Could we have a minimum reputation for visible profiles?

I feel we could pick either of two reputation levels where setting an about me could tie in.

5 reputation - This reputation level allows you the most basic interactions besides asking and answering, namely participation on a sites meta, and commenting on others' posts (on Meta sites).

It requires 2 suggested edits to be accepted, or one upvote on a post to reach this level.

or

10 reputation - This reputation level removes the new user restriction, which makes users able to post more links and inline images, the later ofcourse is also a protection against spam.

It requires 1 upvote on a post or 5 suggested edits to be accepted to reach this level.

In conclusion it boils down to how much of a barrier we want to be put in place. I think 5 reputation could be sufficient, as that requires some form of positive contribution to the site, which isn't something most of the spammers are willing to invest in.

I suppose it would be safe to have the minimum reputation of "more than 1" to unlock the full profile editing feature. So, for example, an accepted edit can unlock it. Or even asking a question and accepting an answer. Or any upvote.

Although, I feel maybe rep is golden hammer-shaped. What the positive reputation means is that the user has had positive interaction with the site. For example, they have made an edit, or have asked a non-spam answerable question.

I do not like tying privileges to reputation because it is not very meaningful and only rewards one type of behaviour. Yes, that is how almost all extra features on the sites work, however, it might be time to look beyond reputation.

Therefore, my suggestion is to unlock the edit feature after a user has interacted with the site in a way that shows they are not a spammer. Accepted edits do count here. An example of non-reputation based interaction would be asking a question which is not flagged and removed as spam within X amount of time. 24 hours seems appropriate (spam content tends to last a lot less than that) but it can be adjusted as needed.

With this approach, there is no need to go for rep hunting just to unlock a minor feature on the site. The barrier to entry is lowered, yet for spammers it remains relatively high.

I upvoted as I agree these profiles need less visibility, but I still have concerns about hiding new user profiles completely. It needs to be done with care.

When a new user posts something suspicious, I often look at their profile to help determine if it's spam. In fact I just came here after doing just that. An answer was posted along these lines:

Q: What's the name of this manga?

A: This is my favorite manga: [link 1] [link 2]

A poor answer yes, a non-answer yes, but is it spam?

Believe it or not but link 1 was to their favorite manga (I assume), on a reputable site. Link 2 was spam, but I could only definitely tell that because it was plastered over their profile, where they admitted they were a contributor.

By all means filter "new users" (the list) and "recent badges", or even prevent 1 rep profiles from being viewed when you're completely logged out. Just don't hide the information a flagger needs to do their job. (The same goes especially for moderators, even on sites they don't have a diamond on.)

Seems a valid alternative. As I said in the chat when this was discussed some days ago, another option is to lock the profile editing privilege (setting the "about me" info) behind a minimal reputation requirement - let's say just 5 or 10 rep point. That way you still lock out spammers from being able to use the user profile about me field to promote inappropriate services, while standard users should feel almost no difference.

That said, browsing the answers here show that some users still have concern with both proposals. Therefore, I will also reference for sake of visibility another option that was suggested in the past: preventing user profiles for being indexed by search engines and - optionally - hide them completely from anonymous users.

See also Shog comment back then:

This is definitely a good approach. Based on what I've seen in the past, these groups are using search engines as their proof of work - so if they can't get the pages they've spammed into Google, they're not gonna get paid. That's eventually gonna make this a waste of time no matter how cheaply they're able to post it - but if we also take steps to make it more expensive (that is, more tedious: IP-blocks / rate-limits, content checks, automated account deletions would all slow them down to a degree) then we may actually discourage further abuse

I think the first step here should be to figure out what the purpose of any measures against profile spam is. Profile spam has very low visibility, it's almost entirely irrelevant. Users that don't post don't get their profile linked on any question or answer, and search engines don't index these profiles as far as I remember.

The only places I can think of that expose profile spam are

• the users list when going to "new users" and sorting by date
• autobiographer badges in the "recent badges" sidebar

These are really obscure places, I strongly doubt that the vast majority of users ever looks at them. So a typical user will almost never encounter any spam profiles while using the site.

It's still a bit untidy to leave them around, and it does give a bad impression of the site if someone actually manages to navigate to the new users list sorted by date if most of them are obviously spam. But I would also really expand the problem here in that not only the profile is the issue here, but spammy user names as well. The names are always visible one step earlier than the profiles.

So while I don't think it's worth spending much effort on this because this is not very visible, I do think that some measures might be possible here. The big problem is that I don't think it's reasonable to just bump up the rep threshold for editing the profile. SE wants users to engage with the site and fill out that profile, putting roadblocks in here is likely to reduce engagement. And I think that would be a reasonable stance, SE is weird enough about hiding abilites behind rep and I don't think we should make that worse. Spam profiles are such a minor issues that I would not consider this enough justification to interfere with the new user experience like this.

Hiding the profile information without telling the user about it would also be weird, asking the user to put effort into something that isn't shown at all. I still think the least invasive version would simply be to make new users without any participation on the site even less visible than they're now. Don't show their autobiographer badges and change the users page so that you won't see those users there. There still can be mod or 10k tools to view all users, but in the end the user profiles and names don't matter if you can't reach the from the main site.

Maybe something could be added so people can't do anything except edit, ask questions or answer unless they have at least one upvoted question/answer... but it feels wrong somehow.

If it's possible to block phone numbers on profile pages, that might work, but it would crash some people's About Me pages as well.

Minority opinion here. I don't want a few spammers to cause about 99% of the users to suffer, or have fewer privileges.

That's just not fair. Most users sit with 1 rep, and that's fine. Such a sudden and major change won't be fair for them.

I prefer the users to keep their privileges, and find other ways to fight spam. Maybe a list of bad words in profiles, that when present will raise auto flag, but that's off-topic in this question, and it might be worth starting a "How can we detect spammers and nuke them faster?" discussion.

Perhaps it's time to re-examine: "Why does reputation start at 1, and have a lower bound of 1?".

• The negative reputation should be limited to a maximum of -5.

• The downvotes should be divided by 5 (20 on metas) when applied to calculate a negative result. Example 13 total downvotes (loss of 26) would show as -5 if they never had a positive contribution, and one upvote would get you out of the hole.

• A user with all posts downvoted, but less than -5 total, would show as zero.

• Suspended users would have a red colored 1 reputation, which distinguishes them from other reputation 1 users without having to check the profile.

I don't object to different numbers above, that's just a suggestion; and a limit to how far we express our displeasure.

The negative reputation profile could cause information to be added to the new user banner prompting people to assist the poor person with a helpful comment or to report a user who is obviously not here to help or be helped.

It could also cause a caution banner for the user, with helpful links to read about providing better answers or asking better questions; much like the result of a "not helpful" flag cautions the user next time they flag, and asks them to review their prior flag.

This would help both the user to avoid a question and answer ban (a common complaint) and to highlight problem accounts, allowing quicker identification and flagging. The ability to have the user profile visible to search engines and for links and images to show only to logged in users would both prevent spamming and increase positive participation.