Introduction

Hello all! I'm a new joiner to this group but not terribly new to TrueNudists in general (signed up a couple of years back). I'm Noah, 34/m from Oregon!

I don't know how long ago it was that TrueNudists was "great" but all I see recently is people complaining about all the spam, fake profiles and the lack of Certification requirement on this site. I found it a bit interesting why certification wasn't strictly required - maybe TrueNudists originally started in a day before everyone had smartphones and easy access to digital cameras? It takes almost no effort to scribble something on paper and take a selfie with it - I have done exactly that so many times on different sites, from Reddit groups to Discord groups and a few odd places in between. When I signed up on TrueNudists I posted my certification selfie right away - it took a few days (maybe a week) for the moderators to get around to me, and I've heard from others that their certification photo goes for weeks/months unanswered - there may be a moderator burden trying to get to all these pictures, or maybe uncertified users are lying some of the time (and never actually posted a pic - just want to make you think they tried!)

A story I've heard from non-certified users too is that not all nudists are willing or able to be certified, because of their job or local community and they can't risk being "outed" as a member of this site or as a nudist period. So maybe TrueNudists had the lax certification requirement to not be exclusionary to those kind of folks? But by not requiring certification, the site is an easy target for automated spam robots or just creepy people who like to ogle at the nudists and slide into your DMs and get all weird on you.

I actually have a project of my own where I'm tackling the 'certification problem' in my own way. I'm a software engineer and I had recently built my own social networking site for nudists (nonshy.com), where certification (and a profile picture showing your face) is a hard requirement to access much of the site - the Forums, the Site Gallery, the Member Directory are all gated as certification-only. A non-certified user can basically only view and edit their own profile page but the site is designed to make it difficult for them to discover anybody else to talk to (to keep spam robots at bay). A certified user could search for non-certified profiles and reach out first, if they want; but as the non-certified user they have no way to discover users otherwise. IMHO, TrueNudists should have been designed around that principal to begin with -- take away all incentives for automated spam bots and creepy people and give them a highly limited site experience until they certify. My site only launched about 20 days ago and has 41 certified members so far!

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