Bitcoin Forum

It's no secret that there are stolen accounts on the forum. It is very difficult to return such accounts as this support system is not very effective. Sometimes users have to wait for months, and sometimes they don’t get their accounts back at all. I noticed that some forums have their own support services in messengers. This greatly speeds up the process of returning stolen accounts and other problems. This can be a very good solution for bitcointalk.
Why not make a user support in a telegram or a discord? Or make a bot in a telegram?

There has nothing to do with support on other platforms. Isn't the forum as well as the respective persons active here?

Also, if supports are given via another platform, who will recover the accounts? Of course, theymos and cyrus only. So, the result is the same while some extra effort is needed (for support in other platforms)
AFAIK, theymos thinks that people will abuse the power if they are given to recover accounts. That's why recovering accounts are limited to theymos himself and cyrus only.

I don't see this as being better than the use of PMs. Perhaps it would be useful if there was a recovery account, and selected admins and staff could access the messages.

I don't think that support channels on telegram or discord can help when forum admins aren't recovering accounts anymore. They just don't have enough time. Support channel may help if account recovery duties would be given to other staff members. But IMO, everything can be done on Bitcointalk only without using external platforms to give support.
And, few months ago theymos posted that he is working on automated account recovery system, but we don't know when it will be released.

Cant help it till admins find out another method to prerly investigate stolen accounts and then return them to proper owners. Its often an tough task to perform without proper manpower at the helm and theymos might be in need of more people for helping him on this.

This is a forum not a service oriented site.

Because of lot of scammers would try to mimic them and a number of noobs with empty cranial cavities will fall for them.

I agree something needs to be done. The problem of hacked accounts would be solved very quickly if there were more people given access to do so, but at the moment the only two people who can restore them are theymos and cyrus and they don't because they just don't have the time. Much of the forum workload should be delegated here between current and new staff and things would start to improve immediately. If the admin's aren't going to be doing certain things like restoring accounts and replying to emails etc then that work really does need to be given to someone who can and ignoring it is only just going to make it worse as more workload stacks up and adds to the already huge backlog.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of time or motivation to do it.  I recall Vod offering to volunteer to his services with respect to account recovery, and Theymos was silent on the matter.  I'm not sure why it's such a low priority for Theymos or why he won't delegate the job to people who could speed up the process.  As it stands, it's up to the individual to keep their account secure and everyone should know that if they get hacked they should expect to never regain access to that account again.  It's unfortunate but true.  I've seen threads in Meta getting bumped from last year because people still haven't recovered their account.

Agreed.  I don't know what's stopping Theymos from delegating those responsibilities.  Surely it can't be a money issue.  As I said above, Vod had volunteered to help restore accounts (hopefully my memory on that is correct, because it was a while ago).

It's ridiculous, really. Senior accounts are valuable, with many senior members having built up activity, trust and now merit over years. And it's all protected by a single password. The login page for my work's rota viewer, where I can literally only look at this week's rota (and not edit anything) has more security than that. For the world's biggest crypto forum, which should be advocating security, to not have 2FA or any form of account recovery is ridiculous.



The same unknown reason that is stopping him appointing more mods or patrollers, I guess.

Theymos already mentioned somewhere that he is not going to trust anyone while it comes to restoring an account and also the investigation of restoring an account takes lot of time than how it looks like to be,that is why he wanted to implement some automation for restoring an account.

It sounds, of course simple, but it takes money, time, trusted people.

Many here ignore the fact that the accounts of this forum have its value "because of the possibility of getting money from the signatures campaigns" so selling it and then claiming to be hacked is a beneficial policy.
The process of restoring these accounts requires careful investigation of their own and then access to the sensitive data to be restored.
Giving the powers to more than one account is a serious security problem, especially since this forum has been hacked more than once.
Prevention is better than cure

I think this is one of the reasons why we need to have a better way of helping to recover hacked accounts.  People are interested in hacking bitcointalk accounts because they see it as worthy to be hacked (because of the earnings in signature campaigns).

Regarding the "seeling [accounts] and claiming to be hacked", we can have a proper procedure in this one.  And if someone is verified to sell an account, we can put negative trusts on that account.



How about bitcointalk to have a "recover team" for this one?  Gone are the days that bitcointalk account is just a simple forum account.  As the value and importance of bitcointalk account increases, we are gaining the attention of the hackers because of the value of the accounts and the poor security concerns and security actions of bitcointalk management.


How about having a pinned post regarding the proper way to prevent being scammed or being hacked?
Users who have been hacked can share their experiences for people to learn from their mistakes and not repeat it.

For a few, its not money more of an identity/community.

Account recovery should be a priority, it literally is turning into a joke.

I am not really encourage to open new support system like telegram or discord. Pretty much sure people's will knock/spam for every single problem like account ban. Problem isn't about communicate with admin. I believe admin has not been missing single post on meta. Although he didn't reply on all thread but he read it. So creating new support system will not much benifited if admins are not encourage to recover account. I don't why are admins avoiding such as important issue. I believe he is thinking about something new and easy way to recover account. And for me admin should give priority especially for recover account since its very difficult to build a new account. If am not wrong, we have discussed multiple time about this issue. But unfortunately we haven't seen any respons from admin. Hope he will do something as soon as possible about account recovery.

Not only Senior account, every account is valuable. Even I am a member but I will not like to part away with my account.


I am just wondering what exact steps Theymos do to restore the accounts? We already have guidelines for restoring the accounts and any Mod can verify that particular account can be restored and Theymos can click the button to unlock that account .(somebody can create the script that can be executed by admin privilege if it is much of manual work.)  Theymos can delegate the investigation. Mod that will investigate will openly write his/her decision and community can verify the working of that Mod. So where the "Trust issues" comes in investigations?

That's fine, buy and sell account on your own risk, If the buyer able to prove that hacked account was  involved in trade then DT will give red trust making it useless for signature campaign but since forum rules did not against the selling so they need to restore account as per guideline and let DT handle the trade issues. By the way , what sensitive data you are referring here ?



Very correctly said.

Even if the forum was hacked earlier but why the end users suffer for this?Why they need to wait for endless months?

I think he was talking more about things like coding and handing off the management of the forum to somebody else, but even if he wasn't is there honestly nobody trustworthy on this forum or planet earth to restore accounts or handle other admin-based duties? What's the worst somebody could do who is tasked with restoring accounts? Steal accounts to sell themselves? That would soon be found out and would it be worth risking your reputation here for a few bucks.


But they're not even being looked into right now so chances of having them restored are next to zero. Do you think that is acceptable? Imagine being locked out of your bank or exchange or facebook account and just having absolutely no response from anyone at all and you're locked out indefinitely. It's also a serious security problem when there's no chance of you having your rightful property returned to you. Giving some more trusted staff the basic tools to just restore accounts isn't that much of leap and there's probably not that much damage they could do.