Bitcoin Forum

Hmm, I love to read and trying figuring out new things. JayJuanGee never depressed me with his wall of text on Wall observer of BTC/USD. Today I noticed a few interesting things about the Bitcointalk forum. Most of you guys maybe know about this. But I just discovered those things today.

Why are the bots on The Most Time Online?
I noticed my time logged in is about 3 days and 8 hours so far. I visited the stats section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats) today to see if these stats also belong there. If so, let's who is the top guy. I saw 10 most-time online accounts and I realized all of them are bots. They never posted on the Bitcointalk forum. The Interesting fact, 9 of them were registered in August 2018 (from august 14 to august 17) and mitmivan was registered on July 24, 2018. Their Online time is huge, Over 22529 days for the 10th one. Which means almost 62 Years  ;D. Oh man, Theymos joking with us. I am not sure why those dummy accounts belong there. If we can see some real accounts, that would be more interesting.

No Important Announcement for the last four years.
I was trying to figure out what is the difference between this image https://bitcointalk.org/Themes/custom1/images/on.gif and this image https://bitcointalk.org/Themes/custom1/images/off.gif
I noticed the lighter Darker one has new posts and the other one doesn't. I saw the last topic created on Important Announcements (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=87.0) about four years ago. Only VIPs, global moderators, and administrators can post there, and they didn't create a single thread in the last four years. The board icon remained the same for the last four years. I guess there is really nothing to announce, right? Mods and Admins, Think about it if really you don't want to share anything. Otherwise, the Museum authority will contact you soon to archive it  ;D.

The forum statistics were disabled a long time ago, hence the reason page views, and posts sort of stops around 2017. I think its safe to say that looking at those time online stats, it's very broken. Some stats appear to be still tracking, but others aren't. Think it goes without saying, take those statistics with a pinch of salt.

I do believe they were disabled due to a ongoing DDOS attack at the time, and the resources required outweighed the benefits. At least, that's what I recall from memory.

There are a few threads on the matter of those accounts with a massive logged-in time, such as these:

 Statistics Center. What type of Bitcoin ID it is?  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237469.msg54145824#msg54145824)
 The curious case of forum's most online users (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214664.msg53512608#msg53512608)
Total time logged in" bug and accounts with long time logged in (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5185816.msg52494309#msg52494309)
The forum stats are wrong! @theymos check it out,please.  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5179823.0)
 Most time online list, is it a bug? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210234)

I made an attempt (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210234.msg53377285#msg53377285) at trying to unveil how SMF counts online time, but there may be more tricks that boost the values, likely using multiple devices/sessions.

Going briefly over the above listed threads, the ruling hypothesis was that those accounts are bot accounts that do not need to post, but rather likely scrape the available data on the forum, possibly from multiple devices/sessions. What we don’t know is who is behind those accounts nor exactly why they are (hypothetically) scraping non-stop.

If this is the case, I know who are those. I would say those accounts are alts of LoyceV, DdmrDdmr, tryNinja, Coin1, and suchmoon.  ;D (kidding). I am not sure if anyone else scraping data from the forum.  It's odd because all of those accounts registered in the same week except mitmivan. So, I guess it's theymos behind it. ;D

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Everyone missing 2nd part.  :'(

I think you answered the question yourself - because given the very limited number of members who have the ability to post in that board, no one thought there was anything important to post there in less than 4 years since the last post. We can look at this fact from a positive side, because if something new appeared on that board, it would probably be some very bad news.

I'm not sure if it's just handled differently these days. For example, theymos used to post about vulnerabilities about Electrum, and other Bitcoin software a few years ago. However, I do believe he now uses the "news" header for these sort of announcements, and links to a discussion thread about it, rather than posting it themselves.

So, I don't think it's a lack of important announcements, but rather being handled a bit differently through the news header, as there's definitely been important announcements conveyed through that feature in more recent times.

But of course, that figure is something you get in cartoons because this forum is barely a decade old. How tech guys arrive at stats like that beats me hollow. Perhaps there's a time machine tapped to the forum and we're already in the future with that 😳

I'm not sure that's the sort of development OP is talking about. Even forum members hardly know when theymos releases such announcements because there are only placed on headers which most people will miss reading. I guess OP is referring to such announcement as we had in 2018 that shook the entire forum with the introduction of the merit system. To that, I say none has been made so far. Except OP is prompting theymos to embark on something drastic once again.

I guess you didn't get it. Welsh got it right. I was talking about the important Announcement sub board.

Total logged in time doesn't really matters and it doesn't give any advantage so newbie with 1 time will be treated same as an account with 62 years of total logged in time. And about the important announcement section which I didn't really browsed for very long time because any real important will flood the meta section immediately so even the big changes are announced through meta only in the recent years, probably theymos forgot the existence of those sections. :D

Not me. I don't know how they fake the "time logged in". LoyceBot (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=949024) has been scraping the forum continuously for years, and currently has:
I don't get it :P

Yeah, those kind of announcements are made in the Meta section, since they're forum related. The important announcement section that OP refereed is located in the Bitcoin Discussion section, which generally means its more Bitcoin related stuff to go in there, rather than forum announcements. According to the guidelines (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=96540.0) theymos posted, albeit potentially outdated, that would echo that sentiment.

I can't really answer why that section isn't used much any more though. I guess over time users here have come accustomed to each section more, and announce these types of stuff like compromises etc in the relative section. Probably, also due to the forum now being a bit more organised than it originally was. For example, Electrum vulnerabilities tend to get posted in the Electrum section.

I guess it would be useful for someone to quote the text, with sources in the important announcements section, to help condense the information a bit more.

Yeah, I'm not even sure why that statistic exists--not even that it's no longer relevant or interesting, but that it was probably never interesting or relevant. 

There are a lot of features of bitcointalk that seem like relics of some era far in the past, e.g., this part of members' profiles:

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

Meanwhile, I've seen some very good suggestions that would probably be easy to implement go completely ignored.  It's baffling to me exactly what's going on behind the scenes.  On the bright side, I'm generally happy with websites that don't keep changing all the time (like eBay).

I just imagine how this could possibly be. A forum that is barely one and a half decade since its existence and an account will have more than 6 decades total logged in time. Does this means they are some activities that can be done here without the regulation of the forum board been taken on those actions? Is the forum prone to changes from external body that can’t be stopped? Am just curious to know how an account can possibly bridge the forum system already programmed to work so.

I think this new way of posting important announcements is better and cleaner.
Making new posts for important ann stuff would have to be in closed topics, or it would be followed with bunch of useless comments.
One change I would make is adding some different color to announcements or flashing popup if something is really important, but that is probably not easy to implement in forum.

Maybe it is active only for few seconds to minutes when it scraps everything, and then it gets back to sleeping hibernation.
Regular members could stay logged in for hours, and some even for days.

That is true, unlike what Aliexpress is doing.
They keep changing stuff in background, so all the scripts people made to improve this website, usually stop working soon after they are released or updated :D
I don't want Bitcointalk forum to be like Aliexpress  :P

Maybe, colour. Not sure about the idea of making it flashing though, I imagine that'll have a lot of backlash. Plus, there's what you consider critical enough to have it basically distract users. It would probably have to be pretty critical, and at that point users probably already know of it. Although, I get most of my news from Bitcointalk, so I suppose others would be the same. I literally don't ever visit any Bitcoin news sites, and only occasionally check real news.

If people want to know the vulnerability of certain programs, they should probably consider signing up to the mailing list.

I forgot I don't login for most of my scraping, but still, LoyceBot now has exactly the same "time logged in" as it had when I posted here 3 days ago. I assume there's a certain threshold for "time" to be counted, and my next assumption is that can be abused somehow. Or there's time travel involved.