Bitcoin Forum

1. Lots of threads on bitcoin discussion are being moved to unrelated boards that no one reads
2. Having a newbie section is derogatory, people should be able to post where they like. Registering an account is inconvenient enough without having to satisfy some random admin.

Yes please lets open the forums to every spambot out there.

I mean it's not like there are 40000 accounts on this forum registered by spambots and the only reason they can't spam is because they can't auto-defeat the newbie restrictions.

Oh, wait, no, that's exactly what it's like.

Hopefully this will get people to read those sections.


I've always really disliked the newbie restrictions. It significantly reduces the quality of the entire community IMO because there are no "drive-by contributors" who would otherwise make up a large percentage of the community. However, the moderation tools currently available aren't good enough to protect the community if there were no newbie restrictions. In particular, at least these features are needed:
- A much better report system. (Currently, moderators just receive reports via email, which is terrible.)
- Better CAPTCHAs for newbies. Many bots are able to defeat the current CAPTCHAs.
- A way to require that newbies from certain IPs must have their posts approved by moderators. (Spam and proxy IPs would be given this treatment.)
- A page like this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent) that shows only posts by newbies, so moderators and other helpful people can patrol newbie posts.

Whats stopping you from changing the forum software?

I always hated the captcha options for SMF, honestly. I spent a week or so trying to find a good one and the best one added a checkbox that said, "Uncheck this box". That was in 2008, though. The stuff since doesn't seem to have improved that much, though.

I guess this one is kind of promising, but you have to change the default images:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=421525.0

The current CAPTCHA system was custom-modified by Satoshi and is probably just as good as notCaptcha at confusing bots. (Mostly because systems like notCaptcha rely more on obscurity than security.)

I guess I was responding to...


It seems like you're saying it's decent at confusing bots but it's unique enough that they end up designing bots anyway? I mean, the images may need to be in the thousands to really fool them, but notCaptcha could be worth a shot.

Otherwise maybe Bad Behavior mod would be a good idea, instead of relying on captchas. I'm not sure of a solution, just throwing a few out there. I've heard of people running into problems with Bad Behavior.

Captcha just sucks, I've used it on my site and it does nothing, determined bots will get past it one way or another and you also have to acknowledge the fact it's fucking annoying to get past them as a human, the only ones I've found remotely bearable are the numbered ones. Like DRM it's an over-marketed heap of junk that claims to do something but in reality it does nothing to combat the thing it was designed to stop and can be abused in all sorts of ways.

Captchas can be really annoying if they are impossible to do but the more impossible they are the more likely it will stop bots ;), unless the bot uses a service which asks a random person to solve it and give it the answer. :-\

Even more threads are in the wrong section, I hate seeing for sale ads in trading discussion instead of the marketplace.


It greatly cuts down on spam, scammers and especially trolls. Without that limit the forum would be FULL of somethingawful & 4chan trolls. Sure its inconvenient, but the requirements are soo low, 5 posts & 4 hrs, heck I was whitelisted after my first post by a mod. The benefits definitely out-weigh the inconvenience.

If you are the superhero who can read everything about Bitcoin, maybe this RSS feed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=.xml;limit=20) is better for you. For the people who care about relevance, the board system is optimal.

The reason why CAPTCHAs are useless is because some shady sites *reuse* other site's captcha.

You go to http://somesite.com/ and click on register.

Somesite queries a site with reCAPTCHA and copies the image, delivers it to you.

You enter the captcha.

Somesite sends what you enter to that site and checks if it lets them make a bot account or not.

???

What a serious face palm, getting rid of the newbie section would open this forum up to how many spambots.


Please, someone find a pit of logical sense and spread it around.