I am concerned about a forum I know about where the forum owner is most likely a student in middle/high school who does not have enough money to pay for the forums and plans on abusing multiple free-trialed forums to get past the money requirement. I am trying to convince the owner that this is a really bad idea, but I don’t have a real example of what could happen to a student if this happens. Can someone say what some of the punishments could be for abusing the free trial? Thanks.
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I don’t believe multiple free trials are offered with discourse hosting.
If someone pretends to be someone else to get a second free trial, you could report them for that and then their application may be denied.
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That was a problem long ago. It’s at least part of why you must ask to have a database restored. I wouldn’t worry about it.
If he’s willing to start with a new database and a new url and a new email address every time he might do it a few times. Now that the whole trial process is totally automated it’s not that big a deal.
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Still issue with amazon aws , you can have multiple aws student account and use the free account to have multiple instances
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I’m not quite sure what you mean by quoting a single word from my post, but I’m not saying that it’s not easy for someone to come up with more email addresses, just that CDCK mostly doesn’t care about some kid spinning up a new low-volume trial site every couple of weeks. When actual human labor was required, it matter, but it’s been a long while since that’s been the case.
Maybe you mean that the students could use AWS free tier for some period of time to run Discourse there? I think that’s true, and seems like less trouble than starting a new site every couple of weeks.
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posted without reading your reply ( my bad ) , i don’t want to write the cheat sheet but AWS is very easy to manipulate for free student account.
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I have done that more times than I care to admit!
Isn’t it as simple as cranking up an EC2 (can you get 2GB on the free tier?) and doing a standard install? (I know that you have to use a real hostname and not a AWS ec2 default hostname).
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sure but post is for a student following cheat sheet and what they do is
1: Domains from freenom
2: t2.micro 1gib with swap
3: Sendgrid for email with CC or gmail without CC
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@pinder99 that may be true, but is extremely risky, because once you get caught, you are forever banned from aws
@mysz doesnt Discourse have abuse reporting email address?
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We do, but we’re not concerned about this.
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By that do you mean that if someone had a trial site that was cancelled, they must ask for that database to be restored for a new site if they don’t have a backup themself?
The trial system is not entirely automated, at least if there are any problems with that a team member must make correction and they can also extend a trial few weeks.
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@HAWK May I ask why is that?
I don’t understand this double-negative statement, do you mean to say it is easy for someone to set up second e-mail or is not?
With free e-mail accounts these typically are only one address per account, but with paid mail providers some offer secondary addresses that use the same account, even with a “catch-all” sub-domain which means technically infinite addresses can be used. Mail can be sent to any random numbers @sub-domain , however there is a limit to only five sub-domains and that is only for receiving mail not sending.
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It is easy. You can open an unlimited number of free Gmail accounts and there are many other such providers.
A low volume trial account uses almost no resources, so cdck doesn’t care. The work to stop them is much more expensive than a low volume trial site.
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Yeah I have a few google accounts but don’t use gmail anymore. With workspace gmail it is also possible to have many multiple addresses with custom domain.
For some people older generations to create even one second e-mail account seems really confusing.
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It’s just not worth our time chasing the tiny number of idiots that abuse the system. They get an average experience and no support for a whole lot of effort.
That may change one day but for now it’s simply a fool’s game.
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