for a request to rename?

[denise]

If someone thinks we've mis-identified a community, they can open up a support request in the Feedback category, and we'll get to it as soon as possible!

[theresa]

Thanks.

There is a community I'm a member of and they were confused by the name change. I'll let them know your response.

[desert_rn]

I was wondering about this, because a group of friends came over together, and one of us (who had a paid account and more free time than the rest of us) recreated our favorite communities. She worked hard on the layouts and everything, and while they were small, they were active and had entries in them- and you deleted every single community. We weren't squatting- we were USING those comms- and there were nowhere near 100- it was closer to 6 or 8, 10 at most.

I understand being vigilant, but if the comms were active, you might have at least checked to see if they were in use before mass-deleting.

[phoenix]

The comms were renamed by DW, not deleted. I see some on your profile -- reading, baking, thequestionclub -- which are now in a deleted state, but I saw those renamed but undeleted yesterday. The only explanation is that the admin deleted them. Perhaps because she was embarrassed? I saw yesterday that she'd created approximately 20 on various topics, which does seem excessive.

[desert_rn]

She wasn't embarrassed- she was pissed.
And since she was acting for a group of people, I don't think 20 was excessive.