Bitcoin Forum

When technology is involved, things get sloppier and inhuman on the large scale and that's exactly what happens when you make a fixed time and post count requirement for newbies.

It confuses them, pushes them to make meaningless posts to meet a quota, and creates an abusive and aggressive atmosphere that moderators are then left to clean up for the life of said member.

I don't know how others feel about this policy, but personally I think it's one of the most bizarre and backwards policies ever. We don't want trolls, we don't want spambots, and we don't want people who are here just to spread verbal diarrhea, yet that's exactly what we get when we place barriers that can be broken by a GreaseMonkey script.

I propose that the time and post requirements be removed for newbies and replaced with the following:

• Newbie accounts are created, along with a BTC address previously generated in bulk offline
• The balance of this address is controlled and owned by the forum and is used in place of donations
• When this balance reaches a certain threshold, the user will be automatically whitelisted and the balance dumped into the forum's funds, with the address removed from the profile of the user.

This makes it costly to make new accounts and shit-post or spam, and it also makes it so that people with abusive attitudes and nothing meaningful to say stay where they belong.

This would be the equivalent of using Reddit gold or the Reddit tip bot, but as a form of quality control and whitelisting instead.

Thoughts?

I suppose they could add a "buy yourself out of jail" option. But it should not be the only way, as people without any bitcoins might well want to ask questions about it or need tech support etc...

I don't know if we really need them at all.

We don't have newbie restrictions on the local Boards.

In the German section we now have a large increase in Users (when I joined I barely posted there at all, now it's even more than in the English threads)

Yet we don't have any problems with trolls and barely with spam bots there.

The only real good thing about the restrictions is, that it keeps the reoccurring noob questions in one board, if it wasn't for them, we would have the same question about the 21Mil Limit twice a day in the Bitcoin Discussion Board.

My plan is to remove the newbie restrictions once the moderation tools are improved enough to make this safely possible. I've so far completed one of the three necessary moderation improvements.

That's good too, but one of the many benefits I can think of for having users be whitelisted based on their participation (the only reason they'd actually be creating an account instead of just reading as a guest) and the *quality* of their participation is to all but remove the loan scam issue. Right now it's basically:

1) Sign up
2) Exit newbie jail
3) Go straight to lending subforum

This simply wouldn't happen if someone was only allowed to post in places once their peers agreed already that they weren't dipshit scammers. Additionally, it would help them get the loan they're looking for if in fact they are legitimate.