Any objection to not granting Participate Everywhere to new users automatically?
New users on our communities automatically gain the Participate ability, which allows limited participation. In particular, you're rate-limited on posting, you can only comment on your own posts and answers to your own questions by default, and links in your profile are not linkified for people who are not logged in. The Participate Everywhere ability lifts these restrictions, and is normally earned after some positive participation.
Currently, this community (along with most others on our network) is set to grant the Participate Everywhere ability to all new users alongside Participate. We did this to help our communities get up and running, reducing the barriers to entry.
That was several years ago, and while this community hasn't taken off the way we'd imagined, it is attracting a steady stream of new users with spam-filled profiles who never post anything. We'd rather not help them boost their spam linkage. We have a nightly job that attempts to do some cleanup, but prevention would be better.
We can change that setting, so that new users start with just Participate and have to earn Participate Everywhere. Some other communities on our network have made this change and have not reported any problems with (real) new users hitting roadblocks.
We'd like to change this setting, which will make things a little harder on spammers. Any objections? If I don't hear any, I'll plan to make this change a week from today (August 18).
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