[mod says] I’ve forwarded this question to Ben – the only person who can possibly provide an answer on the timeframe. All I can say is that, last I heard, Ben was arranging talks on getting Fluther the necessary tech support to welcome new jellies, while maintaining protection against nefarious users. Legit users will be able to join easily (we don’t want to make that difficult at all). We’ll probably have certain limits to make incessant spamming and trolling impossible. Maybe new users can only ask one question and write up to three responses until they’ve been approved by a mod…something like that. We haven’t discussed the details yet because we don’t have a programmer to implement the changes anyway.
We don’t like that Fluther is on lockdown. It became necessary because the technical protection we have just wasn’t enough anymore. For a while, every time we left Fluther for more than ten minutes, we’d return to chaos. At least three new unintelligible questions. Sometimes dozens of inflammatory posts. Lurve gaming, fake accounts, and many flags informing us about concerning PMs.
That’s all I have to say on this, really. I know it’s probably not very satisfying. It’s definitely not a good situation.