I was speaking on this weeks ago in comments and on discord, as well as, when I first signed up. I have 5 friends right now still waiting at 2-3 weeks.
Morevover, it's not just that those spam accounts are signing up and paying for their stake— they're signing up with a delegation to the tune of 15SP each, so what's that... $30USD x 1000~.......?
And I can't even get my little sister on here after 3 whole weeks?
I've bought accounts for 2 dev projects, but I don't want to do that for other users (friends, family, etc.) and have my account attached as a multi-account to other people who I'm not responsible for. Plus many services ban multi-accounts from using their services. For instance, I can't BUY my sister an account because it will be attached to my username and then she can't join P.A.L. or use certain resteem bots.
Actually just to let you know that shouldn't be a problem for us at PAL, we don't really look at who created the accounts unless we see a lot of suspicious activity, like ten discord accounts all pointing votes at one account or other weirdness :) I can't speak for the resteem bots because I don't know how they work but most of them seem to have a lot of dead followers anyways from what I've heard.
Okay thank you for the clarity @juliakponsford. I noticed a conversation in the help channel on PAL where the issue was multiaccounts. I don't mind onboarding my own friends and getting them set up (they can just give me the cash for their stake in person) but I don't want them to have any hassles as far as when they try to register with services and be linked to my account. I'm also concerned about being responsible or tied to their content. I don't think anyone I'd personally sign up would be a douchebag intentionally but you never know how people will use the platform. I could possibly keep a running list of accounts I've personally validated and signed up and keep an eye on them too. Kind of a hassle though lol. I hope the sign up process gets fixed. Especially because it's only hindering regular people from signing up.
Unfortunately those rules need to be in place because we have caught rings of up to 50 accounts who sign up for tons of discord accounts all to vote one account and we want to try to keep the upvotes as fairly distributed as we can. I really do hope steemit fixes this with the next hard fork, signing people up is a PITA!
Please ask your friends to seek help with their account approvals in the #help channel on https://steem.chat
@pfunk Is there someone they can tag to get attention there? I can have them specifically mention they were referred by me if that helps.
drakos handles most I believe, but asking in the channel will get the attention of someone who can help.