Bitcoin Forum

I'd like to read through threads in their entirety, however there are so many junk posts nowadays that I quit when I have to read more than a few pages.

It would be nice to have a rating system, and the ability to filter our the junkier posts by selecting the minimum rating of post to read.

Perhaps rating a post should be restricted to Full members and above and the right should be taken away to people with higher ranks that abuse it.


Say there is a post with 1000 replies.... Say the rating is 1-5 stars. I only want to read decent replies so I choose to only read 4-5 star replies.

Suddenly I only have to read 100-500 (numbers are made up) replies to be fully up to date.


Maybe we can also tag posts by kind of off topic and really relevant from 1-5.

Then I only want topics that are 4-5 stars relative....

Now I might have to read only 50-250 replies to get up to date. (Numbers are made up)

My idea:

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No because Merit is scarce but quality posts are not as scarce.

And some people Merit shit which I think is idiotic. You presume we all think with one unified mind. Whereas, the natural state of humanity is to dissolve into warring tribes, red versus blue politics, countries in the World Cup, etc..

Also reordering the chronology of posts will make the discussion incoherent.

Decentralized moderation is the only possible solution I can think of that has the correct incentives and sufficient degrees-of-freedom.

A simple drop-down with an option to sort by
 - Top merited posts
 Should do the job

The operation, however, would be time and resources consuming which I believe theymos isn't a great fan of.

In theory it is a fantastic idea. In practice it won't work and this is why:

1) Political reasons. Some people are not popular and will be voted down. Some of these people do sometimes have valuable contributions and I like to read them. Without the stirrers and objectors it has the risk of becoming a pompous, self-congratulatory discussion where little to no progress is made.

2) Spammers and scammers have many accounts currently. They will be voting up crap posts - just like they merit crap posts. How does an escrow service or ANN thread become a higher merited post than Hal Finneys post ? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=toptopicsat
Just like shills and bots are constantly bumping up threads.

Some noobies have great stuff to say. Whether they are learning by asking questions, participating or contributing ideas.
On the contrary - some older accounts are long-term spammers, scammer, bought or stolen.

For serious discussion try "ivory tower" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=251.0

and "serious discussion" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=250.0

Yeah so many junk posts made by spammers, so what we should do is avoid SMT as much as possible and try to engage boards like "serious discussions" ,"ivory tower". We can create a long list of spammers,shitposters by simply pressing ignore button when you feeled those posters making spammy posts only. By that way you can avoid lots of underworld freaks.( Think about JC, I think he has the longest ignore list :D)

But who do the filtering work? Mods even can't handle the amount of reports that have been reported everyday. So that would not be a viable option and also there are so many different sections in bitcointalk which requires number of staff members to filter every posts and rate it.

The bolt part doesn't make any sense to me, because becoming a full member or above can't take as a qualification for rating.

Why even bother for tagging off tofic posts? Just press report to moderator button :D

By maintaining ignore list, by pressing report to moderator button, by avoiding SMT, involving "serious discussion" boards will make you able to read actually 4-5 rated posts only. How about that?

The ignore button seems like the most practical solution, however I'd prefer to filter the content and not the authors. And hell, I'd love to see through the eyes of the user with the biggest blocklist for a day.

Implementing my proposal would probably take forever, and it might even be a bad idea. Maybe I just have to learn to speed-read and cut my losses when a post seems to be garbage, skipping to the next post.

I think the most bullet-proof way will be skipping Altcoin and Bitcoin discussion forums entirely. I feel disgusted to see so much spam there. I suggest people skip bounties required to post only in the Altcoin section.

Right. I failed to understand the correlation between implementing a sorting algorithm and designing a "System Software". Oh, never knew one has to tinker with the kernel by a software interrupt to sort data on a given constant.

Yeah, link me to your "decentralized" forum and I should see your authority free "System Software".

The ignore button is great. You can ignore complete bords like the ANN and ICOs, and you can ignore posters with bad posting habits. OK, maybe they will create the odd useful post, but why spend time picking through the garbage in the hope tht you will find one. Ignoring the OP in a thread greys out the title, so it's easy to skip that thread when you are looking for posts to reward. It's sad for the good posters who may be active in tht thread, but in life you need to choose your friends carefully, society judges you by your friends and associates.

 theymos for some reason does not want to create this feature, sort replies for merit. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3405573.0

I remember you talking about a common ignore list few weeks ago.

Maybe this could be interesting.

It could work like the trust system.

 trusted members could create this ignore list, which could be imported by anyone.  And updated easily by these trusted members.

Then campaign Managers would not accept users from this common ignore list , as few people would read them.

That would only be effective if there was a guest ignore feature. Most threads seem to have 10 times as many views as posts. and this ratio increases with time, and one wonders how many of those views are by non-members. One should also remember that when a member changes his signature, that changes the signature in all his historic posts. I suspect that bumping those old threads will also update the Google entries for the posters. The real benefit would come if Google didn't list ignored member's posts.

I started making a list of the public "ignore lists" of some users.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4453143.0
Well I did't went far but it is still under construction :)

Basically a like button, and you want the ability to sort by best rated.
A reddit copycat.

Without limitation on those ratings, it will turn into a nightmare and theymos isn't a fan of restrictions and limits.
Right now the forum is almost overrun by bumping bots, with this implemented it will be infested with upvoting bots also.

Rather than implementing a new feature that will be abused from day one, it's better to simply move the discussions to serious discussion (Ivory Tower).

Read the topics that are of your interest and do not go beyond third page for reading (unless it is constantly evolving thread like Wall observer  in which people post daily TA ,graphs etc). My personal feeling is  that you will rarely find a new idea or interesting comment after third page. If you think some post are really "junk" then feel free to press "Report To Moderator" , it will not help you at that time  but it will benefit the next reader. (if Moderator removed junk.) and somebody else also pressing "Report To Moderator" to make you reading pleasant if you visit that thread in future.

Might be Theymos give some power to some member in specific section/subsection   in which they can remove junk post on their discretion and their removal report will go to moderator to decide what punishment should be given to user for spamming/ or their removal of post is correct or not.

I could care less if the altcoin section was done away with, but given that this is bitcointalk, I think Bitcoin Discussion ought to stay.  Yes, at present it's mostly spam, but I think it's possible for it to be cleaned up.  Anyway, if you frequent either of those sections, report spammy posts as you see them.  That's really the only way any improvement is going to happen. 

As far as voting up or down, this has been suggested already, and you have to keep in mind that anything that can be abused will be abused.  I don't think a downvoting system would be effective for the reasons xtraelv mentioned.  Lots of politics here and lots of unpopular people.

We are having so many suggestions and opinions about how to better this forum. It is a good one, but I think we have to caution ourselves. The originator of the forum had a concept and I can see they are keeping to it - a democratic forum. What has been decided is that with so many new persons coming in, there is the reduction of the quality of the posts. To resolve this problem, smerit has been introduced.

There is another control which has been introduced. Multiple registrations now have to pay for an evil fee. These are measures the forum is putting in place to maintain the democratic structure of the forum, yet having control. Unless we see these changes and amendments from this perspective, we will be suggesting things that will not work.

Maybe you should really think about the introduction of a system of likes or "+" for a message that is at least worth reading.
It is clear that merit is difficult to obtain, and read only those who received merit is impossible, but to create a system of written evaluation by the same users wash is a good idea. So anyone can choose the quality of messages he wants to read and not waste your time reading all the messages.

This proposal with rating system of post is good. And also, I think that it would be cool if counter of merits was shown also next to subject.

This is a very big issue, something that the merit system has failed to address.

I mean there are users making good posts after the merit system in hope of getting merits. So far as stopping the junk posts is concerned, merit system has not done anything about it. Is it where dMerit can come into picture ? Only time will tell but if I had to decide, I would have first increased the merits in circulation.

And it was proposed in May, too.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3628036.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3628036.0)
Somehow, all the proposals seems to got ignored sooner or later, as there's only a few direct feedback about some ideas from the staff.

This is a good idea however, we know that most of the members in the forums skips a number of pages and does not read in between. They are only reading the first and last page entirely and that lessen the effectiveness of your proposal. It would be better to just ignore lower rank members or some high members if you can distinguish their post quality a shit/spam just as @Jet Cash stated. In time you will have encounter less junk posts because of this.