pixeldesu: Thank you! Not to compare services, but I once was a user of CuriousCat and that was a feature on that site. You could do "true anonymous" and people don't need an account to ask questions, but that meant that if you blocked them, they could just send you another one because there was no account to block.

But by letting me require a user have an account to ask anonymously, if I block them, I am actually blocking their account and they can't simply return with no consequences.

Alternatively, I don't know how easy this is to implement, but IP blocks would also be a decent option. A test me and my friend ran once was to make me block him anonymously with no account attached to him, and when he signed into his account, it too was already blocked. He made an alt, and that was already blocked. Goes a long way to prevent people trying to circumvent blocks or make alts.

Not sure if that's helpful, but I found it made weeding out troll users very easy for me since I am a somewhat popular person in my community, and thus makes me a target for harassment.

TwitchREVO: Anonymous blocks on Retrospring are IP blocks, but they only count for anonymous questions. As soon as someone asks you a question with an account, you can just block them that way.

pixeldesu: So, I re-enabled anonymous questions after I blocked the original offender, and they came back and spammed 36 more instances of "ass" in my inbox. If I understand correctly, if I blocked them, that should have been an IP ban, and therefore they cannot come back, correct? Does that mean that they are using a VPN or other ways to bypass IP bans?

This is also more reason why optional "must have an account" toggle is important, so that even if they aren't IP banned, I am still stopping them from spamming me because their root account is blocked.

Like, I literally cannot use anonymous questions because this one very sick person is stalking me and spamming me any time they can. They are obsessively checking for when I allow anons and jumping on the opportunity to bother me. I mean, it's kind of sad they spend all their time doing this, but it's still an inconvenience to the end user if others exploit this.

TwitchREVO: You can also set up mutes for "ass" and other similar keywords they use. https://retrospring.net/settings/muted

I assume that they might use a VPN if they still can ask you anonymous questions.

And no, the account-only thing would actually not help, because anonymous blocks only prevent anonymous questions being asked, they do not entirely prevent an account from asking you questions. So if they then change their IP, they could still ask you questions even with an account.

I talked with team members and we're going to internally track logged in users with anon blocks in the future, so the account requirement will actually be effective.

I already opened issues for it, but we will look into introducing account age options like CuriousCat has them as well, so combined with an account requirement, people could only ask you a question with an account after a week/a month.

Things will probably still take a while (Retrospring is developed by 2 people in their free time), but you can track ongoing issues here as well:

pixeldesu: Thank you so much! This sounds really good! And thank you for all your hard work!