Bitcoin Forum

I miss how the forum used to be around March-April time, the quality of posting was amazing and the forum really did shine with brilliant technical information.
I can't help but feel as if a truck load of teenagers have jumped on the bandwagon to derail threads and bump their post count with useless crap.

I also feel guilty for the quality of my own posting and have thought many times about killing my account here as to not add to the continual problem.

I want bitcoin to succeed, I really do, its taken over my life the past few months and I cant help but feel angry reading the majority of forum threads now a days.

What can I do myself to make bitcoin succeed and drive the riff raff away?  :-\

Even less than I can, and I havn't had much luck in that department.

It's a good sign actually.

As any technical community grows and/or a technology becomes increasingly adopted, it's inevitable that numbers of non-technical users will increase. I suppose a fix would be to split the forum up, add in some kind of reputation module so that users can uprate those who post with quality. Then have a forum where membership is by invitation only, or automatic on somebody hitting certain reputation mark.

Although this might earn the bitcoin community a snob reputation and work against adoption.

Or we could just start a StackExchange for the technicals... Oh wait, we're working on that: http://bit.ly/pt2km3   ;D

Which needs some topics to get things going :D
There's been just one new topic since I committed to it a couple of days ago and I'm more of a responding than asking question for the sake of asking kind of person :(

Me too. I don't know how to fix it.

Crack down hard on the trolling. This will need more moderators.

You're welcome for the one new topic ;)

Like you, I'm more of a responding than asking sort of person so it's rough to come up with questions.

How do users become moderators anyway? And couldn't more moderators make things worse just as easily better?
(The humble questions of someone who missed the good old days)

Ah that's not me! That topic started after I joined the stack group :D

The Bitcoin Stack Exchange isn't actually open yet.  What we've got right now is a proposal, and we need more users to join before the site will actually launch.  We especially need established Stack Exchange users with 200+ reputation, as that number is lagging.

The one up side is more people on the forums means more people know about bitcoins.  So you should be glad the forum is full of people!

I think the biggest problem is one of information organization, not "trying to bump post count".  There has already been a bit of joking about the fact that the forum has a very short memory.

The reason that there are so many topics and posts is mainly duplication. The thing that the new people generally do is rush to the "Create topic" button to ask one of the 10 most common questions. So make a FAQ (I know there is one on the wiki, that one can be used/extended).

In this case they should be pointed at a FAQ or duplicate topic as quickly as possible. Prevent the thread from becoming a lengthy political argument (especially if it was a technical question in the first place), and simply close it if it does.

Everyone can help with this (except for the closing) not just moderators. The key here is speed. Don't assume people are malignant, they are simply ignorant of everything that went before.

Edit: I also think MiningBuddy would make an excellent moderator

+1

Good point. I would support not allowing people to post new topics until they have 100 posts or so.

That would make for some good policy I think.  Maybe not on all sections of the forum, but a lot of them.

Yeah, but that wouldn't stop the trolls. AyeYo hasn't created a single topic. (that I could find)

Hm, but that would give people reason to bump their post count on purpose.

IMO we simply need to be more watchful. And there need to be more moderators (that actually respond to "Report to moderator..." clicks). Technical measures won't help I'm afraid. Trolls know their way around they, so they mainly end up hurting people that have a legitimate reason for opening a topic.

This won't help. I've been a mod and admin in various forums over the past decade and whenever this tactic is attempted, it just annoys legit users. Importantly everybody especially the spammers/trolls, except the very stupid, quickly figures out how to get around it... by doing the exact thing we don't want: posting nonsense as fast as they can to get past the X post count barrier.

+10, if I only had more time I would spend so much of it on the wiki...

I think much of the clueless questions/rants can be eliminated with good information on the wiki, linked to in eye-catching stickies in the forum.

Not everyone are in the forum for endless chatter, some just research Bitcoin on their own and have as their first post here a good question, a useful suggestion or an interesting project they've been working on.

More prudent would be a manual vetting system where established users can bestow to newbies posting rights if they see they're making good posts.

That's what was going on here for a while, until the newbie post count was dropped from 50 to 5.

then topic hijacking will be rampant, or people spamming "GREAT POST!!!" to get post count up

I lament with you fellow peer. But if a boatload of children can destroy bitcoin it was never meant to be. Let them bla-bla-bla, it does not change the efficacy of bitcoin. It is still the best money around.

They can't destroy bitcoin, the stage that the bitcoin community was limited to this forum is long gone.

But they can destroy this forum, by making all the serious contributors leave.

The carrot is stronger than the whip.  I like systems that reward positive contributors rather than those which attempt to punish abusers.  I think stack exchange does a great job with this.  I've not seen a particularly good system for forums yet.

At the end of the day, however, it comes down to who uses it.  Since bitcoin was advertised as a way to make a quick buck (I quadrupled my money in one week), a high percentage of the new members were uninterested in the culture of bitcoin or how it works.  This led to a rapid decline in the quality of posts IMHO. 

I admit to discouraging open discussion of topics which are deemed illegal under various governments when I first started posting.  This was mainly a tactical idea I had for sneaking in under the radar.  In retrospect myself and others like me probably pushed away a lot of the quality posters.  Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.   

I don't know where you heard about it, but I knew it as a way to transfer funds securely and relatively anonymously. Not a ponzi scheme.

I apologize if I were unclear.  I meant that the user base grew significantly as/after the price jumped to $30/btc.  These were the new members to which I was referring, which of course is a blanket statement and doesn't hold true for all of them.  I most enjoyed reading on the forums prior to bitcoin hitting $1.20.