1) We keep a regular eye on the hit rates of every access restriction we place, yes. It is very rarely that we can lift one once we place it, however.
2) It absolutely will not be faster than 24h turnaround; there's no way we can commit to that. The exact speed will depend on the volume and on how much admin time we claw back from spam handling. If that doesn't work for you, you can also use a VPN service to get an IP that geolocates outside of one of the blocked countries just for account creation, although VPN abuse is another one of our big issues right now and we have the "filter traffic from netblocks with bad reputations" filter with our DDoS provider turned up pretty high right now.
3) The account creation admin tool generates a random password that can't be emailed to you (it's impossible to extract an account's password: writing the password to the database is a one-way operation) and you will have to reset it once the account has been created through the normal password reset email workflow to a password of your choice.
4) Not easily technically possible, I'm afraid.
I know it sucks, and I'm sorry. We have been holding off on this step for a very long time, because we know it's disruptive. But we are absolutely drowning -- on a bad day our account creation volume is 80% spam and an average day is running around 60% -- and we need to take drastic steps in order to preserve the service for everyone.
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2) It absolutely will not be faster than 24h turnaround; there's no way we can commit to that. The exact speed will depend on the volume and on how much admin time we claw back from spam handling. If that doesn't work for you, you can also use a VPN service to get an IP that geolocates outside of one of the blocked countries just for account creation, although VPN abuse is another one of our big issues right now and we have the "filter traffic from netblocks with bad reputations" filter with our DDoS provider turned up pretty high right now.
3) The account creation admin tool generates a random password that can't be emailed to you (it's impossible to extract an account's password: writing the password to the database is a one-way operation) and you will have to reset it once the account has been created through the normal password reset email workflow to a password of your choice.
4) Not easily technically possible, I'm afraid.
I know it sucks, and I'm sorry. We have been holding off on this step for a very long time, because we know it's disruptive. But we are absolutely drowning -- on a bad day our account creation volume is 80% spam and an average day is running around 60% -- and we need to take drastic steps in order to preserve the service for everyone.