STINC’s sign-up process has been one of the most exploitable processes in this ecosystem. They routinely allow exploiters to create hundred- or thousand-account bot-nets. One was able to grow to over 20,000 accounts.
They need to get out of the account creation game until they have at least some kind of adequate measures to prevent obvious exploits. It’s sad that this continues. And it’s even sadder that they wanted the ability to create these accounts for free...so that they can assume zero responsibility AND pay no price for it.
good point about the free account creation mechanism. While it costed at least 0.1 STEEM before, it is fully free now. I guess the whole signup process is a tricky balance between convenience for genuine users and public perception one one hand, and a burden for abusers on the user hand. But seeing wait times of several weeks isn't the best advertisement anyway. Apart from abuse prevention, the new account creations are currently at an year to date low while still taking most of @steem's RC - I wonder to which extend the account creation process could scale at all?