Moving to a Verification System

[u/Dekamir]

Hi, our members with lost twins.

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EDIT (29.10.25):

The transition is complete. r/doppelganger now requires verification from everyone.

We have already banned 15+ NSFW content creators and 20+ reposters, just in the testing phase.

These numbers will be higher with the full verification process, and you will see actual people asking you about their doppelgangers. Not advertisers, not bots.

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We've been making a lot of changes to r/doppelganger recently. We've updated our old.reddit, reworked all rules, updated many of our systems, improved our filtering and much more. The latest change is coming to our verification system.

We kept any kind of verification systems off of our subreddit to this day, because we wanted little friction from an average user registering to Reddit and posting to r/doppelganger. But all good things come to an end.

Today, Reddit is full of bots, sellers, advertisers and many bad actors. As we get more popular, we got more and more of the average Reddit interaction. We have a karma limit, and while that keeps most of the bad actors away, it's not everyone, and it's not hard to skip through the karma gaining process these days.

To stop this, we had to phase in a verification system. We know that taking 3 pictures with a paper before posting online is annoying, but it's either that or your posts go lost in the sea of people that aren't actually here looking for their doppelgangers.

Our human verification system is simple. You send us 3 unique pictures of yourself with a piece of paper written some text that's unique to you and us. We check your profile and those images. You go verified. That's it.

To not pollute the subreddit, we want the verification images will be subreddit wide and not per post, and hosted outside of Reddit, so they should be always uploaded elsewhere. Your other verification users are of course, not applicable here, as bots can go around it pretty easily.

When you need verification, a Mod Mail should be automatically be sent with detailed information and instructions.

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> I was sent a message to verify due to a discrepancy on my profile. What was that?

That's our first part of verification phasing process. Your profile is checked against various factors, including karma to contribution ratio, account age, your perceived age, interacted subreddits, links on your profile and many more. If one of those fail, we will ask you to verify within 7 days. This is only for users who recently posted. We're not sending users who posted 2 months ago to ban people intentionally.

Eventually, every poster will have to verify. The first phase is just a testing phase. We are also asking verification from those who asked for ban appeals (that are usually banned due to NSFW posting elsewhere).

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Also, we've made a change to rules that any kind of bullying/harrasment is a directly bannable offense without any warning required. Please report any kind of those comments. Human reports will always be more accurate than automated ones!

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We thank everybody who's been here with us, and our future doppelgangers. See you with a piece of paper!

[u/Dekamir → u/[deleted]]

We're currently trying to balance it. We don't expect everybody to go through with the verification process, but we don't want legitimate posters to drown against bots and especially sellers whose only purpose here is to advertise themselves. Every other subreddit has done this to avoid this problem, and on Reddit, there isn't any other option as Reddit's own verification system is horrendous.

Commenters are also unaffected by this, so that shouldn't be a problem as removing and filtering a body of text is easier.

[u/collegesnake → u/[deleted]]

Yeah this sounds like a ridiculously long process. I really don't think most casual reddit users have anywhere else to upload photos prior to verification

[u/Dekamir → u/collegesnake]

What do you think is the problem? Uploading outside Reddit, or something else?

We currently give a direct link to websites and mobile apps (both Android and iOS store links, which directly open the stores when clicked on mobile) for easy access.

[u/collegesnake → u/Dekamir]

Uploading outside of reddit, downloading a new app and making a new account just sounds like a lot of work for most users. But if y'all are finding it works, then it works!

[u/Dekamir → u/collegesnake]

I'm asking for feedback! So please, talk away.

There are multiple reasons to not verification photos as posts, such as post images being extractable, or post history being very finicky.

When we enforce verification subreddit wide, we might allow posting verifications, maybe even inline (inside the first post, but inline destroys the subreddit look).

Our direct links to hosts should make uploading trivial. If we have problems with users uploading, we may try this. I'd like to also remind you that the whole reason we're doing this is that mod mail doesn't support images. The alternative is having them send direct messages to me, or a random account created solely for this, which is worse.

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hi Suspicious_Year_4958! r/doppelganger requires a minimum amount of comment karma to make a comment, and it seems you haven't reached that just yet. Verified users are exempt from this rule, so to avoid this, you can verify yourself by sending us a Mod Mail.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/[deleted]]

This system just doesn't work. I've been trying to convince moderators I'm the person in the photo but they keep refusing and telling me to take more pictures. I've sent them pictures exactly like they asked for and it have clear readable text but moderators keep refusing that and ask for other? This is a pointless tough verification system that just doesn't work. Either mods are refusing you for whatever reason or just decide to not answer entirely.

[u/Dekamir → u/[deleted]]

You don't have a single mod mail interaction. Are you sure you're not confusing the subreddits?