Bitcoin Forum

What I propose is that everyone gets to suggest improvements to the forum. Please make them in this thread and I will add them to the list. After a couple of weeks or so I will compile them all into a new thread and let users vote for which ones they think are a good idea and I will gradually arrange them in order of votes so the most popular ones will be pushed to the top. Hopefully theymos can use it as a sort of 'to do' checklist, but at least he can see what is popular amongst the community. Please keep your suggestions as concise as possible and try to stick to one or two sentences if you can. Here are the various suggestions I've made in the past (in no particular order):

• A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.

• A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).

• Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).

• Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).

• Remove signatures completely from lower ranks (at least Juniors). Purchasing a Copper Membership (or higher) could still get you one.

• More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).

• Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).

• Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).

• More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.

• Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).

• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.

• A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.

• Two report buttons/queues: one for sig spam and low quality posts and one everything else that is more urgent (hundreds of reports on spam posts are currently burying more important reports).

• A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.

• A sub board for highly merited users to encourage constructive topics only by users who have proven their worth here over time (or make the Ivory Tower merit requirement much higher [OMG ITS LIKE SOVIET RUSSIA GULAG]).

• A new member rank after Legendary as it is becoming far too common now and will only become more so as time passes. I would suggest fixing Legendary at 960 activity and the new rank is double that at 1920. You could also make the merit requirement very high for this rank so it's only for the crème de la crème of users [OMG NAZI RANK ITS LIKE THE RICH KEEP GETTING RICHER].

• Additional perks for Legendary accounts or a higher rank if added (for example: custom title, image banner in signature, clickable link in personal text, access to exclusive sub board etc).

• Charging ICOs a fee to make their ANN here. You could even get rid of the ANN board completely and give them their own sub once they've paid the fee. If there's no Ann board then there will probably be no paid bumping because it will be useless, but let them spam away in their own slum and squalor.

• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.

• A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).

• A captcha added to deleting a post.

• Require email verification for new accounts.

• Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.

• A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).

• A dedicated Marketplace for the Alt Coin board that would be used for currency sales/exchanges and advertising/requesting services etc (the current one has no description and is being used as catch all for anything and everyting and not what it was intended for).

• Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.

• More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).

• Requiring manually whitelisting of all new accounts before they can post. All new users will essentially be shadowbanned until they've been verified by a mod. This will eliminate 99% of bots and spammers before they even start. Spam threads can be trashed on sight before they even become spam megathreads.

• Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.

• Press board locked/archived as it's served its purpose and now is mostly just used to get away with legalised copy and pasting or blog spam, or:
B) Sticky some guidelines that only notable bitcoin Press hits are allowed from non-bitcoin related websites (IE articles from cointelegraph and cryptocrapnewsdaily.net aren't allowed).

• Some local boards have Press and Off topic subs. They should be removed as they're hotbeds for account farmers/spammers and are not necessary here.

• Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).

• Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

• Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying.

• More advertisement slots. This forum is badly under-monetised in my opinion and we likely lose hundreds of thousands in lost revenue to signatures and lack of ad slots and visibility. Many people don't even seem to know we have adverts or assume they're just another sig ad. What I've suggested before is that there are a few 'premium slots' that are displayed at the top of certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion, Gambling, Services etc. Companies would pay a lot for these as you could target your audience and you could run them for a month or even longer for a fixed price rather than having to bother running auctions every week.

• Warnings in red displayed to lower ranked users when they go to post alerting them to the most commonly ignored/broken rules. They should be specific to the sub board that they are going to post in as well. Ie  Press: Alt Coin articles do not belong here. Alt coin Anns: Please don't post generic posts like "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?" etc as they are not permitted. Maybe in the Marketplace we can have a warning to Only bump once per day and remove old bumps etc. Bitcoin Discussion: Do not post topics on the value of bitcoin - they belong in Speculation etc. A lot of people break the rules because they're just not aware of them so they would then have no excuses.

• KYC for all new users. Just kidding.

• Lamborghinis for all staff as a Christmas bonus (will also accept an Audi R8). Not kidding.

Introduce a new system based on trust system, all the +- feedbacks without risked amount should go to reputation score.
Pick 10 active reporters and pay them $5 daily to each for 1000 good reports per month.
Show Alia's nude pictures after every 100 good reports to members actively reporting. just kidding.
Give a damn to the actions of DT members. not kidding.

I've suggested tweaking the feedback algo a bit before. Tiny trades with a smallish value probably shouldn't count for much or turn you 'green' after a while. Some people are obviously just doing trades for the feedback and to essentially buy a feedback as cheaply as possible.


Would be abused if you give out monetary rewards. Some people are already obviously going crazy reporting things after theymos merely mentioned the possibility of reporter badges and that's just for a worthless badge. Imagine what will happen if we monetise the system. The report queue will become a mess like the forum already has. I wouldn't be against issuing some other sort of rewards but probably best not for cash prizes.

I'll add one for now:

Have more options for polls. For example, ability to restrict certain ranks from participating, not showing the poll results after vote but to show the results only after the end of the poll.

A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts

Reason should be clearly given for permanent ban....for temporary ban, For temporary ban ,there should be some team ,who handle these case,because currently no one is replying for that...

Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member

It can be more,

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).

I don't think this is the good feature for implementation ,it will affect the popularity of forum.


Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic
 
you can allow,but this type of activities(bounty report,off topic,) has not been counted as a post.

Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest

we should provide the list of high reports of the month like high merited person,So if other member's want to give some award they can free to give them in terms of merit or something else.Most merited member is getting rewards by earning merits. they can be utilized in upgrading the rank. I am not in favor of cash price.


don't post generic posts like  "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?"

for this we can make the limit of posting like 20 words or more.

all other suggestions are very good,they should be implemented soon.

there should be some features about the security of account like 2fa, hacking case are increasing day by day...

In addition an option to delete the poll if you have put it by mistake.

---

Great list, can't wait to see theymos reaction on this one. I guess I have to wait a lot as usual. ;)

I will add two more requests:
- report button from the search engine /For those with a report badges/
- An option to see if the post you are reporting is already reported by others, so we skip the double work on the both sides. /again for those with report badges/

One merit is nothing for juniors. It would be far better to restrict newbies and juniors to starter boards, and leave the merit system alone.

Animated avatars would be a nightmare, If they are introduced, then please provide a method to disable them.

Removing merits from deleted posts would be a tremendous advantage in my opinion.

I'm not too bothered about badges or higher ranks.

Allowing a compact jpeg or png banner in a sig would be great, but charging for it would mean that only the spammers would use it. I think it would be far better to allow it for contributions to the stability of the forum.

No, it will effect the quality of the forum and greatly so. If you don't contribute anything here and get merit or aren't going to cough up for a donator rank then you shouldn't be allowed to spam away and earn here by posting rubbish. People are literally coming here with no knowledge or interest in bitcoin other than they just got told you can earn here. Many can't speak English to an acceptable standard so they just garble out nonsense or copy and paste. This can't be acceptable.


Then people would just make sure their posts are 20 words or characters or whatever and would just make things worse:

Give me bounty. Very good. I like the Project. Great time. Much support. When is airdrop? I like free money. Blah blah blah. Is this twenty words yet?


2fa is coming on the new forum, but if that isn't coming anytime soon then I agree it should be implemented here.


I'm suggesting at least one merit. Currently it's nothing. I wouldn't be against it being 2/3/4/5 or more etc. You could even bump up the Member merit requirement to something else. Personally, I think I would probably prefer something like Junior should be at least one merit but only Members and above can have a signature. That way you would still need ten merit to get a signature which spammers will struggle to get. Currently anyone can have a signature as soon as they've hit Junior and this is being colossally exploited by farmers and bounty abusers. It's so bad even bots often become Juniors now. Bots will never even get one merit.  Theymos has also stated he is against restricting new members just to one board so this almost certainly isn't going to happen.


You can already disable avatars, but those are just some of the examples of possible perks, not they should definitely have these rewards. I'm not a huge fan of animated avatars either, but people have already worked out how to have them here anyway.


It would only be for the Premium rank. I don't think spammers will pay $1000 for it or whatever. You could also give it as a reward for the 'very high merited' user rank or Legendaries or whatnot.


Maybe, this post has been reported by x amount of users, though maybe people would get annoyed if they see this on their own posts, especially if the reports remain unhanded. The more people that report it though will get the attention of the mods quicker and if it's something multiple users are reporting then it's likely urgent.

Payment for being a Merit Source, even if it’s something low like $100 per month.

I'm not sure that is a good idea - giving them the ability to fly a png/jpg sig would be good though. :)

Yeah, this isn't going to work. People will just want to become a merit source for all the wrong reasons then. I have no issue in giving merit out to those who contribute to the community and am happy to do it, but I don't think sources should be paid.

No problem boss :)

You can't hide evidence by deleting posts.

We still know who you sent it to and how many you sent - we just don't know the content of the post.

Example:  https://bpip.org/smerit.aspx?to=PavelRostov
It says "Deleted Post" for each post that has been removed.

• Restrict posting/reply on  Marketplace (Altcoins) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=161.0) board & disable signeture for newbie & Jr. Members.

---

---

We can see only merit history. But we will not able to see the post really it's deserve merit or not. Delete option should be disable from merited post.


It will be great.

You can. People can merit shit posts or a copy and pastes. What happens if someone gives a large merit to a deleted post? We can't see the content whether it was deserved or not. Most times it probably wont be. Huge loophole in my opinion.

I can't find the thread anymore, but one user suggested to remove to ability of (low-ranked) members to make locked threads in the marketplace section.
I think this would go a long way to prevent the autobuy scams that a lot of Jr/Newbie members are pulling off.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1353400.0

Aren't these already a thing? See bill's profile, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=370611

Easily fixed.  I can start recording the content of merited posts as soon as they are mertted.  I can display that content if the post is deleted.

Thoughts?

Sure, if you can. I think it would help a lot.

- I think there should be an option to report a member, instead of an individual post. The format could include selecting a common reason for reporting (Sig Campaign Spam Poster / Plagiarism / Off-Topic with a comment section for other possible reasons), and then have it only alert a moderator once several people (maybe 5-10?) have reported the same member. Would reduce number of reports and probably be more effective in eliminating the worst offenders.

- a twist on your suggestion for a sub forum on BCT for highly merited members. Instead of merit as a req, you have "bouncers" who let people into the "club" based on looking through their post history and determining if they contribute value to the forum (not that every post has to be long and philosophical, but is on topic, and actually adds to the conversation). Perhaps a thread could be started for people to submit an "application" to the club. And as the club grows, you could add a number of "Suggesters", who can suggest members for selection into the club (to be approved by a bouncer), and as the club gets big enough, a major change could be implemented to the forum across the board where only those "in the club" have privileges on the forum (such as avatars, sigs, starting threads, etc). I know it will seem too exclusive or elitist to some, but it could be a possible solution to many of the issues currently plaguing the forum.

- an alternative to the idea above is simply adding more (maybe a lot more) moderators. If this happens in conjunction with making it a little harder to get to Jr Member (or at least the first rank where you can have a sig), I think most of the bots / crap-posters would be weeded out. You just have to make it hard enough to be not worth their while.

- what if merit--all merit--slowly deteriorates over time? This could help solve some issues--for example, members who got grandfathered into the merit system with a high rank, but do not post anything worth meriting. Over time, their rank would deteriorate unless they step up their game.

- an alternative to showing on each post if a member has been reported by other members, only have it show up when you click on "report to moderator".

You can write whatever you want in the box provided, so if it is a user issue, just say so there.

Merit should not deteriorate.  If I make a good post, what makes that post less valuable over time?

That's a pretty solid list compiled. Nothing like it even if half the points from that list are actually implemented! Some of the suggestions are easy on the coding end while some are complex. Do you think theymos should be coding it for this forum if he has planned to release the new forum anytime soon?

Realy nice list of things, like it!  And I am in any case the same opinion!

Maybe a Subforum for reports and for questionable threads and posts and spam!
Wherever threads can be discussed that may seem conspicuous or suspicious!

Liking most of these suggestions.  One small [//EDIT: very minor and not at all urgent] one I'd like to add to the list is to show an "earned" merit stat next to the regular one, excluding the starting "inherited" merit.  So at the moment, for example, mine would show:

Merit: 1127 (+127)

And hilariousetc's would be (if I'm right that Heroes started with 500):

Merit: 1080 (+580)

I'm thinking that, over time, it's going to become tricky to tell what rank a user was when the system was launched.  It would be helpful to be able to differentiate between what they've actually been given by other users for their posts and what they started with.  The above example is pretty good as the OP has clearly earned way more than I have, so it seems a little unfair not to make that clearer.

Man, look at the number of critical issues that should be taken care on priority! How hard it is to calculate the Default Merits - Earned Merits? You literally just have to know the default numbers for 5 ranks. This is something can be added on the merit page for deep analysis.

I did say it was a small one, heh.  I know that there are plenty of more urgent things to consider and don't want to detract from any of that. 



But you also need to know what rank the user was when the system was introduced.  That might be simple enough to do now in some cases (keeping in mind that some have already ranked up, so it's not always obvious), but in future, it's not going to be easy at all.  Again, using the OP as an example, when hilariousetc does rank up to Legendary, some people might assume they started with 1000 and only earned 80 merits.  It's not representative of their phenomenal efforts here.

I disagree.  I think that's a huge obstacle overall.  Maybe not for some, but in general a lot of noobs are going to have a hard time getting that one merit.  This might lead to more begging and/or trading, but I think it's worth it.

Very nice that these suggestions are being compiled, and I can't wait to vote on them.  I'm pretty much all for making new members sing for their supper here, since that's basically what it comes down to in most cases.  Good job, hilariousetc.

Agreed.  I don't think "earned merits" being explicitly shown is necessary or even desirable.

What do you think if the login form has two steps like email login on google if the 2FA system hasn't been implemented? And the Forgot your password? link is on this page (password form after a username is valid). This thing can prevent random password injection.

And once again when Forgot your password? To use, enter the username/email there. For email I've tried an email that has not been registered in the provider and was successful, this is very risky. to overcome this, I agree with @hilariousetc's idea.

Merit received for good posts decline naturally should not. But to reduce Merit obtained at startup Merit-system - on that you may want to think.

There are accounts of high ranks which filled activity in bounty companies (links to twitter and facebook) and since the launch of the Merit system did not write any good post and did not receive any Merit.

I understand that this proposal is unlikely to support users of high ranks )))

I wouldn't expect him to do anything major here if the new forum isn't far off, but if it's going to be years before it's released then that's a different matter. However, simple things like punishing sig campaigns and assigning sub boards mods can be done now and take little to no effort from theymos. Meanwhile, the forum continues to the circle the drain getting worse and worse which each passing day. One day we're going to wake up and the forum will be 99% bot accounts and copy and pasters. Anything else can just be considered for development on the new forum if it hasn't already.


How about we remove the default merits completely and everyone starts from ground zero? That would really sort the wheat from the chaff and stop all the whingers about it not being fair.

There are a lot of really good suggestions here so I'm just going to prioritise what I think is most urgent and what will be the most effective in reducing the spam problem.


This is the only effective way to deal with bots. The other suggestions about captcha and email verification are trivial for botnets and won't even slow them down.


Whichever combination of this is implemented doesn't really matter but until members require at least 1 merit to get a signature there will be spambots by the thousand getting paid in shitcoins/tokens. The same requirement to be immune from the nuke button makes sense as well.


All of these are desperately needed at the moment although implementing the first two suggestions may actually reduce the need.

Although, 1 merit might be hard to achieve for most of the low quality users here I think I would still be more comfortable requiring a few of them. Something like 3/5 seems to a good point which would prevent most of them or at the very least demotivate them from making several accounts to earn from airdrops and bounties.

It is the only way we'll likely stop them from being a nuisance and an eyesore, though it's a lot more work for staff. The benefits of it stopping 99% of bots outweigh any negatives though. Many other forums have this sort of post verification as well. As for captchas being bypassed, anything can be got around but it's one more hoop for them to jump through. I don't think I've joined many websites or forums before that didn't require email verification and if captchas are so pointless then why does pretty much every other forum use them? They have their benefits and will stop some bots at least.


Agreed. A mere one merit requirement really puts a spanner in the works of bots and the very worst of posters. It doesn't effect anyone else's ability to post here either. It has no drawbacks at all as far as I can see.


These could all be implemented today within a matter of minutes and the board would be better of for them instead of current staff being swamped with more things to do (that often aren't getting done) day after day.


At a minimum it should be one. Maximum probably 5 or something. I would be more for it being just one if Juniors had their signatures removed completely. Then you need ten merit and enough activity to become a Member to get a signature. Either way the requirement should be something and one would be better than nothing. 

I've been doing a lot of antibot work recently and I'm not saying it is pointless because you want to put as many obstacles in the way as possible. I'm just trying to reduce any expectation that either of these will make a difference. Email verification just requires them to run an email server and a script to create the email accounts at the same time as the forum account and then acknowledge the link sent. You can buy software to solve reCAPTCHA for less than $100 a year subscription and the botnets I deal with have written their own solvers.

When user is banned, reason of ban should be shown when he try to login. Then we would see less "I was banned without any reason", "I didn't anything wrong" and similar threads :D

I quite like the idea of having only members, and above with signatures. That would literally solve so many problems of the bounty spam within the alternate cryptocurrencies section, but also would likely have an impact on several other sections too.

It would solve a heck of a lot of problems and it's not an unreasonable or unreachable requirement either. Ten merit and being here for 2 and a half months is nothing. Something needs to change and we can't just allow people to come here who are 100% only here to earn. Many users literally have no interest or knowledge about bitcoin other than they've just heard you can earn here. Add into the mix when you can't speak English very well and it's a recipe for disaster. These users are then essentially forced to use google translate or just copy and paste a post. It's like signing up to a Lamborghini forum when you can't drive and don't even like cars. Why would anyone do that? Nobody would normally sign up to a web forum for something they have little to no interest in but this one is different when you're throwing payment into the mix. Adding a merit requirement would severely curb this behaviour and force campaigns to not accept and pay anyone for any old crap they can be bothered to make or copy and paste because they can't be trusted to do their job. Sadly, I'm not sure if anything from this list will be implemented anytime soon if at all other than maybe adding a few moderators.


It is when it's temp. It just doesn't on the permaban button. You could put a message and just set the ban to never expire which will be the same.

Some of these suggestions are worthy of attention from the mods but I cannot agree with the suggestion to rmove signatures from lower members when the rules make it difficult to rank higher.

We aren't too far from that stage. I literally have to search for non-spammy topics and boards in order to join some relevant discussions. I don't even remember the last time I posted in the Bitcoin Discussion section. 

That's one way to go about it but after being on the forum for all these years and finally hitting the legendary is some sort of achievement. And if asked to start from the scratch again, I don't think I'll have the time or energy to do so. I mean it would be demotivating for people like me who have worked their way up starting from the base.

I found it best to completely avoid any of the established captcha providers.  Back when I used to run a phpBB, I had a little-known visual captcha called KittenAuth.  It basically gave you 9 pictures in a 3x3 grid and the default setting was to select only the kittens.  But you could change the pictures to something more thematically appropriate for your site.  I found that far more effective than any other captcha I've ever encountered.  Only human beings got through after that.

The safest bet is to make a totally proprietary one.  The more obscure, the better.  But not text or numbers.  Use pictures.



That works too.  Would certainly make it easier to spot bought accounts.

I wouldn't be completely against the idea of removing the default merits to further distinguish the good quality posters from those who earned it by just being around here for a long time, and being somewhat active. Probably a little bit of an extreme measure though.

Although, anyone that has been here for even a short period should know of those that are of a particularly high standard. If we are talking from a campaign standpoint, then maybe the managers just need to raise their requirements. But, again that's up to them, and unless we start putting restrictions on campaigns they aren't going to do this voluntarily.

I know. It gets worse every time I go in that board. Even threads that are created about something worthwhile quickly get spammed by Junior Members writing their generic one/two liners often just replying to whatever question is asked in the title. Even worse is that when you see a constructive comment written it's often a copy and paste from somewhere else online or some other user in that thread.


People could go back and merit all the posts that are deserving. I know there will be hundreds of my posts that deserved merit that were made before the introduction of the merit system. I think we should concentrate on the newer users that are signing up here just to claim bounties and sig spam etc though.


I've suggest that some of the potential money brought in from something like more donator ranks or ad slots could be used to fund the development of new projects such as a decentralised forum and a better captcha service. Do you have any suggestions for a more efficient one? If a foolproof one could be created wouldn't it have been by now? 

I don't how long ago this was but captcha solving has really moved on in just the last 4 or 5 months I've been involved with trying to fight bots. Something like that with a 3x3 grid they would just brute force like they do with reCAPTCHA. There's only a certain number of combinations and they have a powerful backend server just trying until it gets a token to pass to a worker bot.

Back to the matter in hand we already know that these spambots can log in, so they must already have the ability to solve reCAPTHCHA so asking them to do it again to post will not make any difference to them. They just need to add a couple of lines to their script.

The bottom line is if there is a financial incentive to do so someone will find a way to defeat any type of captcha.

I dont know if this is already mentioned by the others, but i really think it would be great if we have something like "spoiler box" feature in a post making, so we can decide to hide a content and others who read our post can show or hide our content which has a really big image or other long post by a click.

I tried it already but it seems doesnt work with our forum. Here is the link which describe the feature I mentioned about www.minecraftforum.net/forums/forums/forum-discussion-info/514283-how-do-i-make-spoilers-on-the-forum

Thanks for listening. I take any comments

Going through the activity logic, if Full member require 100 merit and 120 Activity, then Member should require 50 merit and Jr. member should require 25.
So definitely we can increase the Merit requirement for Member rank and introduce Merit concept for Jr. Member.


I do not think anyone will agree with my suggestion but to control Signature spam, we can introduce the requirement to get at least 2 Merits in previous month. (If I have not got any merits on July, then signature will be disabled for August month (even with Coopper membership, irrespective of rank in forum. If I receive 2 merit or more in August then it will be enabled for September and you again need to earn 2 merits in September so  that it will remain enabled for October. )

On a side note, this will halt the account sales too.

Since system is already in place for more than 6 month, so we should decay all the default sMerits so that no more merit abuse can take place.

Most of the ideas are good, some need a little more brainstorming (something that a lot of users are not able to do).
But the real question is, is there at least an interest to improve the community and its platform from the staff.
If I had to choose only 1 it's about the email verification to be able to change email/password. To protect its users is something to consider important. It's as if someone raped you in my living room and I tell you I have no time to look at it

I won't have a problem to see more advertisements displayed because I don't find it intrusive the way it is here

I'm all for brainstorming. I'd rather my ideas be shot down or picked apart than nothing getting discussed at all. I'm not saying all these ideas are great either and some certainly have flaws or may cause more harm than good, but I'm just putting them out there. I'm sure many of them can be improved by others suggestions, and hopefully people can suggest far better proposals. Somethings like captchas just might not really make much of a difference and cause more annoyance than issues they solve, but other things like assigning sub board mods and requiring a merit achievement for Juniors are no brainers in my opinion and are not disruptive. Same goes for punishing ICO campaigns who are responsible for the majority of the destruction here.


Theymos seems to be against them going by a comment he made today. One at the top of a few of the main subs like this would be lucrative:

https://i.imgur.com/jIbHl22.jpg

That way advertisers can target their market ie a gambling site would advertise in the gambling board and so on.

I vote for these suggestions to be implemented.

I like this one, I still remember that I made a proposal about this idea before.

This will be helpful for reporters to focus more in reporting unban accounts.

I prefer to make it 3 to 5 Merits.

A very wise idea. Nowadays, these spammers are only here for advertising ICO using their signature spaces so that they can earn money. Implementing this one will really change a lot of things hete. I highly recommend this one.

I like it as well. So that bumping threads by those shills accounts will be useless.


In addition for this one. Once another bump has been made after 24 hours, the old bump will automatically be deleted.

Recoveries are not really prioritised but I want this idea as well.

I am against removing merit for deleted posts, because some posts are worth reading until the entire thread gets trashed. For example: a scam warning.
But I'd have to agree the large majority of merited deleted posts must be merit abuse.

I have a different suggestion: in the user profile, behind the merit amount, add the percentage of merit earned for deleted posts. If it is 2% nobody will bat an eye, of it's 80% it is obvious not to rely on the merit count for that user.

What if it was only when the user deleted the post themselves? Surely that would be the indicator of abuse rather than it being in a thread that got trashed.

That could be something that's implemented. But, honestly I don't think its that big of a deal to implement something like this. These users abusing the system will likely not be able to generate good enough posts to gain merit legitimately, and will eventually run out of sMerit to abuse.

I surf on interesting topics sometimes, but it is drowned among all the other topics, and in the topic itself there are more posts to be put in the trash than posts that participate in a normal discussion the forum made me become anti-ICO anti-altcoin. (I follow the thread about Zencash and it's the only one I am interested in. I refuse to read anything else there.)

So, I suggested (as your OP) a few times to make a membership to pay to be allowed to use the signature space. (I don't know something like $xxx per year) And I am sure a lot of members would agree to pay it
And to allow ICOs to post about their crap project only after paying a fee it would be a fee that worth to pay honestly, and I am sure they won't have any problem with paying a fee.
And finally, to distribute a bunch of warnings to the campaign managers. They are also concerned. I don't know very well the sig campaigns but for sure they don't really care about the quality of the participants. Surely some campaigns will reply, "I have no time to check xxx participants". Then if they are not able to provide a job correctly done they shouldn't accept it.
I am currently participating in a campaign managed by Darkstar, this is the most strict campaign I've ever seen. (I'm not licking testicles here, I prefer a good pussy btw) and before it, I participated in Bitmixer which was managed by Lauda if I remember and it was also one with strict rules.
I say strict rules but if you are a normal user, there is nothing strict in. Just to say I would be happy to see all campaigns managed this way

I then started to think Theymos doesn't want to change something around thinking it's good that the members can earn some bucks freely using the forum. It's honorable and I would be a hypocrite to say no because I am one of the members using my signature space and earning extra cash, I am happy but I am not interested to post all kinds of nonsense. People tend to forgot Bitcointalk is a discussion board and not the job center. For the sake of my brain, I will be happy to see something done.

The donator rank shouldn't be created to give more benefits. I mean members should donate because they want to donate to the forum not because there is something coming with. I bought the Copper membership not to be able to post images (since I already could) but to make a donation indirectly. Like I participate in the forum life as I can.

I think it's crazy to get there, trying to find a solution to something that shouldn't exist. It's the very first forum I am a member of that need to find such solutions to fight the spams. I will be happy to see more restrictions on Bitcointalk (even if it restricts me for something btw)


An advertisement slot like you posted in the image is fine and not intrusive at all, and advertisers could get a good CTR at the end, a better ROI, and so an advertiser coming back then..

The thing is there's good campaigns, and then there's bounty/altcoin campaigns. It seems that the majority of well managed campaigns are paying in Bitcoin, and are managed by reputable members. Although, the ones that pay in altcoins or even worse promising payment in "shares" of their own coin. These are the ones that are opened by low ranked accounts, and encourage spam rather than looking at offering a fair way to earn money, but also assure that quality users are selected.

We could either require a payment for displaying signatures or if that's not something theymos is particularly into implementing. We could just impose restrictions on running campaigns in the altcoin/bounty sections.

A less extreme option would be to remove zero-point-something merit from the airdrop per day.
That would instantly drop the rank of users with very bad posts, while people who earned some merits once in a while won't be effected.

I don't think it's fair to expect Legendary users to earn 1000 merit in half a year to keep the rank, while a Full Member only needs to earn 100 in the same amount of time.

I have a couple of suggestions that I would like to make.

1) Allow users to see the boards/Sections where most merit is given, In the "Merit Stats" page. From what I have noticed in the past couple of weeks is that more posts in "Meta" get merited as compared to other section. I will suggest this thing to BPIP too.

2) If the case made above is true, Then I suggest assigning a merit source to different boards/sections. This will ensure that people making "Quality" Post elsewhere get merited too.

Imagine a user who is posting quality content in his/her local section but they haven't been seen by a merit source. They will not receive the merit they deserve. An average user can send only a handful amount of merit. What I propose is to assign merit sources just like moderators to different boards/sections to make the distribution of merit even.

Would like to hear the thoughts of the community on this.

I believe theymos was on to that, as per his statement:
Lately I’ve seen a couple of people postulating to become a Merit Source with a local board strong component, so hopefully these will increase with that idea in mind.

In terms of merit distribution per section/subsection, If we take a look from the 1st of July 2018 onwards, the Merit percentage awarded per section is as follows:
The real issue really though is not down to which sections are less merited, but which lack merits in relation to the content/quality of the posts they bare. We can look at it numerically, and even ratio it to the number of posts being created, but the number of meritable posts that go unmerited needs to be scouted somehow visually in order to detect these situations. In the past I believe at some point we has a conversation going on on the matter, where ideas like having mods or trusted people give "alerts" on unmerited sections could help (the idea was to have trusted people alert on unmerited sections so a merit source could be considered).

One would say that Bitcoin Sections are extremely undermerited looking at the numbers, but I'd say that Merit Sources do visit those boards. Nevertheless, we also find plenty of spam there (Bitcoin Discussion), and the really technical stuff is not that easy to follow and neither do those sections have a large amount of posts on a daily basis.

I would like to see a feature added so that you can chose to look at threads by the date they were created rather than by the thread that was most recently posted in. this would enable me to see new threads more easily instead of having to fight my way through a whole lot of older threads that have been bumped up by dare i say shitposters. Very often as they attempt to keep there thread at the top of the que and often being rewarded by it from various coins as they see it as keeping there threads in the spotlight.

Played around for five seconds:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=24.0;sort=start

For account security purposes I would like to see the forum have a email or any kind of notificatiom about a failed log-in attempt and also a permission via email to allow an unrecognized log-in to a new device or ip address. In this way our accounts will be secure from people who are trying to steal it. This kind of early prevention is similar to what other websites/apps are doing and it might really help a lot of people on protecting their accounts.

How did you get it to show like that? i tried all the different combinations i can see and it won't list it like that anywhere apart from your link? please explain steps if you have time. thanks

And/or add a link to the rules at the top of the forum next to Home, Help, etc. Make it red and blinking if that's what it takes to get noticed.


So satoshi becomes a newbie and so does anybody who takes a lengthy break from the forum? Not a good idea.

There won't be a bump to remove. It would just push your thread to the top, though if there was some sort of message left then obviously it should be removed.


They're not prioritised because theymos and cyrus don't have time to do them. They don't have time to do much else it seems either. Account recoveries should be made a priority not just let users to languish for months without even a response. It theymos is in fact going to automate the system then that should be made a priority so nobody has to worry about losing their accounts and that's one huge issue taken care of without staff members being pestered to sort them out every day.


I don't really buy this reasoning. You and anyone else could or can still donate to the forum without expecting anything in return. But you did get something. You got the copper title and are wearing it. Some people like it just for that alone or to show that they donated for it. These ranks would be the same. It's a way to show your appreciation for the forum and as a thanks you get some benefits. It's also a way to replace account sales and the shady business associated with them and instead of users buying them of a shitposting farmer or hacker the money goes to the forum instead. It's win win as far as I'm concerned.


Yeah, browser fingerprinting would also be good for this. I only use two; one on my computer and one on my phone. Any thing else should set off alarm bells and alert the user.

In the words of "great" Donald Trump. Bitcoin Discussion board is a "shithole" and I don't blame merit sources for not visiting that place often. But people helping out in the technical stuff do deserve to be merited. They are the ones who are actually "Helping" the users here. That's why I believe we should assign merit sources to different boards so that right people are meriting the right folks. You don't want a merit source who knows nothing about Bitcoin technicalities meriting users in that board.


What I propose is to start a program like "SpamBusters" instead of reporting users who are spamming. Users could be assigned to different boards and they would report in the posts which are under-merited or haven't received merit at all. This should ease out the process of meriting users for the merit sources IMO.

Its a good idea. Especially, because this could give theymos some indication on good merit sources. Currently, they have to make an application for a merit source. Which some users might not be willing to do publicly, because of the issue with users begging merit sources for merits. I think it would be a good idea, but I don't know too many merit sources which would be willing to crawl through a queue of messages which have been reported for being of high standard.

Don't merit sources have a duty towards the community? Why become a source then if you are not willing to do your assigned job? I don't see the staff/moderators complaining about the number of shitposts they have to delete or the number of bot accounts they have to nuke! If you can't even go through the trouble of meriting already sorted "High standard posts" Then I believe you don't deserve to be a merit source in any shape or form!

I like the idea as well, when it comes to security, it is something that we should prioritised. But, can I ask something? Is it possible to capture the user who is trying to access your account (when there is a failed log-in attempt) by using the front camera of the device if possible? and the image captured will be sent directly to your email address that is associated in in your account. Some security app supports this feature and I don't know if SMF or any website supports this feature but this would be somehow a cool one. But will be useless if the device's camera is covered.

As far as I know only applications are capable of this kind of feature so it can be added as security feature once there is a official app for Bitcointalk  ;D but still a bad idea since application softwares are reversedengineer-able or can be modified to use for phishing.

Bitcoin discussion has become largely unusable. It's just full of farmers churning out their generic one liners. Go in any thread and play spot the farmer.

How many can you find on this page here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4820477.1140

Three merit for anyone if you can catch them all.

Can you spot them on this page and the one after?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4868904.80

4 merit for swatting the 4 bots there.

Remove signatures from Junior so these scumbags aren't going to get paid by some crapcoin ICO as soon as they've made 30 posts. Let's see how long it takes them to get ten merit to become a Member. Probably never. If you earn ten merits then you've earned your right to have a signature.

There are a couple of points in your comment. I don't think that many of the merit sources applied for the job. I think they were appointed by Theymos as a result of their history in awarding merits or their potential. This was so in my case. I received a quantity of sMerit as a hero when the system was introduced, and I was awarded a few hundred additional merits as a result of my posting. I gave these out in ones and twos, and I tried to award them for quality posts. As a result of this, I was recruited as a source during the secondary allocation.

We don't have a duty towards the community, but we do have an interest in preserving its integrity, and in encouraging quality discussions and information exchanges. We are not paid as sources, and it is a time consuming voluntary activity. We are not helped by the vast majority of members, and it is pretty obvious why they don't receive any merits from their posting activities. In fact it can be quite depressing as a pastime, I've tried quite a few things to help junior members, and to improve posting quality, many of them have been ignored, and the others  gain sporadic support. I've backed off to a large extent, and I live in the hope that some major changes will be introduced in the not too  distant future.

Gotcha!


So its all about the money eh? So if you guys were getting paid to do this you would have taken more interest? is that what you are trying to say here?


Agreed! These members aren't worth saving and the energies of merit sources shouldn't be spent on them. That's why I suggested creating a team of members who would report in "High standard posts" for merit sources to go through and reward them if they deserve any. This team can be made by the consensus of the community and I am sure many people would volunteer for this. This will distribute the workload and won't be a "time consuming voluntary activity" anymore.

No! Because if I were to be paid, then I would have to take on a responsibility, and I don't want to do that.

I wouldn't mind it. A handful of merit sources is all it takes I think, at least initially.

I have a feeling though that the queue would be empty most of the time, or spammed by the usual shitposters trying to report their own posts. Every time the subject of undermerited posts is brought up and I ask for examples I get crickets. For the most part people seem to either think too highly of their own posts or are too lazy/selfish to promote others.

Nope, you got it all wrong. There won't be users reporting their own posts because only a few selected members will be able to report in that thread.  As for queue being empty, I kinda agree but it will defeat the purpose of this team if the thread remains empty most of the time.

Hello, fellas.
I`ve read the whole thread, and I can`t see anything related to local boards. Well, I do understand that maybe this is the English mean board, but locals are part of this forum too, and there are a couple of problems there.

I can only speak for my own local -Spanish and the problems I`ve seen in there, problems that also reflect on the forum:
- Locals have not enough pinned post. What does that mean? Well, many people come in here and this is just impossible for them to understand the rules and policies, given the lack of information in their local languages. Of course, they can try harder before beginning to spam or plagiarize, but, maybe, by implementing well-explained pinned post in every local we can help the forum. So my suggestion is to designate people to translate every new information of importance to their locals.
- Besides, there is also a problem with merits in local boards -again I can only speak about my own. The people don`t seem to understand the system, and there is a common misunderstanding: they think they will only be able to rank up in the English boards, so they use google translation or engage in the English main in a poor English. So maybe this is time to have more merit sources dedicated to their locals.

So those are my suggestions. I think we need to care about locals a bit more, so the people can get the information and avoid to rush in here with the wrong mindset...

It would be spammed by everyone who desperately needed merits. I don't think this is a good idea. Better to have community lead projects where people can post quotes or links to their posts and others can decide if they're deserving of merits.


There's nothing stopping you from creating these sorts of FAQ or info threads. If they're helpful then they can easily be stickied.

-------------

Nobody wants this merit bounty?

Yup! I will create one soon...  Tho it will require some moderating tho. I will choose a few people from different sections to be the part of the team, They can report in every week with the posts they think should be merited by the merit sources.

As for your challenge. Follow the "0" or the "default merit value" and you will find your targets :P

To be precise here is the list of farmers/Shitposters/Bots.

@Slayer21 @NarutoTan180 @Shawn20 @heppot [shitpost] @AmandaCherry00 @warrior.coins22 @AshleySalama23 @Pemburu dollar @ThomasThorGG1 @AliceSusana88

@travelgear17 @necromastery @xysheeh03 @Burogh @taslimaborsha @daringkhan30 @rudox @honglien @mimiko @Raja_Salman @Corvin17 @Seundavid @veivivon

@clonely @samsul1234 @Fmradio98 @Airbuxf @rnssol @Suketlapangan @iram3130 @nagasaking @Plumbank @BumblingBee @Sircoss @kangbasir @BraveHeadlight

@tanzaholzmann

I need my 7 merits now. :P

I don't know if websites have a proper access with your phone's camera or computer's webcam without a software installed that has the capability of doing so unlike apps which already have a program to do that but even them needs to have your device's permission first before they can even access your camera. As for the feature I suggested, my main point about this one is to have some kind of early prevention in order to change your password or even your email (if necessary) and not for the purposes of capturing someone doing the attempt, also I think your recommendation is only useful if you know the identity of that person, capturing an unknown face is useless.

Yeah you're right, it made me think about that too. But I would be so willing to see how my account's hacker looks like.  :P
Sounds really good to me.

Guess the most problem why Accounts get hacked is that they use their email everywhere and not only for Bitcointalk!
What I prefer to use only the email for BCT ,  2Fa Auth. would be a good reason too for secure Accounts!   

I can only hope most users are smart enough not to give their browser access to the webcam without asking for permission. But just in case, I have some tape on it as a physical confirmation that it's not doing this.

I think spying on users fits in the same category as KYC on Bitcointalk:

Is only an idea!

Maybe it is possible to implement 2FA Authentication via Google or even a 2FA Authentication Device for users who want to protect their account as well as possible!
Many exchanges have this and other platforms too!
I know that this is probably expensive but think that it is the safest solution or would be for accounts to protect them from hackers!

It has been discussed many times. It is planned to be implemented in the new forum software, but when this is going to happen nobody knows. I think even theymos is not sure about it.

I don't think I saw this.

Not critical but it would be nice if the Report to moderator page, came up in a separate tab. The same way the Merit page does.

It's a small annoyance when I go to report someone in the middle of reading a topic then I have to go looking for them. It's small and easily doable if I'm not mistaken Theymos made the change rather quickly when VOD suggested it for Merit.

Middle click or right click and Open link in new tab.

NSA DETECTED! What is this, 1984? This is ridiculous.


Same. Clearly he hasn't seen Citizenfour.


Sadly, I think hell will be more likely to freeze over before anything gets implemented here.


I think more people would find this annoying than helpful. I dislike how we have to go to a separate page to give merit, but merit should just be pumped up somehow without having to go to a separate page at all. And as TheQuin said you can just open it in a new page anyway.

Use your middle mouse button to open a tab in the background. I wish Merit would work the same as "Report", with Report I can choose to open it in the same tab if I want to.

Easy there mate! Did you just assume that everyone uses a mouse which has a middle button? Not everyone can afford a mouse like that.

None of these ideas are new to me. Even if I don't respond to suggestions, I do read them, and they float around in my mind going forward. If it's not already done, then there's some reason why. A big possible reason is that I'm the only person who does development on the current code, and my time is limited. Another big reason is that this is a huge forum with complex dynamics, and even small policy changes can have big effects which need to be thought through very carefully.

An example: a bump button sounds good as a fix for certain very visible problems, but it also codifies a broken system. People would use bots to bump all of their threads constantly, giving "industrial" posters a huge advantage over casual posters. A captcha could maybe help a little, but there are services where you can pay a tiny fee to have captchas solved for you. (Which opens another question: maybe a comparatively tiny fee should be allowed as an alternative to having you solve a captcha.) A better solution would be to replace the concept of traditional bumping with something quite different, with different bumping models for different types of sections. But that requires further thought. If implementing a bump button was free, perhaps it'd be worthwhile to at least do it for now and fix a few minor problems with bumping today. But since it's a clearly-imperfect solution, this isn't even on my miles-long to-do list.

I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:


OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance.


Maybe.


No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified.

I was always on your side Theymos!!!!

 ;)

Could you elaborate at least on the "No" part a little bit? Some of it I could guess but e.g. displaying the banned status sounds like a simple feature with no downside so I'm curious why it's on the "No" list.

Without doubt i agree with this part, some changes may sound very easy and fast to do (and probably they even are) but they could have implications in some other part of the code or with a functionality itself you didn't anticipated, bringing some unpleasant cascade effect.

Since in here the the stakes are high is good to be cautious.

So, after reading the post from Theymos, i think that there is one main problem that needed to be solved by the administrator side, before they can start with the forum problems, which is this
Even if we have and suggest a great suggestion, it would take a long time for it to be implemented because the lack of person in charge of coding. This is a hard situation and hard to be solved because finding a partner who is honest and devoted to this kind of job is hard, and if admin pick a wrong guy, it could destroy the forum and all of us in many ways.

Kind of dilemma though.

I'm a bit disappointed that my delegated merit awarding suggestion didn't appear in the lists. That would be a great help for good posters on the local boards, and it would help the responsible merits sources to distribute sMerits for the benefit of the forum.

I'm not saying all of these are good suggestions and some probably won't help much if at all to combat certain issues, but I'm just brainstorming here to try plug some of the holes of what I believe to be a sinking ship. I'd much rather you just say my ideas were crap or just a simple 'no' (as you have now done) than remain silent for years on them because everyone is in the dark. At least I know I can drop certain suggestions if they're unlikely to ever be implemented and move on to trying something else.



Everybody knows and respects the fact that you're busy and making changes isn't always as easy as clicking a few buttons or writing a bit of code and requires future thought of how changes will effect things in the grand scheme of things here and it's good you do that, but when there's just silence for years things just get worse and worse and nobody knows what to think or whether something is a good or terrible idea or not. It's incredibly frustrating for both staff and members alike when we can see the forum crumbling before our eyes being overrun with bots and spammers and we're making suggestions to try prevent further deterioration and we're just ignored. Years pass and the forum just gets exponentially worse with each passing one and that's only going to continue the longer we leave it.


A bump button is the least of our worries to be honest. Putting a warning when they go to post to maybe follow the rules in the Marketplace and/or a reminder to only bump once every 24 hours and remove the bump when they do would be a quicker/easier fix. Linking the rules to users upon sign up would also give them the information as many just aren't even aware of the rules here.


This could be done very simply and quickly, right? Can we do this ASAP as soon as we've got it ready? New users would then have no excuses for not reading the rules.


Same for this. You sent me the list of highest reporters in Bitcoin Discussion a few weeks ago and there was a clear standout. Unless you know something about him that I don't then I think he would make a good sub mod and patroller. Other staff could volunteer for other boards, but I think one or two of the users who have reported thousands of posts have probably also earned or are deserving a place as mod by now. We've lost far more staff over the past few years than have been replaced and the forum only continues to grow so we need to occasionally add them to meet demand. More staff = less workload and stress for other mods and the board improves in the process.


Why don't you add another? This seems like a quick fix for a few things. If there was more staff and admins added you and cyrus would be bothered less and less. You would be less annoyed by the barrage of PMs and users would be less frustrated and every other Global will then stop being spammed with the same questions for things they don't have the authority to do. It's pointless you two even being messaged about certain things like account restorations if you're not doing them at all which currently seems to be the case. I could even do admin duties full time here if you wanted and I'm practically on the forum all day anyway, but something tells me if I was going to be made an admin it would have happened by now. If you don't trust me to do it for whatever reasons then fair enough but there must be someone else who can do it on staff - Mprep, rickbig, Mitchell or one of the other long-standing mods. Maybe even ask one of the veteran/trusted users here like vod or whoever (in b4 quickseller complains). If none of us are suitable have you spoken to BadBear recently? Maybe try email him asking if he'll come back. You mentioned a while ago that you've considered hiring someone to run the forum so why not hire BadBear? It makes sense for him to do it over some Marlon Rando. BadBear was a great admin as you also said and he knows how the forum works, which would make sense rather than hiring someone external who has to learn all the ways of the world here which wouldn't be easy or something you can learn in a short time.


This needs to happen asap as they're the ones causing the rapid deterioration of the forum in the first place which makes it unfit for purpose and enforcing this would have a tremendous knock on effect on the quality and usability of the forum. I've banned at least 50 users (mostly Juniors) who were copy and pasting content on the Elon City campaign the past month or so. I've no idea how many Rickbig or mprep has banned and could be even more than I have. Elon City accept anyone with no checks and this is why it's exploited by copy and paste bots and spammers. This can't be acceptable. I say we set up some sort of rules where if 5 or 10 users are caught copy and pasting on your campaign or the same amount of users are banned for low quality posts then your campaign gets the ban as well. If this starts happening then campaigns will start doing their job and it will become less common that we have to issue bans because the culture of campaigns doing nothing will change very fast. This forum is too valuable for them to not be able to advertise here for free so they'll start playing by the rules very quickly. If they can hire people to spam for them then they can hire people to manage their campaign as well.


Can this be done soon? People are getting annoyed at all the alt coin spam in Bitcoin Beginners. The Alt coin marketplace is also unusable as it is because it's being used as a catch-all for everything and not for trades/services as intended.

Can you comment some short reasons to some of the No's?


This is already shown to staff, but is there some issue in making this public? I don't necessarily think we should show temp bans but if a person's account is done here then I see no issue in that.


Can you elaborate on this one? To me a merit requirement to become Junior or their signature removed completely is essential and I think most of the community agrees. It can't be acceptable for bots to be able to earn from signature campaigns and wasn't the merit system introduced to curb account farming? It stops spammers from moving up to higher ranks but doesn't stop them from farming hundreds of Juniors and spamming and earning from them which people are now doing and this needs to chnage. One merit to become Junior isn't a lot to ask and most people seem to agree it should be higher. Removing signatures from them completely shouldn't be a big issue either as you did so for Newbies and Juniors barely have anything there now anyway, but this doesn't stop campaigns from paying them for it and that's the whole crux of the issue. People can still purchase Copper Membership to get a limited one anyway.


That's a shame, though I hope someday they will be implemented like Copper was. I think it will severely deter account farming or people trying to purchase merits just to move up ranks. I hope they'll be on the new forum at least.


A new rank obviously isn't essential right now but I think a new one will be needed eventually or the forum will just be full of Legendaries. A new rank with a very high merit requirement would mean only the best posters achieved it. It would be a nice thing for Legendaries to aim to achieve once they've hit that rank as there's nothing after it.

Also, you forgot to comment about Lambos for staff?  Yes/no/maybe?  :D

That is a nice list you have there, I hope they will be implemented sooner than later.

I have also brought 2 possible improvement ideas to the forum some time back:

• [NEW FEATURE] Seeing a post that quoted your post  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2878955.0)
• [NEW FEATURE] Live Chat for users   (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3223081.0)

I would appreciate it if you could take a look over them and if they look good to you, add them to the OP.

@theymos
Once you have some free time, please elaborate the No part a little bit especially for the permaban tag + 1 merit (at least) to become a Junior Member.
This will help us improving our suggestion in the future.

Since none of these ideas are new to you, Theymos I think it's about time you start hiring devs who can work on features you deem worthy. Don't give them access to the live version of bitcointalk but instead ask them to build these features on a local version and before implementing them on the live version. You can validate/verify the code yourself. Should decrease the burden on you. If paying these devs will be an issue, many ideas have already been suggested here to generate an income for the forum.


Agreed! but the current policies are destroying it! Unless you see bot-accounts/farmers/Spammers as growth.

---

This should be implemented right away. Many "Money Making" Forums charge upwards of $500 per week for different HYIP programs to get listed. Imagine what these ICOs will be willing to pay who "actually" have a "Vision" behind them... ::)

I believe this doesn't even require any coding of sorts just needs your approval.

SMF is open source, right? Have you considered soliciting help from the community in the form of patches / peer review / testing?


This is probably more complicated than PHP code but perhaps if you could make more data (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3134370) available publicly you could get help from the community here as well.

@theymos, "sir",  :P
We respect the fact that you are too busy with your own things, and it is not easy at all to do all this along with that, but at least things, like assigning more mods for patrolling, a welcome message for new users containing rules and guidelines, requiring at least 1 Merit to become Jr. member, or forcing campaigns or their managers to do their work and discourage spam, that don't require a lot of time and effort nor any extra thinking over them should be implemented ASAP.
Postponing every single one of these issues will only make them worse in future IMO.

This one falls into the "regulations" category and I don't think there will ever be a forced action. What's far more likely is the easy thing of removing/banning paid signatures.

For now I would say this falls onto the DT network to tag managers who allow spammy shitposters to clog up the forum. While also reporting and tagging said posters.

I guess KYC for all the members is a must to avoid bots or anyone having so many accounts.

E3 NSA like that.
Theymos want to see the hell freezes before doing so...luckily for us.

Read the thread before posting. This has come up several times, and unless hell froze over recently and no one told me Theymos has stated


May have paraphrased that a little

Edit: Here's the response.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3097811.msg32026584#msg32026584

All of them are farmer or sig spammer. Even reading 4 page of topic, there is nothing new in 58th page. It look bad that some of the accounts are Sr. member + that are doing sig spamming.  Now this Mega spam reached to 63^rd page.





Sorry, I am not able to spot bots. Maybe you can create a guide for spotting them ..

It is interesting to look in this profile, posted 4 to 5 time in this same topic and posted in russian too in this  English thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1858713

I think we really need to trash bounty threads that are asking to paste fb/twt bounty report in there thread.
1. They are increasing the length of the thread.
2. Giving unnecessary bump to thread.
3. It makes headache to manually go through this post History of these bounty hunters.

Just wondering, you are the Moderator of that board handling and reading so much of spam, I think autolock of thread after 5 page might bring relief to you.

There are many remarkable ideas proposed in this thread, I just wanted to know if it is possible or not to introduce a ban for IP, I know that there are cases where many people use a shared IP but there are cases that I reported in this forum where some people use more than 500 accounts like in this case (for abusing airdops and bounties)  1 MAN 560+ accounts on forum, Millions of tokens abused.  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4759763.msg42989933#msg42989933)

It will work only for 1 week. Then they will learn to use a VPN/VPS/proxy to get around the problem, it's like a war lost in advance.
You also will see a ton of "Sir I can't post..." threads by people sitting in a cybercafé with wife, brothers, cousins, paying a connection 20 hours per day and used one at a time

It would probably be a good idea for the new forum to have the possibility of having users propose code changes as the forum ages, and new features need to be added or old ones changed slightly. Would probably be better for community input rather than hiring someone to do split the work, or theymos continue doing it himself.

Hey, I did start something similar here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4480507 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4480507)

Because I am lazy, I posted in "serious discussion" section so I wouldn't have to many (poor) replies. For the same reason, I also didn't read the 6 pages your thread's got already.

But, you might find some ideas that aren't in your list yet.

Good luck.

Edit: seems like I'm too late... I just saw that Theymos answered already !

How do you know they're all sharing an IP? Many farmers will share one or a handful of IPs but the smartest ones wouldn't. I wouldn't be against something like once an IP is used to create an account it is 'burned' and no more accounts can be created from that one. Maybe paying the evil fee or whatever per account could white-list them, but not sure how effect either suggestion would be.


Fell free to suggest them here. I plan to compile users suggestions and others can vote on them and the most popular ones among the community will be moved to the top of the list. There's no guarantees that theymos will ever implement them or not but at least he and we can see what is popular amongst users here.

I also have a small suggestion what could be improved in the forum. When a post is deleted in a self-moderated topic, you get a message, but in the message are no information about the thread in which the post was deleted. It would be good to know from which thread the message was deleted. A link to it would be great, from which thread the message was deleted. Otherwise you never know from which thread what was deleted and especially with old post, it's hard to know which post it was.   :)

I understand your point of view but I think that if we introduce this limit of account for a single IP it slows down and a lot of activity for people who have more than 500 accounts. I do not think these people are willing to pay for "evil fees" and I strongly doubt that they are going to change their IP 500 resetting the router every time.
Also if I'm not wrong the Evel fee is only IF anyone get a ban till that moment you can use unlimited number of accounts for IP.

@hilariousetc
Can we gather here also suggestions which does not required theymos to do anything, like gather a group of DTs to monitor the Bounty Managers, as you proposed earlier, this will be one way to go. Finding solutions without changing the policy of the forum.  

Maybe we should focus on this direction since no major changes can be expected in the near future.

I'm working on an ignore system with a categorised public display, and a multi-admin ticket support system.

Yeah, the context of the post is important. I've had them before and it was hard to tell where it was deleted from and many users report the deleted message notification asking why it was deleted etc. Sometimes the post can seem perfectly valid but if the post was off topic or in a thread necrobumped then that's often why they're removed but without knowing where it came from you can't be sure nor can you give a concrete explanation as to why it was deleted.


If they don't require his input then they can easily be implemented and those things can be discussed or done elsewhere.

Why would you want everything to be centralized than it already is? Why should all the control be given to the DT's instead of a proper system that operates on predefined rules? We know the DT system is broken, feedback's are often biased and subjective. You know, if that ever happens, you will only see the members of DT managing the campaigns and not let anybody else to do it. I really have like 3 members in my trust-list whose feedbacks I consider appropriate. I don't mind if a set of rules are defined for one to become a bounty manager or community has to approve on an individual basis.

Not going to work out in the long run. Yes, we have DT, scams still exist, account farmers still exists, bumping services still exists and I can go in. We need an improved system to reduce this drastically.

A couple of suggestions I've already made in the past and haven't been considered yet:

• Show the default trust on the Marketplace for unregistered users. A lot of guests get scammed by users who are already tagged as scammers [link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3058480.0)]
• Implement rules to reduce trust spam. For example any user should be able to leave only one 300-char feedback per week on any other's profile. [link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3039025.0)]

Vote for this [+1]


One can still trust spam by creating new accounts. Although I think trust spam will be reduced to certain degree but still wouldn't be completely eliminated. Will vote for this as well [+1]

---

I would like to suggest adding a message like we have when we visit any thread in Investor based games to be displayed in every board where there are stickies to read the stickies of that board carefully.

What we have in Investor-based games:


And what I suggest.For example: In goods section,


Highlighting might get some good attention and that way maybe people will get aware about stickies. On top of it , it would be much better if Guest are also able to see this message.

I hope I was able to deliver my idea properly. Apologies in advance if have been already suggested earlier.

No it is not, I can post right here a link with eth link addresses connected and a kyc passed from spreadsheet data for one abuser with atleast 10 accounts.
It's seems quite easy to "steal" ID documents. Also someone probably will sell 3rd world ID for few bucks.

I've actually suggested similar things like these before. People shouldn't be allowed to spam the trust needlessly. Some do it because they actually think it makes a difference and turns their score bright red the more they do, though this probably isn't huge issue.


True, they could, but you'd have to be pretty determined to do this. Most probably won't go to those lengths.



Those are pretty much what I've already suggested. See the bit at the bottom in red.

Isn't this one that can be started without further effort from theymos:
I know you (hilariousandco) have suggested it before, and wrote the signature guidelines (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1684035.0) almost 2 years ago. Now that theymos says it's "OK in principle", can't you start banning them?

He didn't say yes either: "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance". It wouldn't work without his input anyway so it's pointless without blacklisting their signatures. You can ban their accounts and trash their threads all you like but people will still continue to advertise for them and the banned campaigns will just run and organise them off site or through telegram etc. Many campaigns are already making joining telegram channels a requirement so they will just rally the troops there or on their website. We could get something going to police problem campaigns if you wanted to take things into your own hands. I've suggested before that the community starts some sort of 'campaign police' and starts leaving negative feedback for the utter crap campaigns that are doing absolutely nothing about spam and quality control and as such are being colossally abused by farmers/spammers/bots in the process. If something like five or ten users are caught copy and pasting then that campaign then gets negbomed by everyone until they show that they've made changes and removed all the spammers and bots etc. Feedback can then be removed. It won't stop them from running them but at least they'll know their behaviour is unacceptable by community standards and negative feedback doesn't look good when you're trying to raise money. It's certainly not ideal but neither is letting them get away with whatever they like and destroying the forum in the process. I would much rather theymos just put measures in place to stop or curb this behaviour such as sig blacklists and removing signatures from Juniors and/or requiring them to earn a merit before they can have a signature which would all work wonders.

I dunno if this sounds VERY naive; but do away with the DT; people should have to modify their Trust list to get the red/green/amber etc.

I believe DT gives a false sense of security on the forum and reduces checks and balances which otherwise people would do more.

Instead when clicking on someone's trust the trust feedbacks should be displayed in the order received by the most merited(over the default merits) and older members. A weighted system to display the feedbacks is what I mean.

EDIT: Also feedbacks by staff, admin and mods should be displayed on top.

EDIT: DT imho is the most abused system on the forum and also a breeding ground for group fights.

EDIT:
We can disagree to disagree for all we want; BUT I WAS NEVER RED/AMBER/GREEN tagged; it is only a frustrated neutral that I have ever had, so stop trying to judge based on your biases.  ::) :P

Please read it carefully; I never said merit and trust are the same thing; also I think being a mod requires you to have the trust of theymos which is far more important than handling BTCs in trades; which might have never happened. Not to say that theymos is infallible, but yeah he must be doing a better DD while appointing a mod, than people do while choosing an escrow or a dealer.

The merit-abuse is rampant and I'm not defending it; but yeah it will stop once the merits dry out; Trust, on the other hand, is perennial and won't dry out and is a much more dangerous territory; cause if it wasn't, then hilariousandco wouldn't have negged mdayonliner for trying to be an inexperienced escrow; for he sure has quite a few merits but doesn't have sufficient trust.

I don't know why so many people tie merit to trust. It's not the same thing. One should have absolutely zero correlation to the other. ::)

At least with the DT network, there are far fewer members "abusing" it than the merit abusers.

---

I disagree. Just because a member is a moderator doesn't make their feedback more valuable then, let's say someone who deals with thousands of dollars worth of transactions a day.


Again, I disagree. The merit system is obviously more abused than trust. I think you're just taking it personal because you were previously red-tagged.

Makes no sense. You're replacing an imperfect system (DT hierarchy) with a stupid one (trust linked to post quality).

Theymos has already suggested a DT replacement. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=914641.0

That puts my trust power right under theymos (unless satoshi comes back for this, then I'll be right under satoshi)! Great plan, I like it :D
In reality, apart from the fact that making good posts doesn't make someone trustworthy, Merit is being traded for money (or sex). That should not turn into power over who's good or evil on the forum.

I disagree with this too: although I don't know the exact criteria used, I'm pretty sure not all staff members are picked because they can be trusted with money, some are picked because their local boards needed a Mod.
And Admins are on DT already.

I imagine some trust is still needed for local moderators as well though. It could be argued that they might be able to get away with more malicious actions, because of those reviewing their actions not knowing the language natively.

I think it goes without saying that admins have to have a lot of trust between theymos, and them.

The way you put it, it does sound a bit odd; but that's not the only or absolute thing I said; I also wanted to factor in an account's age and activity; not just a newbie making a couple of posts casting aspersions and leaving negs. What's your opinion on the mod/staff opinion thing I have proposed?



We can HOPE!



Exactly, this is what I had in my mind too; while the language barrier can be an issue; it can also be a boon. Most members might not know what sort of scam is going on; in let's say Japanese or Korean threads or the mods(who r usually versed in the language) will know better.

Was waiting for someone to pop up with "Trust" being an issue. TBH bitcointalk needs some sort of "centralization", One can point out issues like trust abuse etc, But it is now needed more than ever! Scammers are getting smarter, Farmers are getting organized in ways we haven't seen in the past. Removing/Replacing the current Trust will cuz a havoc. I believe the opportunity to replace the "Trust" system has been long gone and replacing it with something less "Centralized" will be a bad move.

Imagine all the ratings applied to loan defaulters having no more value. It's like giving them a second chance they don't deserve. Coming up with something to "Decentralize Trust" has to be revolutionary and shouldn't give a clean sheet to scammers from the past. Unless you have found a way to keep everything intact moving forward, I believe its best to leave the issue of trust alone.

P.S Trust based on merit isn't the best solution IMO. You can argue that it can act as a voting system but for what exactly?

This would shift more responsibility (or as some would put it - "power") onto moderators. I can't think of any positive result from that. As it is now, moderators can be added to DT when needed but also other members can be added without giving them the privilege of moderating the forum. Same with merit sources. Why would we want to sacrifice that flexibility?

I believe that if one day we will have a system in replacement of the current trust system, it will be a system that will take into accounts the current values of each person on the DT network.
I do not think they will ever make a system where everything goes away and everything will starts from zero again, it would make no sense and as you said, even a merit based system does not make sense as many old people here have several high rank accounts and it would easy enough for them to abuse this thing. (we have some people with over 200 merit points abused right now)

Theymos, can we do some of these in the 'ok' category? Things like the welcome message, enforcing sig campaign guidelines, assigning more sub board mods and admins surely can be done now or soon enough? Things are getting way out of hand and the longer we leave things the worse it gets.

I'd also really appreciate if you can take some time out to give the reasons for some of the 'no's' or 'not yets' when you get chance. Things like removing signatures from lower ranks and/or requiring merit to become a Junior would help things tremendously in my opinion.

This article was written about bitcointalk's marketing: https://hackernoon.com/marketing-on-bitcoin-talk-what-can-go-wrong-d6d5bd6c6174

Most of the ICOs face the same issues.

---

Have a few suggestions in mind:

- Make a god-damn campaign guidelines for newbie campaign managers.

- The bitcointalk rules should be viewed everywhere(similar to reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/), shown on the right-hand side). At least then, people can know what the rules are, and the fact that rules actually exist(This can be really helpful).

Interesting perspective, but not surprising. Letting people come here and run their business or campaigns however they want is like a company hiring someone off the street to do your advertising or work in a job they have had no training or guidance for.


There is one: it's called the signature campaign guidelines thread, but it's useless when most people don't read it (or any other guide/rules thread) and even worse when it's not even enforced. As long as people can come here and vandalise the place with no repercussions then they will continue to do so. This is seemingly ok because "freedom".


Well that was the proposition with the newbie welcome message proposition, that theymos did initially "ok", but whether it will ever happen or not is another issue entirely.

If not that, the quickest and the easiest way to go about it would be incentivizing newbie accounts in order to manage campaigns. A newbie account has to pay a certain fee to become a campaign manager. After paying the fee, they will be publicly judged after 1st week of their management and decided if they're capable to continue. If they're not capable, the thread should be locked until company hires someone else. Not only newbie accounts but any rank lesser than Hero Member shouldn't be directly allowed to manage signature campaigns.

Regulations are permissible to obey the sub-forum sometimes even higher levels also ignore this rule who is wrong,
1. Who makes the rules
2. The rank is low / high or
3. It was deliberately ignored for the sake of sensation.
For example:
= This is the same as the cross signs on the highway: It means to stop but those who feel themselves as dignified dignitaries actually go without stopping.
= and one more reason why corruptors are sentenced to 2 months
= Why is the chicken thief in a 2-year prison.
Regulations are good for all the main ones who must obey, especially the commander. bari the soldier.

What about reviewing the merit system!
I am sure many members don't like the actual merit system because they don't receive any merits despite the effort they make when writing helpful posts.

The Merit system is the only positive improvement to the forum in years. We're looking for ways to go further in that direction and curb spam and shitposting, not reviewing the thing that actually helped a little.

The people who don't like it are usually the exact type of people the merit system was implemented to stop in the first place. In fact, I think the merit system should be even stricter in some aspects and there should be a merit requirement to become a Junior Member. We can already see that the merit system works because low quality posters likely won't ever rank up past Junior and there's going to be a hell of a lot of people who never make it past that rank, but it's useless when anyone can create an unlimited amount of Junior members here and get paid for them and not having a requirement just forces users to make multiple accounts to maximise earnings from bounties. That's why I'm a big proponent of removing signatures from Juniors and requiring some minimal amount of merit to become one.

With that being said, the system probably needs some tweaks. More merit sources need to be added and people should probably start being more generous with their merit (myself included), or I wouldn't necessarily be against lowering the merit requirement of some of the higher ranks as even for a good poster it may take a very long time to get there but that will become apparent over time and whether it works efficiently or not and can be tweaked and tailored as needed.

hilariousandco says very correct things and are necessary as an air to the forum in all his post, but at the moment I am only interested in the part of him that I quoted.
Since I fell out of the forum for a long time already (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4654337.0) and there is no administrator who would pay attention to this and help me get back on line, and from this temporary account I do not want to write on the forum.
Several times I sent letters to administrators responsible for the restoration of accounts in PM, but the answer was never received.
So if you do not have time to deal with these questions then why do not you transfer this work to other people, especially hilariousandco himself says that he is ready to take up this work - so give him such an opportunity. Already a lot of members of the forum are waiting for you to help, how much longer do we have to suffer in anticipation.
I myself am ready to take up this work, I have as much free time, I would solve these user problems in 1-2 days if I correctly assess the scale of the problem, but this is realistic, we are ready to participate, help in this . We understand that you have a lot of work and you do not manage everything, so at least give this part to someone.
Please consider this opportunity.

I am not against the merit system and I am one of its supporters since it helped alot in stopping abusers and spammers, but I am still convinced that it require some improvements (members are not generous thus this system can't be 100% fair).

Realistically, more admins and staff are going to need to be added at some point to keep up with the growing userbase and workload so I don't understand why that time can't be now (or soon). Most staff are already swamped and there are others that could help but can't do much about anything because they don't have the power or ability to. More mods and admins can be added at the touch of a button, and it doesn't even have to be me who does admin duties or account restorations either if theymos doesn't trust me with that for whatever reason, but someone needs to be doing it. Plenty of simple things that would greatly help improve the forum are just being needlessly ignored like assigning sub board mods etc and the forum continues to circle the drain in the process whilst we stand by and watch helplessly.


It does need some improvements as I've already addressed, but have you suggested anything to make it better?

One of the main problems of the forum is the increasing number of spammers. Many users register on bitcointalk for reasons that are contrary to the original purpose of creating this forum. A huge number of people are looking for "easy money" for the quantity, not the quality of comments. This problem is supported by a huge number of bounty campaigns, which take everyone in order for the participants to advertise their signatures. For me, there is no question of completely destroying signature campaigns, although many on the forum see this as a solution to the spam problem.

I believe that admins need to approve a list of rules that campaign managers need to be attached to. It is necessary to establish high requirements to the quality of posts, rank and merits. As we can see, almost all signature campaigns in the Economy > Marketplace > Services branch are the level higher than signature bounties (Alternate cryptocurrencies > Marketplace (Altcoins) > Bounties). This is due to higher requirements for potential participants and more stringent selection. Those who want to join a signature campaign and earn on it must meet the requirements, otherwise they won`t be included in the spreadsheet. Thus, a motivation arises - an indispensable condition for attempts to improve.

Signature campaigns by themselves are not a source of spam and shitposting. But while they encourage the number, not the quality of comments, the problem of spam on the forum won`t disappear. Instead of removing signature campaigns in general, I suggest that they become a motivation for improving the quality of posts of forum participants, by raising requirements.

There are rules. We created the signature campaign guidelines because of this, but this issue is that they're not enforced. It's like saying theft is illegal, but not actually punishing anyone who does it, so of course lots of unscrupulous people will take advantage of that because there's absolutely no repercussions for doing it. Punishments need to start being handed out to ICOs and their managers and things would drastically improve here if that happened. The forum is such a shitshow because we allow campaigns to largely do what they want, but if their laziness and greed was punished then the culture would quickly change around here and they would adapt and actually do what they supposed to do in the first place because this forum is too valuable for them to not be able to advertise here.

I'm not sure if someone already mentions this.

As we know that spam posts are from:
1. Noobs who pursue rank: after they reach a certain rank they can do some bounty
2. Sign camp participants who perform tasks without care what their posting, just to pass their post target.
3. Some of them have several accounts to do the bounty.

To deal with it actually, we can use the basic functions of the SMF feature.

I believe that the admin only applies 4 types of member groups in this forum, they are:
1. Global mod members
2. Local mod/sub mod members
3. User members
4. Guest members

So, the admin can add the fifth group, which member in this group have no access to bounty marketplace
ex:
5. Limited members.

And how to moving spammer to the group? I think global moderator and some of another moderator have right to add/remove them in this groups, based on moderators reports and/or they just find it.  

Reference:
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF1.1:Membergroups
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Moderation_center

edit:
About merit, I agree with this:
What you think about give merit to the post that does not exist?

I see your point, but I agree with hilariousetc that we need punishments and restrictions for this theory to work. Otherwise your proposal sounds very utopically and is unattainable in real life. People always bypass rules and regulations, if they are not afraid of sanctions. It is fear of punishment that helps to develop norms of behavior in society. Even in developed countries, where from childhood they are taught to compliance with rules, noone cancels the sanctions. I like your idea of raising the requirements for members of signature campaigns, but this idea needs to be supplemented by sanctions in case of violation of established rules.

That still doesn't solve the issue of them spamming the board.  You can claim a bounty anywhere online.  People will just use social media instead of the bounties subforum.  If they aren't contributing useful content, get rid of them.  

Yeah, it does not solve all of them. But at least that can reduce the number of spammers.

As stated in the reference, admin can make rules in that new group.
example:
1. Signature disallowed, whatever their rank.
2. Reducing maximal post.
3. etc

People maybe can participate bounty at another website, but they cannot use signature code that they need to claim their prize.
For social media reports...
I think bounty manager must make an additional rule about the reports.
example:
Using google spreadsheet/google form then send to their official email. It's not necessary posting in their announcements thread.

Indonesian Patrol always doing that.
And this is our works:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4755388.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4654436.0

One more thing to be added to the list with suggestions: 
The patrol list should have an option to exclude the ignored boards.
I think someone suggested it some months ago.

If replacing the management would be a possibility I would put my vote there.

For example a Junior Member needs 10 merit points to become a Member while a Sr.Member needs 500 merits to rank up, I think it should be the opposite, if the aim of the merit system is to lemit the number of spammers then a new registered member should provide more effort to prove himself.
If he succeeds to collect a high number of merit and ranks up, that means he is not a spammer and ranking up should become easier.
What do you think?

A spammer is not limited to newbies. There are a ton of spammers with Full Member, Sr Member, even Legendary ranks. Making it easier to rank up after Member (or whatever ranks it is) would be interpreted: "Hey, congrats on ranking up to Member/(anything)! Now you can spam more without fear!"

Btw, merit means the higher your ranks mean you have more contribution to this forum through your post. It is not solely to defeat spammers, but also as a "reward" for contributive users.

Self-moderated thread extension.

Self-moderation is great but I want to propose an extension to it. Allow the OP to choose who can participate in their thread, E.g if I want to create a discussion thread, Instead of self-moderating it, I would just choose the ranks who can respond to it. It's not a tool to counter spam but it could help in sub-boards like "Bitcoin-Discussion" and "Offtopic".

What do you mean the opposite? You mean you need something like 500 merit to become a Junior? I think there should be a merit requirement for them as well as their signature being removed, but it shouldn't be unnecessarily high. They will already struggle to get something like ten merits, but a decent poster won't have much issue with that whilst it will also severely curb the worst of the worst posters and also bots etc.


That has literally been suggested, along with being able to prohibit certain users from posting in it so you don't need to waste time removing the posts of users you don't even want posting in there or breaking your 'local' rule etc.

This is the only idea I'm expecting that will be implemented for sure but, I still can't imagine why it's in the "No" list. I proudly said in some of my fellows citizens a few days ago that once this idea was implemented, bounty abusers as well as spammers will be lessen as I'm a hundred percent sure that this one will be implemented but seems like it was now just a dream.

I'm wondering, Why no? Or not yet? I really thought that this will be prioritised along with remove signatures from Jr. Members and Newbies but it didn't even passed the "Maybe" list. What a surprising result. Unexpected.

If I had to guess, there are probably concerns over the longevity of the forum in the future.  If the number of older, more experienced members starts to dwindle, newer users need to be able to rise up the ranks in order to replace them.  Perhaps theymos doesn't want to create an environment that's deemed too hostile towards newbies and risk scaring the legitimate ones away?

The older members should probably remember the likelihood that their early contributions to the forum may not have been quite up to the standards they would like to see now.  We can't expect too much, too soon.

It’s probably one of those tough business decisions that can affect the forum noticeably, and the risks are there whether you embrace the idea and go ahead with it or not. It’s a question of determining which is the best business decision, and whether it needs to be played out right now or can be booted a few more month ahead to see how things go in the meantime (the latter seems to be winning I guess).

I gave it a go a few days ago, looking at very numerically conservative scenarios, and by imposing the 1 gained Merit for signatures, campaign slots (available people vs signatory demand) would likely only fill around 30%. That could move campaigns away from the site, along with traffic rather quickly (even if the upside would be that the forum would be way better, and remaining campaign signatures would be waved around by better posters). See detailed numeric scenario here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4955187.msg44660431#msg44660431.

Well hopefully it falls under the 'Or not yet' or 'Or the idea would need to be significantly modified' parts. Everybody I've mentioned this to seems to be back it in some capacity (and some think it should be much more than one merit). I haven't yet seen any better suggestions to stop or at the very least curb bots or the very worst of the worst of spammers from getting paid as Juniors.


They don't. Why does rank matter? If they can't get merit then they're still shitposters regardless of ranks. Requiring a small amount of merit isn't hostile, especially when it's majorly Junior Members that are causing so much damage. People can still post here without earning any merit nor do they need a signature to be able to do that.


I don't think it has anything to do with business decisions. Theymos has already said he thought about removing the one and only ad slot we have here so he can't care too much about traffic effecting forum revenue. The people who come here to earn aren't going to just give up because they need one merit or so to get a signature either. How about all the traffic and users that are lost from genuine users who leave because this forum is unfit for purpose and is 90% spammers posting nonsense about things they know nothing about just in order to get paid? That needs to change or this board will wholly become a welfare system for spammers. Requiring a minimal amount of merit isn't ridiculous nor restrictive. People can still post here or claim bounties, they just can't get paid to post until they've got the merit and I think this is how it should be, otherwise nothing will change and people will continue to farm Junior accounts in their hundreds if not thousands and that needs to be stopped somehow.

you could add to the list: A way to bind your account to a BTC address automatically from the user profile, plus at the login an option to recover your account, all done by signing/verifying random messages.

I understand they are going through each account manually checking messages and in detail that everything make sense, but doesn't look like this is sustainable anymore given the amount of accounts hacked we are seeing lately.

Doesn't really prevent accounts being sold, and then claimed back though. I'm not sure what the forums stance on selling accounts, and who the rightful owner is, but I assume that they would look for information that might indicate that the account was sold, and see if the credential changes link up to that too. Account recoveries can never be automatic.

An automated method to claim back your account could severely reduce account sales. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for an account, knowing the previous owner can claim it back at any moment?
Losing your bought account will just become an occupational hazard.

if applied, what parameters are used in the script to filter these things?

Or just severely increase account scams when sellers just take their accounts back after they've sold them. Most newbies won't be aware that they can be reclaimed in such a way and falling victim to this will become rife (unless theymos has though of a way to stop this). I still think we should allow users to purchase the bigger signatures via donating for Silver and Gold Membership etc. This would essentially kill the account sales market and account scams with it so it's win win for everyone and the forum gets the money instead of some account farmer or scammer. Users don't get scammed, the forum gets the money and users can have the bigger signature which is what they wanted in the fist place.

I also wonder what will happen to those users who can't sign a message posted here because the hacker deleted it but the address can still be found archived online or on one of the bitcointalk mirrors etc. There's also the issue of those who don't have a bitcoin address but can sign one from an alt coin wallet. I'm going to assume theymos' auto-recovery system will be bitcoin only?

Newbies who buy accounts aren't that new. Have you already bought an account before you even know the forum? Ignorance is not an excuse, otherwise, I will stop paying my taxes today and I would say that I did not know.

As I said several times paying a fee is a goo idea. I remember reading a post from Theymos saying the forum doesn't need money. However, there are tons of charities that need it. So why not make an annual donation in Bitcointalk's name, based on the community choice? It can be Bitcoin-related or not.

Deleted messages in the forum are not really deleted, they are just hidden from everybody. The admin can see them, same story for edited messages.

But i don't understand why going through all the trouble and time spent doing these researches (considering the fact there could be more important things to do with that time) on the account hacked/deactivated.

More importantly everyone should take the responsibility for safekeeping his account imo.

Lolwut? You got a source there? Newbies do buy accounts. Do you think it's just old timers that do? If newbies come here to earn and they realise they can buy an account then many of them do. Some people will just be told to buy an account straight away rather than wasting time trying to get merit and activity.


This isn't relevant to anything. This forum essentially sanctions the sale of accounts, so newbies will think it's fine and ok to buy one. Their sale might even go through ok (assuming they don't get scammed), then hours or days later their account is taken back.


How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?


People should, but nobody is invincible or watertight with their security. The forum was hacked. Who's fault was that? Shit happens sometimes and anyone can slip up somewhere, doesn't mean they should just be left to languish in limbo for eternity.

I hope it won't be based on a post but rather set in account profile without the option to update or remove it (except perhaps using a signed message from the old address although that opens some loopholes). At least that's how I'd do it. I'm not theymos in case you're wondering.

If he has no time or desire, he may perhaps delegate this "power" to global moderators.
I say maybe, because I do not know how this power works on the forum and I do not know if you can pass this skill or he needs to create a new rank with more powers than a global moderator.

I've suggested addresses in profiles be logged before so they can be used, but they're not currently so the people who have already lost their accounts won't be able to restore them this way. Regardless of whatever system theymos does implement I'm almost certain there's still going to be cases that need manually reviewing for numerous reasons.


Well that would be the logical conclusion, but only theymos can initiate that. If it was going to happen then it likely would have already been done by now. Maybe he just doesn't trust anyone to do such things. With that being said, he did put my suggestion to create more admins or demi admins in the "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation" category so hopefully that will happen at some point. Workload also needs to be spread out between other staff members as well to lighten the load on everyone. More patrollers should be added and mods assigned to sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion.

About the automated recovery system through BTC address: it would be enough to activate it at any time by binding it permanently from the profile page, you are given a message to sign and when confirmed that BTC address used is binded to your account. In some special cases theymos could intervene IF the binding was done by somebody who already stole an account.
When an account get compromised, you are asked to to sign a message and if confirmed you can get back your account.

The advantage of this change alone is that will probably be able to handle most of the cases on the long run as more and more account gets protected, the rest, those contested could still be checked manually.

I have suggested this opinion of mine a long time ago but got ignored (maybe I'm not that popular since I'm not that fluent at English.) :D.

I have suggested that the admins must put a rank requirement in Announcement section. As we can see, most ICO ANN are being bumped by newbies and Jr. Members although there are some Members and up who are joining the SPAM SQUAD. I think putting a rank requirement in posting on that section will significantly reduce the spamming problems there.

I should say a minimum rank of Member are the ones who can post there. Maybe some will say how will new members post their ICO projects there. The solution that I see is to purchase a Copper Membership in order for them to post there. How will Newbies and Jr. Members post on Announcement section? They must buy Copper Membership in order to post. In that way, there is a high chance that more members will purchase it and will add to the revenues of the forum.

Just a suggestion. :D

What kind of trust can we talk about when working on the forum, in reality you can trust only in yourself in the network, but as dozens of other moderators work there, it means that there is an opportunity to trust other people by placing some of their responsibility on them.
I also do not think that assigning another person the task of restoring user profiles will somehow violate the overall security of the forum and affect its operation. Especially it is possible to give a probationary period, and to make sure that a person copes wonderfully or not.
But until a person is appointed to this position, the problems of hacked accounts will not be solved for a long time.

Most suggestions are ignored (or at least not commented on), so don't take it personally. Maybe theymos has taken them into consideration also, but he rarely comments on such things individually. What you're suggesting has been mentioned before, as well as similar suggestions. I've suggested ICOs have to pay a fee to list here and lower-ranked members don't bump ICO threads to the top. Theymos did address some of these suggestions if you look back to page 5.


It would depend on what sort of responsibilities and access they are given. There is obviously some trust required to be a moderator here. You can delete people's posts and threads, so you need to be trusted to not abuse that. A Global mod can issue bans and needs to be trusted not to just ban people he doesn't like. An admin has access to a lot of private info that mods don't such as people's IPs, and they are also able to reset users accounts and they need to be trusted with that. An unscrupulous admin could just reset accounts to an email they controlled then use that account as they wished. Unlikely to happen but it could. They might abuse their position to check users IPs or for alts as well. Depending on what sort of access they were given they could do something like what happened when the forum was hacked and scrape everyone's details and password hashes etc, but I think theymos is the only one who has root access here and even cyrus has limited admin powers or not full ones like theymos does. I'm sure there's other reasons as well, so there does need to be quite a lot of trust placed in an admin, even a 'demi' admin with limited powers.

To demonstrate you are worthy theymos trust you can undertake a simple test, he will leave you in a room alone one hour sitting on a chair in front of a table. On the table there is a plate with delicious cookies, by the time he comes back if you haven't eaten the cookies you are in  8)

Today, as I was going through the daily spam once again, I was wondering why new accounts are created and spam with 0 merit since they won't get signature payments anyway; and then an idea came to me!
I went through most of the pages of this thread and I didn't find my idea suggested by anyone else, only something close which I'd like to improve on. The similar idea is mentioned bellow,


I figured that there are two possible reasons people create new accounts and increase their postcount with spam even though with 0 merit they won't get paid for signatures,

• Either they don't know that without merit they won't receive any payments from signature bounties. Most of the spammers obviously don't know English and don't research the forums at all.
• Or they're planning to trade merit after they've reached enough posts.

Proposed solution for case (A),
As mentioned by Theymos, a newbie welcome message explaining the rules guides etc. But because spammers won't bother reading them, force them into answering a quiz before they're allowed to post. The quiz could select 5 random questions from a pool of about 20-30 questions. It has to be multiple choice and it has to punish wrong answer with a time limit before they can answer again. Every time they fail to answer all questions correctly, they have to wait 1 hour for one wrong answer and up to 24 hours for 5 wrong answers. Every time they retry the quiz the questions will be shuffled and randomised so that they won't get the same questions every time. One of the questions will always be about the merit system, something that will force them to understand that without quality posting most campaign managers won't reward them.

Proposed solution for case (B),
This is something that the community must help to eradicate. Most, if not all, bounty managers require not only high rank but also not negative trust. If we give negative trust to spammers even if they have 0 merits we safeguard that the person behind this account won't start posting normally after 500 spam-posts, buy merit and then sell the account or farm campaigns with it. But right now the trust most of us give have no value. I noticed Theymos proposed a change to the DT (DefaultTrust) system so I have hopes that this might be improved in the near future.

Sorry for the long post, I hope I managed to keep everything simple and easy to understand.
I also hope you read my post even though I use a paid signature too and you didn't automatically qualify me for a spammer! ;D

Add a blockchain for voting. I want votes only to be made by holders of the Merit currency. This will stop potential spam bots to control the votes.

I have another suggestion that's not really important, but can be annoying. I've ran into it many times: if a user creates a wide post, it looks good on the forum. But in the user's post history, it totally messes up the layout.
Example: this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5020614.msg45297325#msg45297325) makes me scroll about 20 meter left and right in my post history (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=459836;sa=showPosts) (note that this last link will point to the wrong page in a few days).
I often run into this problem when I check the post history of a "bounty manager" in an altcoin ANN thread.

I have another suggestion that I forgot about: The ability to 'share' ownership of the op of a thread so those relevant individuals can make changes to it. For instance, when you create the thread you can add 'co-owners/operators' who then can edit the thread the same as you can. This would be helpful for community-lead projects and threads like the Sig Campaign Overview where you can let a couple of trusted individuals make the required changes, or for businesses who have a couple of employees who can make the required changes instead of just relying on the person who created the thread. Obviously you would only grant access to those who you trust but I think this would be very helpful, especially for projects where the op may lose interest or not be as active as they once was.


Yeah, this is annoying, especially when you're going through someone's post history and trying to remove infringing posts.

This was one of the most needed improvements, and I know many users support it. But from the "No", I never expected this would be the first suggestion that gets implemented (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030366.0)!

I've been giggling like a little school girl all morning reading meta. Out-fucking-standing, is all I can say! And a special note of thanks to hilariousandco/etc for pushing the "1 merit to become a Jr. Member" suggestion repeatedly.

1 down about tree fiddy to go. I was surprised by this and I'm glad theymos came round to it and I hope he starts to take more of my suggestions on board, but I still don't think this goes far enough though. I agree with one merit to become Junior but we should also remove Junior's signatures. Requiring ten merit to become a Member and get a sig would really sort the wheat from the chaff here. Far too easy to beg, buy or trade one merit and this will become rife. Ten is a much different ball game and becomes exponentially more difficult the more accounts you have. I think the users with one account will struggle but the people who are farming en mass will probably have earned enough money to buy merit and then trade it around their various accounts and I think this is something we're going to have to keep an eye out for.

Yep, but this was a big one and I'd also like to thank you for pushing the idea for so long.  It certainly seemed like it wasn't being listened to from my perspective, but sometimes Theymos surprises everyone.

I've got so many members on ignore, it's not even funny and even with all of them I still can't keep up with all the garbage posters here.  I have no plans to modify that list, though I'll probably not be adding many more for now.  And as I said in another thread, I don't plan to lower my standards, but I'm going to try harder to seek good posts to merit--especially from the lower-ranked members.  Ranking up had gotten to be a little too slow, and it actually just got worse for Jr. Members who haven't yet earned a single merit.

It's all good though.  Got a huge smile on my face this morning, and I think I'm going to be tap dancing around the house later.  This is almost as good as when Theymos rolled out the merit system in January.

Let's keep this list updated. Now we have to mark the ones that are done!
Maybe someone can make a list of what has been done till now. I've seen quite many changes since I joined the forum. First were the copper members, then the CouldFlare after that came the merit, followed with the report scores, Homographs were fixed and now this. I may have forgotten something on the way but quite a lot happned for the past almost an year.

I posted a different idea (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030366.msg45819684#msg45819684) today, and already modified it a bit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030366.msg45821767#msg45821767). In short:
Every time an account goes up 100 in Activity, remove 1 Merit. That means any normal person has to earn 1 Merit every 3 months to keep his rank, old inactive accounts aren't affected, and any spammer who got a Merit without deserving it, will lose it again unless he starts deleting many of his old posts.

When I was new here on the forum I thought there would be a lot of legendary account on the forum in some years and legendary would be a rank of any spammer you could think of but due to the great changes made by theymos by adding merit system to the forum he made it worth getting to the rank and also stopped the shitposting in better way.

Due to the implementation of some of the suggestions made by great community members here, bitcointalk would attract more knowledgeable people than just dumps and spammers to express themselves here and help the crypto community to grow. I am very happy that theymos tried to look into this issue and i think after the implementation process this forum can become a very great to place to gain and share information from knowledgeable people.

The best suggestion for me would be adding more mods and giving the  some extra power to ban users and all the scammers they come across. Also a power of IP ban in case the user is just creating multiple accounts.

It's certainly a bold idea, but I suspect it might fall afoul of theymos' stance that:

While new users are still learning, it may not be fair to expect too much, too soon.  They might have worked really hard for their first merit and I could understand some serious disillusionment if they happened to earn it at 90+ activity just for the new system to tear it away from them again shortly after.  

Don't get me wrong, though, I like the idea overall.  I'd be more than happy for higher ranks that inherited some initial starting merit to be subject to those rules.

Users whom I consider "good" won't have a problem losing 1 Merit, they'd earn another one within a few days tops. Falling back from (say) 150 to 149 Merit points won't hurt any good member in the long run.
Spammers however will be seriously restricted if they lose 1 Merit, it could even lower the rank of high ranking users who haven't earned a single Merit since January.

Thanks to theymos and thanks to the various other people (you know who you are) who continue to push for a cleaner and spam-free forum. Meta is a shitshow at the moment, and the complaining posts are popping up on the other boards too, but seeing posts today from Newbie accounts with 500+ posts and 0 merit complaining about losing their bounty campaigns is beautiful.

Awesome development! Theymos cares about the community after all. This can be improved tho, just like you mentioned in the "Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements" thread i.e 10 Merits to wear the signature. Now that the first step has been taken I believe the next step should be strict action against managers who are accepting higher ranked members who haven't earned any merit and going about their daily shitposting. These managers should be the immediate next target for the staff members and theymos.

A team should be made to investigate these managers and warn them for their wrongdoings. They will have a couple of weeks to adjust their policies, Failure to do so should result in a permanent ban.


It's kind of an overkill TBH Loyce. What we need to do now is have strict rules for running the bounty campaigns. Make it official that bounty managers should only accept people who have earned at least X amount of merit. Failure to do so will result in a ban. Something like this should be a good start point. We will see immediate results if something like this gets implemented.

I checked out the idea, and am all for it. I wouldn't tie it to activity as you have already pointed out the work around, they would just delete posts. There would be no repercussions to them in doing so as they aren't ranking up without merit. I would say every 45 days. With all the new sources of merit that has been added, a worthwhile poster should be able to earn 1 merit in 45 days, I feel that is a generous timeline.


That would be nice, but Theymos is not a fan of heavy handed rules being implemented. Unfortunately the community doesn't have a tool to use though to enforce a majority consensus on how we would like to see bounties handled in the forum. I used to not concern myself with bounties as I assumed there actions were all off forum, then I realized how many of them require a signature and to post on the forum. I tried to thin kof a way that DT could be used to reign in the bounty managers but trust doesn't really affect them.

Some might argue that spammers being effectively incentivised to tidy up their own mess is a good thing, heh.  Sounds like a win if the mods would normally have to delete them anyway.   ;D

^^

I like your glass half full attitude.  ;)

Although I would still prefer to see them leave or improve, cutting off or restricting the ease access to their "jobs" is probably the only way to do it.

I think losing 1 Merit every 3 or 6 months would be enough to derank most spammers, and that was my initial idea. However, this would be bad for high quality posters who don't post often, or even inactive accounts. By tying it to activity, none of these are affected.

I see what your saying. Perhaps the happy medium would actually come from a post count as opposed to activity or time. Say 200 or 250 posts; the kicker would be that it is a continuous total not affected by deleted posts.
This way spammers can't cheat the activity threshold by deleting posts, and it won't disproportionately affect casual or inactive users.

So they'll just cheat the post count by deleting posts.

Why not this > if you don't receive any merit for 3 months activiy then you loose 1. Then the good posters will not be affected at all :)

Not that I care about loosing merit, I already got way more than I needed.

Bitcointalk Airlines frequent flier program:

• You're earning miles from other passengers.
• To earn miles you have to provide high-quality in-flight entertainment to other passengers.
• For every two earned miles you get one sMile that you can give to others.
• The airline has appointed 120 passengers called "mile sources" who can hand out ~200 free sMiles per month.
• Mile sources don't fly to Philippines or Indonesia and only sit in first class.
• Until you earn at least 1 mile you can only fly in the cargo hold, which does not have lavatories.
• You can't buy miles but you can buy a cattle-class seat for $15.
• If you earn enough miles you gain the right to carry an increasingly lurid placard and to shove it in the face of each passenger you talk to.
• Other passengers may spray you with red paint if you try to sell sMiles or give them to your friends or family members.

Proposed rule changes:

• Require 10 miles to upgrade from cargo hold.
• Miles expire after 3 months of no activity.

Did I capture the spirit of the system correctly? ;D

Sorry I wasn't clear in my explanation.


When I said this, I meant it as a programming fix. The forum would tabulate all posts that you create in that time frame including posts that are deleted. So in this system, it wouldn't matter if the spammers deleted their posts, as it would have still been added to the tally.

While an account may only show 190 posts in an effort to remain below the (currently imaginary) threshold for Merit reduction, their actual tally may be 201, thus triggering the removal of 1 merit. In this example they tried to delete 11 posts. With a large number like 200 or 250 posts, I feel it would give a wide enough berth for any worthwhile member of the forum to earn 1 merit...

---

Love it, does it come with a fancy card?

You should ad in the safety spiel pointing the spammers to their nearest exit.

I would like to suggest BitcoinTalk forum to launch it's official mobile app. ;D

oO
I thought selling sMiles leads to just sitting at the end of the plane with the bad boys or in a cage in the cargo.
I thought deplaning occurs when you paste papers from books or newspapers in the plane's wall and windows or jumping like a monkey outside of your cage and waking up the passengers to see what u r doin' everytime  :-\

---

Let's just wait for the new forums  ::)
(<3 this one btw)

You're right, I got carried away with that one. It has been corrected.

The newspaper/monkey thing would be part of a broader package of rules and regulations that would also need to addresses issues like hoarding multiple seats or defecating in the aisle or Lamborghinis for the flight attendants.


So it's basically pay-to-post. Pay 1 merit to make 200 posts. What if a user doesn't have any merits? Would they go negative?

I like the idea but I think it would likely create even more desperate begging in Meta.

The pay to post is an interesting way of looking at it.

I see it as more of an earn to maintain. In a way it removes the "tenure" aspect of ranking up in the forum. It would be most notable to the 1 merit junior members, who when it was all of a sudden needed got a suspect merit awarded. In the long run though given poor enough quality it could affect any user who ranked up but does not currently create meritable posts.

From this I would not want to see negative in the merit field. People would be able to continue posting as normal after the 200 posts.

I feel this would be a good overall way of keeping forum ranks/status more fluid and current. Especially if it were applied in a way that it encompassed everyone including people who were ranked up prior to the merit system.

Edit: Just want to make sure it's known that I began thinking this system up after reading LoyceV's post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4893744.msg45825852#msg45825852)

My offers

1. Spoiler button.


2. Alert message before posting.


3. Pin this topic and theymos title guide (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102944.0) in Meta.

Since trust is mostly for trading, what about to add a "new and separate trust system for abusers"?

I've reported around 200+ abusers but only a few of them are tagged, many DT doesn't want/doesn't have time to tag them.

List of Abusers waiting red tag.  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4695194.msg42378900#msg42378900)

I can report even 200 more accounts but no one is tagging them.  :-*

Now that we have a 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members, I suggest to extend this to anyone who wants to post on the Altcoin board. My original post including Veleor's suggestion to post it here:
The main idea isn't to stop real users, and I do realize they'll be "collateral damage", but this may be the only way to stop paid bumping bots. Copper Members shouldn't be restricted either. This will give the spammers something to lose. Currently, a spammer can create 6000 accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5032314.msg46798027#msg46798027) in a day, which is enough to bump many threads for a very long time (and earn a lot of money from it).
Just 1 Merit (or 0.00208333BTC for Copper Membership) per account can still be abused, but not at this magnitude.

The Altcoin board should be nuked, it’s an about cess pool full of shitty posters & bounty hunters aka shit posters.
It literally hurts my eyes just reading the rubbish in there.

Drastic measures :D
I still have some hope the board can be saved, but that requires maybe 99% or more of the posts to disappear. If 1 Merit isn't enough to accomplish that, I wouldn't mind seeing it raised further.
Make people earn the right to post about altcoins on Bitcointalk.

Maybe a bit over the top by me there :)
It’s just so frustrating reading all the crap on there. It’s spilled over into Bitcoin Discussion now too which saddens me.

Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist. Politics & Society (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=34.0) is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to Flying Hellfish (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=79608)).

Now Bitcoin discussion is far better than what it used to be a couple of months ago. Spam threads are quickly getting locked, duplicates reported. Although copy-pasters are getting banned, altcoin discussion board is still worse with duplicate threads and spam mega threads not getting locked. Maybe if a good number of reporters actively reporting on altcoin discussion board (not bounties and announcements), half the spam would be gone, making it better for discussions.

It's not so quick process, keep in mind that before the changes / like the announcement for the reporter badges,the new mods like Welsh and Flying Hellfish, the more detailed reports stats and some other recent changes / people were not so familiar with reporting and only a few were doing it /I was one of them/. Now more are interested in doing it in a hope to get a badge one day, which is good. Imagine when the badges are actually implemented, there will be more and more people reporting and they gonna focus on different sections of  the forum. We are going the right way so it will come the time to the Altcoin section too, just wait.

I think this is a good idea and I've suggested something similar before, but with warnings for people not to post threads in the wrong subs. For instance a warning like Posts about the discussion of Bitcoin's value do not belong here but in Speculation in Bitcoin Discussion, and in Press: This board is for news about Bitcoin only - Do not post alt coin articles in here etc. Would help cut down on a lot of needless time wasted from staff having to move threads that shouldn't be posted there in the first place.


I really don't think this is something theymos would go for as he doesn't want to limit people's ability to post here which this does. All it would do is put off genuine users whilst the people who came here to abuse the forum would just grin and bear it.

I completely agree on your point regarding Bitcoin Discussion. This is bitcointalk, first and foremost a forum about bitcoin. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main board people are interested in. It's the first board most people will visit when they discover the forum, and it gives off a terrible first impression. As it stands, many senior members won't even venture in to it because of all the spam. The sub needs a dedicated mod that can clean up the spam and monitor any thread that reaches 5+ pages, as 99% of them are spam mega-threads which OP has long deserted.

I worry about the unintended consequences of the 1 merit limit for posting in Altcoin boards, however. Yes, many of them are bump bots, but there are a non-insignificant number of spammers just trying to rank up. Ban them from Altcoins and they will spill over to other boards - Bitcoin Discussion being the most likely.

As I stated earlier I don't see the need at the moment.
The ranking up process is locked by the new rules. The total shitposters cannot rank up to Jr. the ones that are more advances will probably reach up to member but not more.

Those shitposters that got the merit airdropped are now being filtered, I see so many ban appeals every day, so after some time the forum will be cleaned from most of the spammers. This process will continue and more and more of those who post nonsense will be filtered naturally.
I think theymos did enough changes /restrictions/ which will have more impact in a bit longer run.

What I see as the 2 main sources of problems are,
(1) The thread bumpers which seem to be paid people with multiple accounts or even organised groups of many people, not bots. The way those bumpers post in forums and answer to each other seems very relative and on-topic with every thread so they can't be bots, but I have my reasons to believe they're not normal users either (I mean... what normal person would visit 10 different altcoin ANN threads and praise every one of these projects as being the best!)
(2) Just visit the "Patrol (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;patrol)" page and see the last posts, I'm sure 80% of the posts are social media links to fake accounts which post "advertisements" for a bounty camaign.


The problem n.2 isn't a big issue as long as the forum's database can withstand it! :P The spam is only going on inside bounty threads anyway.

However for countering the problem n.1 we need something more drastic. I'm sure there are IP-check filters in place already but that's obviously not enough.
Since the people doing the spam cannot be caught, we need to eliminate the motivation; that means punishing those who buy the services of spammers to bump their threads. But if we start punishing threads for having spammers, then each project team can send spammers to the competition's threads and then report the competition's thread for buying spam services.

TL;DR
To be honest I started writing this post about 30 minutes ago, thinking that I had an idea but then when I'd write my idea I'd see holes in it and then deleted it! That's why I haven't managed to actually come up with a suggestion this time but only the forum issues I can recognise. Maybe I should haven't bother to post this buy someone might actually come up with an idea while reading it!

Also, I used to think all this spam is coming from newbies who don't know how the forums work, which is why I had suggested the following filtering method, if you want to read it I'm linking it bellow, I still believe it's a good idea but not enough to counter a high percentage of the problem.

As I said above, requiring merit to post in the regular boards almost certainly won't happen as theymos is against those sorts of restrictions. It seemed like even requiring one merit for a signature was pushing the limits of what he's willing to do. With that being said, I wouldn't be against additional new boards that can only be posted in once you have a certain amount of merit so that should at least up the quality of discussion allowed in those boards and I have already suggested that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4854646.msg43759760#msg43759760

Bitcoin Discussion definitely needs some dedicated mods and I'm not sure why this hasn't happened yet.


It's not that difficult for shitposters to get a single merit to become Junior. They might not get it legitimately but I'm seeing a lot of shitposting juniors with one suspicious merit floating around. They can also just purchase the Copper Membership for $15-$20 or whatever it is. I still think we should remove Junior's signatures and require ten merit before you can get one. This makes it ten times harder or costlier for them to abuse.

I think that improvements on the bitcointalk and cleaning it from spammers is possible only when new changes are implemented regularly. Yes, at the moment, theymos has introduced new rules, which already brought the solution to the problem closer, but this isn`t enough. The effect of innovation doesn`t grow exponentially; on the contrary, over time, more and more participants will find ways to break the rules and circumvent the restrictions.

We can`t stand still and be content with existing progress. Otherwise we won`t achieve the desired, but also lose what we already have. Therefore, I believe that after some time it`s necessary to analyze the result of previous innovations, draw conclusions and introduce new regulations in order to continue the forum improvement.

LoyceV is already doing that here:


Given that the "1 merit for signature" rule has consistently reduced the number of posts by 20-30%, we can confidently draw the conclusion that it is reducing spam. Since we know that it is working, it seems silly not to take it further and raise the threshold to 10 merits, at least as a trial, and monitor to see if this reduces spam further. It almost certainly would, as it removes the "lucky" 1 merit receivers, makes it 10 times costlier to buy, and makes it 10 times harder for one account to level up all their alts.

These data demonstrate that the number of posts has decreased. Yes, we can conclude that quantitatively there`s less spam (although there`s no direct correlation between the decrease in the number of posts and spam, since it`s possible that participants generally began to write less, not less spam). But these indicators don`t say anything about the quality of written posts. Even if the number of shitposts has become less, this doesn`t mean that they have become of higher quality. Therefore, we can`t talk about solving the problem so far. In my opinion, the spam issue should be solved in two directions: it`s necessary to reduce the number of shitposts, but at the same time improve the quality of comments. And for this, an incentive is needed (in our case, the required number of merit to increase the rank). And it seems to me that 1 merit for motivation is extremely insufficient.

It's really simple, those who earned money in sig. campaigns with 0 effort /newbies and Jr.members/ can no longer do it and big part of them gave up.
Those who really push to do it, now pay either for merit or for Copper Membership.


Yeah, I agree but the number of those shitposters is not so big anymore as it was before. I can find in Bitcoin Discussions more legit threads that those spam-mega-threads, the Off-topic is not so popular anymore as it used to be before. Now if you refresh it every 15 seconds there are no new posts as there were before.

@DdmrDdmr suggested somewhere to introduce a Merit-based sorting for new threads. I don't remember what thread it was but I think that will be a good alternative. The sorting should be based on how many merited users responded to a thread.

Also, Loyce's Comment comes to my mind on Spam Filter v1's thread. Something Like a "Reading" Mode should be introduced, Once in the reading mode, all the posts made by users who haven't received any merit will not be shown. I mean it's not required. The Bitcoin discussion board is much more readable these days can't say the same about Altcoin boards tho. The topics are usually crap or don't belong in the bitcoin discussion board. I think adding a moderator or 2 should help the cause.

I don't know about that. Spam megathreads are still rife and are pretty much the only threads in Bitcoin Discussion, or at least they drown out all the others because they're so easy to post rubbish in continually. Go in them and you'll still see higher-ranked members who were air-dropped the merit churning out their dross post after post thread after thread. It's mind numbing reading it. That won't change until we either remove air-dropped merit (which probably won't happen) or campaigns are punished who continue to pay for people to make the drivel in the first place.


I think that would be an interesting thing to have as an option to view. It would certainly sort the wheat from the chaff/crap threads  and spam threads would be pushed to the bottom.

Theymos,

would you consider supplying a list of user IDs of banned users so far? I know you had answered a related question in prior:

Not sure if this is a thread destined for obscurity but this is the best place for this.

I'd like to see some locked threads created and maintained by theymos regarding for a couple of different topics. My best example at the moment is for merit.

The [ANN] thread was great for the announcement and rollout as well as for community involvement. What would have been beneficial and still could be is a maintained thread that spells out changes or facts maintained by theymos. This threads sole purpose would be to serve as a collection of facts and changes for all members to see and access easily.

Examples -  The jr. member restriction - the updated number of merit sources - The statement about not tagging suspected merit abusers.

As it is now members either need to search for and find the statements being made to answer questions or refresh their memory. This would also be beneficial as the chance of a quote being edited is removed.


In addition to this Rules posted on all boards by theymos, this would make sense coming from the top.

This would be a revised version of the rules. Considering a large portion of the unofficial rules are obtained from theymos quotes; why not go right to the source. The below quote was my inspiration for this ( I seem to recall it originally being saying "I am the Law"... maybe my mind filled that in on it's own.

If theymos is against of showing which accounts are banned, then maybe he make an exception for members that have 300 good reports at least? This will reduce an extra work for active reporters and moderators.

Is there any point in seeing who is banned? If someone has a problem with user "A" and he has reported user "A", just bookmarking his account URL or checking it from your PMs should be enough for you. Unless you have reported tens of users and you want to be updated on all of them! x)

But a system like that would either require a lot of manual work from the site's team in order to publish the account names (most of which would probably be bots) or it'd require resources to be spent on an automated system. In either case, I find it unnecessary.

Maybe read the post you actually quoted as to why it's a good idea. What is the point of both users and staff wasting time on reports for users that have already been permabanned? There's enough work to be done here already without having to deal with stuff that has already been dealt with. It takes a colossal amount of time and effort for people to report copy and pasters and provide all the evidence and then it wastes staff time having to go though them all needlessly. If the user was shown as permabanned then they can just ignore it. Once a user is banned here their account is done for so I don't think it's a big deal showing that. Many other forums show even temp banned users. It would be helpful in other ways too. You could be doing business with someone and they could just disappear without warning. If they've been banned then at least you'll know why they've mysteriously gone AWOL or are not responding to your messages.


It wouldn't. Staff can already see who has been banned as they have a mark on their profile so it will take little effort to make that publicly known.


Possibly, but I suppose it depends on what theymos' reasons are for not displaying that info.

Can be useful, like if a bounty manager is banned temporarily (it seems happens often) it could save time for hundreds of people.

I think it can related to the philosophy of Bitcoin, maybe theymos doesn't want that forum of the free decentralized currency looks like a tightly regulated organization.

And not only this. Such information, if it`s public, performs two functions. First, it reports those users who have become anti-examples, in order to demonstrate what happens to those who break the rules. It`s enough to punish a couple of participants in order to intimidate everyone else (this method has been effective since the Middle Ages). Members of the forum see what the consequences of destructive, spam-shit-posting behavior are fraught with, they don`t want to be in the place of the ones who were banned. Therefore, they make causal conclusions: in order not to be banned, I need to improve the quality of my posts, I cannot spam and write nonsense.

Secondly, the openness of such information would help to understand the main reasons for the ban. As it shows a huge number of topics created in the Meta board devoted to the questions "Why was my account banned?", "What did I do wrong?" and the like, it can be concluded that most of the participants aren`t aware of the prerequisites for the ban (they are not familiar with the forum regulations, so they cannot come to the conclusion which of these rules they violated). A public list of banned users would lift the veil on the reasons for removing participants from their activities on the forum.

This is bitcointalk and as such I think Bitcoin related discussion is the primary objective of this forum and it's rightly at the top, Meta is not difficult to navigate to, as all the boards are arranged conveniently for all members to access them


Theymos has once hinted at a possible Welcome message (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5036308.msg46088206#msg46088206) for new members, but I don't think it has been implemented as yet.
Newbie Read before posting (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1689727.0) is also a very good guide for newbies and a sticky thread on the beginners' section. All members should endeavour to read sticky threads on all the various boards before posting there.

Administration should hire staff for recovering accounts. It's not good when people don't receive any response for months.

I agree that we need more staff/admins to help out with things like account recoveries, but theymos did say a while back that he's working on an automatic recovery tool that should be ready by the end of the year. Not sure if that's still on track but hopefully it'll be ready at some point. With that being said, I do think we'll still probably need some admins to help out with them and with other things, especially for those who can't sign a message or can sign one but from an altcoin addy.

Theymos did put my suggestion I made in this thread to create more admins or demi admins in the "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation" category so hopefully that will happen at some point and sooner rather than later.

So, what was done since the last big update - new Merit requirements? Nothing! Any of these things which were marked by theymos as "ok" weren't implemented. Is it really so difficult to add simple things which we really need, like new mods, no dedicated staff for account recovery or automated software for recovery, no welcome message for new members, no signature campaign guidelines, no more specific altcoin boards (like beginners an help or technical support). Since August, when theymos posted on this thread, only one meaningful thing was implemented here. I don't want to push theymos, but current situation in forum is far from being perfect and we need some changes.

Just a heads up there is 1 big item being delivered.


This had previously been mentioned that it would happen by the end of the year but, now we have confirmation closer to implementation. It's not huge for everyone, but this should help stifle the hacking of accounts to some extent, and through that a percentage of account sales in general.

There are still a ton of items to go, but this is progress. One upside to the recent downturn is that ideally things will slow down here a bit and maybe then we can try and get ahead of some of the other issues.

Add a new rank above Legendary, eg "Deity".   :)

"Deities" could receive some special features. Don't know what exactly but they should get something for sure.

In my opinion this will motivate Legendaries to be more contributing to the forum.

lol good one! But I don't think it'll be good for the forums.
I think Legendary members are already contributing enough. It's the people who spam the forums, often without even knowing English, who we need to fix.

Right now Legendary members are meriting each other because they know each other in this forum for years, so no matter how many ranks are added on top of the Legendary one will be reached without any extra effort or quality increase. It's more important to motivate and reward the average-to-good members who are hardly receiving any Merit at this point (like me?...  ::))

Hacked accounts are still one of the primary concern of this forum. I cannot suggest something im just hoping that someone can have a suggestion with regards to getting hacked accounts back to the real owners.

Is there a need to do so? If you can prove to me that the current management is incompetent then i might also vote for that but if you don't then there is no point in discussing this matter

Hmm I don't think if this is necessary for now the main concern as of now is to eliminate new accounts who were doing the scam act. Tho we were saying a little bit of positive result because of the 1 merit req to become a jr. Member

Another thing needed by the forums is a 2FA on the login.
If it's set to "remember me" then it shouldn't ask for the 2FA, but for every new device this is an important security measure to have as a choice.

If there's no or little intention to show if a user has been banned (e.g. changing the rank to 'Banned' or 'Tempban' or something similar), it would be also helpful to just deactivate the 'Report to moderator' button for banned users.
This would not affect the everyday forum member, because it's only a minor part of the members who use that button, the majority won't even look at that button or even notice the existence of it...
But for those who report, it would be really useful.
Also, (it has also been suggested too) if this button would be deactivated for posts that has already been reported, it could also boost the efficiency of reporting.
So if someone only see that there's no Report to moderator button, it won't tell him/her directly that the user has been banned because it could be the post itself too, that has been reported...
This way ban could stay hidden but reporting also could win with it...

Add the option to quote posts from the closed topics, e.g. "Recovering hacked/lost accounts" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089777.0).

---

I've found also an old but interesting suggestion:

IIRC it used to work that way but was removed for performance reasons.

Turn off 'Delete' and 'Edit' buttons in the thread "Stake your Bitcoin address here" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996318).

I don't think is necessary the buttons to be removed, they can be locked for editing or deleting after a certain period of time, like a week or so.

An easy fix would be to move the thread to Auctions, if they allow it there.

There is not much point in this suggestion as most of the posts there are quoted and verified for reference and even the original poster tries to delete the post it would have already been quoted in the next post after it by someone else.

In the topic "Stake your Bitcoin address here" any user can quote the message with Bitcoin address now, therefore excess security does not hurt.

PS. I think you should visit this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5071290

Yes. But I think there are more bigger problem here than this one and it already has some security to keep it protected.


Yes, I already saw it before but thought let them decide. Any one here could come after long time and take interest in Bitcoin again. I don't have to proof every time I login after a long time as I have done it many times before.

Show in Outbox which of private messages were read by recipients.

No please. This will be used as a tool to pester people. Removes privacy and unnecessary. Just check when they last logged in.

Add a warning to the Private Message window that users should be very cautious about links and codes from unknown senders.

Inspired by this topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5112400.msg49839996#msg49839996).

Add information to the users' profiles how much merit had been received and sent.

Example

https://i.imgur.com/l9YGF7v.png

This amendment will facilitate the identification of merit sources and thus increase Merit begging.
Even if there is a benefit, you can use some alternatives like BitcoinTalk Public Information Project (BPIP) (https://bpip.org/).

Beggars, generally, are receiving the red trust. Therefore I see no problem in publishing information about merit sources.


In my opinion, such statistics should display directly on the forum, because it's more convenient than searching for it on another site.

---

In addition, if I see that the member has received 100 merit and sent 0, then I would rather will give merit to someone else. I suppose many users will do the same.

I won't display it like that because it is taking up more space in the profile, but would make the merit text clickable instead.
If someone is interested, he/she will click on the merit link and will get to the user's merit profile.

I like your suggestion very much and maybe we can do it like that: right now there is a possibility to display the post count in addition to Merit and Activity. That's quite useful to see how many posts the person made so far. It's only an additional feature and those who don't want it because they like it clearer can switch it off.

Merit begging should not be a problem, most of the beggars are well aware that it won't be succesful.

Enable post count can be found here and adding another checkbox if you want to display earned Merit should be no problem:

https://i.imgur.com/rM3Pt78.jpg

---

And if you like it how it is now it's always possible to switch it off:

https://i.imgur.com/tNyrciN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GsLcZS5.jpg

I dislike sending Merit to Accounts which never send some, too  ;)

Rank 'Deity'

Requirements: 3000 Merit, 2000 Activity

Features:
- can edit a Custom Title;
- can use animated avatars;
- can use images in the signatures.

I'm with you right up until here.  Animated avatars should be taken out to the woodshed and shot--regular avatars are bad enough, which is why I have them blocked, and their existence should end right there.  No frills, no more space, no animation....ever.

I kind of like the "deity" rank, but have we heard anything from Theymos lately about whether he's considering adding any more ranks?  I always got the feeling (or maybe he wrote it somewhere) that Legendary is as far as anyone is every going to go.  At one point I thought that that would lead to an overabundance of Legendaries, but since the merit system came into existence and it's much harder to rank up, I don't think that's going to be the case. 

My view has kind of changed since January of last year, and perhaps Legendary is as high a rank as needs to exist.  Don't know.  Something higher than that would be nice, however--and I'm not even talking about for myself.  There are some members here who've been around for many years, and it'd be cool to make a distinction between them and some of the "newer" Legendaries.

Currently, anybody who fits the requirements has rank "Administrator". I don't think theymos is going to give only himself a new rank.

This is to keep the relative proportions between getting ranks and that the Legendaries would have the hard but ambitious goal.

---

---

I believe, the most experienced members which have 2000 Activity and 3000 Merit will not use annoying animations.
For example, some users didn't even guess that Vod (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=30747) has an animated avatar.

---

---

Theymos said about the new rank: "No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified." (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4893744.msg44432901#msg44432901)
But I think that the advanced users, who continue to help making the forum a better place in years, definitely should receive some bonuses.

I'm starting to think we should be able to declare ourselves as "rank outsiders". :)

It would be really good to have 'inbuilt' alerts on forum for quoted comments.

Sorry if it's been already suggested.

See: [RELEASED] @mention notification bot - now with Telegram (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5023605.0)

I knew someone was going to comment this, that's why I quoted 'inbuilt' word.

I don't understand what so hard about implementing it? Users won't have to find these tools and it will help in keeping track of discussions.

There's one very busy Admin with a long Todo list who gets many requests. Anything that can be created by users provides extra functionality without taking Admin's time.

More importantly don't forget every single feature added is a potential back door security risk for the forum. Making sure it is not also takes time. I would be happier with a stale featureless SECURE forum than an unsecure one with lots of bells and whistles.

This is  a 'good old' stlye forum, and it's still working fine for the purpose...
People will choose another forum if that another forum would have the features of this forum plus something additional that's missing here now.
But people are still here and using this forum, so we should not hurry implementing new untested features...
Anyway the new forum software (a really brand new) is under testing now, so the new feature requests should go there directly, it has better chance to get it implemented in the new forum software...

It is the second forum for bitcoin, only after this one:
http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/boards/index.php
Welcome to the new Bitcoin forum! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5.0) (by our beloved @satoshi)
The forum plays important roles to help bitcoin's spread over the world over years.
It is the elder usually don't like new style forum, and funny things inside, which they consider as annoying stuffs.
However, everything has to adapt to new trend, new style, I think.
If the forum, or anything else lack of ability to adapt changes, trends, it will be wipened out, or degraded gradually over time.
It happen in all areas, not only in crypto, and crypto forum.
However, bitcointalk is the biggest crypto forum for ages, and for now, and to be honest I feel very unrealistic to say the the forum will be suprassed by other later-born forums.

Suggestion: Forbid to delete comments of staff in self-moderated topics.

Moderators messages are often contain important information and their removal can have negative effects.

For instance, member 'korner' deleted posts of two Russian moderators in his self-moderated topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2613277.msg50629148#msg50629148

I will modify two of my previous suggestions.

1. Private message


Update: Add checkbox "Notify the sender that you have read the message." The recipient can click it at will.

I suppose, Bitcointalk employees could use this option as well because they're receiving a lot of messages from different members every day.
And the recipient's last login date, in many cases, don't say anything to the sender whether the message has been read or not.

---

2. Banned accounts


Update: Show the 'Banned' marks to the members which have more than 1000 good reports.

I believe that reporters with such statistic are not so many but with this implementation their effectiveness will significantly raise.

The editing time of comment must be displaying not after ten minutes (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5152626.msg51412597#msg51412597) but immediately when the post has been changed, even after one second.

It will remove the opportunity for scammers to frame other members with a fake plagiarism (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5055498.msg47174180#msg47174180).

@ Veleor
I wanted to create a thread in Meta a few weeks ago discussing a scenario similar to what you mentioned in your post above.
I backed out and decided not to as it could be a bit controversial and would look like free advice on how to frame someone. I will probably just PM theymos and discuss it over PM.

A question before I do that, can admins see the original post before it was edited?

They can see older versions, but as far as I know the first 10 minutes don't count as edited (and changes aren't saved).

I keep a copy of most new posts before any edits. If it's ever needed, just ask.

5 minutes, but perhaps this is outdated information.

OK so based on Veleor's quote of theymos, if a post gets edited in the first five minutes of it being posted that change never gets saved in any log by the forum and the admins aren't aware that anything was edited. Is that correct?

The main difficulty in finding useful forum comments, in my opinion, lies in the initial uneven sMerit allocation between members and that the whole work of the Merit distribution falls to a few dozen sources at most.

Along with Merit, it would probably make sense to introduce additional assessment points (voices) for all forum users, starting with Jr. Members.

These voices could be sent for the comments you like, but they must not affect the number of Merit.

On the base of such system it would be possible to organize a regularly updated list of popular comments, with the help of which it will be more convenient for Merit sources to detect good messages on the forum.

The picture below shows how the post with received Merit and votes might look like.


https://i.imgur.com/xrFQb4P.png

How would we prevent spam, putting anything down to majority vote the system can be easily abused, and would need extra moderation.
Increasing merit sources and smerits available to them would also be a good idea.
I suggest we also start considering lower ranked members as sources. This would help quell the idea of segregation, and would also give reliable members a chance to gain trust early on.

To avoid abuse, votes may have a limited amount (10 for example) which will be replenished every 24 hours.
The number of received votes is the same for all ranks from Jr. Members. Unused votes cannot be accumulated.

Since this post has started to decay, I want to bump this thread and bring Theymos's Attention to @Veleor's suggestion. I recently ran out of sMerits and i liked this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5191696.msg52716329#msg52716329 ,  I was about to create a post just to write that I agree with them but I didn't cuz that would have been just a shitpost and would have ruined the reading experience for other users. Instead, I thought of an upvoting/liking For "non-merit Sources". But after reading the last few posts of @Veleor They had the same idea as mine. Is there any chance of it getting implemented?

I've read a topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210375.msg53369888#msg53369888) that hundreds Bitcointalk users can participate in the paid signature campaigns, but at the same time they don't have any earned merit, except airdropped (10, 100, 250, 500, 1000).

When users receiving money for posting, then I believe their comments should have at least some value for other forum members.

So I have a suggestion: if a forum member didn't get any merit in the last, for instance, 90 or 120 days, then such user will not be able to change the signature.

It should be noted that users without new merit still might have been able to continue wear their old signatures.

+1. Although many signature campaigns do have this requirement I feel like this should be something set as default. Not All signature Campaign managers have this rule and some new ones don't give a F@@k about spam.

I would suggest pinning this thread like some other useful posts.
It has everything that needs a discussion of has been already discussed thousand of time on the forum.

Nice work by hilariousandco

Senseless, to me, it's like punishing people because of a few bad apples.
What about someone who hasn't used the forum for months?
What about business owners (who usually only post updates) but never receive a merit point?
What about the valuable posters who receive rarely merit (Many cases could be found especially in local boards if there is not Smerit source) but their comments worth a lot more than the majority?
What about the users who don't care to participate in a campaign but would like to promote something in their signature space?

These members will continue to be able to wear old signatures, but they can't put another signature if they haven't got any merit in the last 3-4 months.



If forum members willing to promote something in the signatures, but at the same time they can't get any merit points, then I think such users might have been able to make a some fee to the forum, once every few months, in order to edit their signatures.

As for users who write good posts but don't get merit, so there's a special topic for such cases: "Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093271.msg49051692#msg49051692).

The situation isn't dreadfully bad to require a change, its comparatively fine. There are many people out there that make normal, not so merit worthy posts, which are still moderate posts, and not get merit for it. It could be a constructive post, but it may not be "merit-worthy", as a lot of people initially go like : "Does this post deserve merit? Probably not, maybe I will merit someone with a better post". One instance, there are more, obviously.

The change ain't required for now, if situation tends to become worse, then maybe not so bad of a idea.

What about if their old signature is outdated, redirect to a hacked domain, outdated discount code, dead blog, etc So many examples.
LOL, if we listen to you, in some time you will suggest paying a monthly fee just to open our mouth
"Special topics": the type of topics we call, introduction to beggars and prostitutes. Not all members here are Smerit prostitutes

1. Make a restriction that only users of the Member/Copper Member ranks can create self-moderated topics, because trolls abusing this option on the forum.
2. Give a temporary or permanent ban for vandalism to users which continuously creating self-mod topics and then deleting all replies there.

• Revoke self-moderating privileges from korner and other hypertrolls (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5274729.msg55164709#msg55164709)
  
• Self Moderated thread All Posts Deleted (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5275476.msg55185639#msg55185639)
  
• Troll abuses self-moderated topics in Russian local (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5155000.msg51490929#msg51490929)

Ave! Thanks to this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5283667.msg55430085#msg55430085), now I know where I can store my suggestions for the forum ::)

---

If you see fit... you could add some of the suggestions for improvement below to the general list.

• Voting interface and Spoiler Tag (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5127436.msg50431471#msg50431471)
• Your statistics and thread efficiency summary (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280906.msg55342186#msg55342186)
• Easier browsing of recently started topics (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280318.msg55325379#msg55325379)
• Additions to Restrictions for Newbies (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5279675.msg55304412#msg55304412)
• Proposal to disable signatures in the Wall Observer / RU (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5279219.msg55290761#msg55290761)