I definitely agree that requiring a link-via-IRC might be too high of a barrier. Even for someone like myself who's used it for decades in the past, but doesn't use it much any longer, it might be a sufficiently high burden as to preclude registration, thereby driving repos toward alternatives.

With regard to these recent requests, I did post a response 10 days ago to this /lisp post indicating that hosting the quicklisp library repo in our gitlab might be a good alternative. That made me think perhaps some of the uptick in requests were legitimate.

—jon

On Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 8:19 AM Georgiy Tugai <georgiy@tugai.id.au> wrote:

On 3/07/2025 06:39, Philipp Marek wrote:
> Hi Jon,
>> Is there any vetting process for gitlab account requests or do we just
>> grant them to whomever asks for them?
> Well, I got suspicious by so many requests in short order -
> (normally we're at a dozen people a year?)
> and two requests coming in with the same name but different email addresses.
> My guess is that these are spam(mers).
>
> I already asked on IRC about that yesterday.
Most (if not all) of the requests that came in that burst are probably spam, agreed.
> With the new installation, is the old process of asking for a registration link via IRC dead?
> Would we want it again to cut down on automated (spam) account requests?

The new installation currently does not support the link-via-IRC method, I imagine that we could reinstate it.

Last time we discussed that, there was some concern as to whether link-via-IRC may be "too hard" for legitimate users, given how few people know about/use IRC these days.