Of course, we can do both too. I think this is how HN works and it's a good solution. The only thing left is implementing it :)
Another idea is GitHub integration. Make each new user authenticate with GitHub, scan his/her repos for original Nim code, assign reputation rank based on star count. 8-)
EDIT - didn't have time to finish this today, but here's a general idea:
https://github.com/lbmn/nim/blob/master/nerdcred/nerdcred.nim
I agree that requiring a GitHub account will do more harm than good.
It may be worth hooking in to the StopForumSpam API which would help block bots (but not much help for humans). Realistically, human spam is very difficult to combat without impacting the user experience for legitimate users.
I'm not saying that having a GitHub account should be a requirement for joining, but it could be a part of the "business logic" for new account validation. It's very easy to implement. If you're an established Nim developer, the forum rolls out a red carpet. If you're not, your first X posts are hidden until a moderator validates them. Or something like that.
Linking forum profiles to GitHub is a good idea for a number of other reasons as well: keeping track of who is who, who wrote what, etc.
There was recently a controversial thread that is now "locked", and there was some talk of deleting it (Page 1 on archive.ORG/.IS; Page 2 on archive.ORG/.IS). I hope that it remains locked rather than deleted, which I think is very unethical.
Aside from a proper thread locking mechanism, I think this forum needs some more features to properly accommodate the needs of Nim's online community:
In the hacker culture, you should be judged by your work and your work alone. Show me your code. I want to see URLs to public repositories with your commits in them. (OpenHub statistics will do for a first cut.) Your credibility goes up with commit volume and number of different projects. and especially with the number of other people you have collaborated with. In theory, I might be open to other metrics than commit volume for people who aren't primarily software engineers. But that's an edge case; the point is, whether it's lines of code or Thingiverse objects or PCB layouts, I want to see evidence of contributed work.
I hope that in the near future I'll FINALLY find the time to submit some feature / enhancements code proposals for nimforum (rather than just feature suggestions and half-baked code snippets)...
I think is very unethical.
It's not "unethical" at all. The thread had nothing to do with Nim and only does Nim harm.
In the hacker culture, you should be judged by your work and your work alone.
And what work was shown in that thread? Never mind, I'm quite familiar with the inconsistencies of libertarian "philosophy".