Bitcoin Forum

Some kind of spell check like tool with a score..
If your writing doesn’t score a 70% or whatever, it won’t let you post..

Could also help users LEARN English better/faster by forcing them to put effort into correcting their writing.
Have it with the change suggestions and such so it helps them fix it..

Would put a good dent in rapid posting shitposters too.. Almost even like a bot filter..

Imagine if all the spam on this forum suddenly had to meet a grammar score standard, lmao..
It could possibly be revolutionary in posting quality improvement..
What percentage of shitposts on this forum would even come close to like a 30% grammar score?
It could wipe out so much utter trash..

Many shitposts I see, I can hardly even believe are created by humans at all..
Even low end chat bots are much better..

It is good to make proposals like this and I have made some myself but I guess we are aware that theymos is not very given to changing things on the forum.

Going to the point, I don't see many posts with poor English grammar. There are some, yes, but I don't see a big problem. I don't know if it is because we usually visit different sections of the forum because I don't see you very much.

Also, I would say that the problem is going improve naturally because nowadays online translators work quite decently and will continue to improve in the future, so I think that users who write in English and are not native speakers will use them more and more. Even professional translators use automatic translators and what they do is to revise the text afterwards, making small changes (unless they are translating poetry for example).

Interesting idea, and I can't say I've every seen it suggested before (though I think there have been similar proposals).

Problem:  Theymos doesn't seem to be inclined to make any sort of changes like this.  He's very much a freedom of expression type of person, and I'm assuming part of that means giving a lot of latitude when it comes to members not being great writers.  Even hitting a 70% score on either grammar/spelling or both would just lead to a lot of complaints and frustration--and though it might cut down on bots and spammers, the resulting outcry of displeasure would probably outweigh the benefits.

Another problem: There are a lot of members who have a lot of trouble with English, yet they're very valuable to the community.  I wouldn't want to see their contributions erased simply because of a language barrier.  I don't think your proposal would help them, either, not if all they got was a message saying their post didn't hit the arbitrary threshold set by the forum.

Is Jet Cash still around?  He used to be really into helping members with their English, and a couple of years ago he had a website devoted to that and invited everyone who was interested....and IIRC, he didn't get many takers.

I don't think it's good idea to make such limitation because theymos already stated it's not need to be perfect English, I think 70% score is considered well written since they need to look at the grammar, not misspelled or using an incorrect words. I'd say it's better if they check the misspelled and try to use more appropriate words, because some people blatantly using google translate from their local language to English and that's make the sentence is odds.

I'm example of not a perfect English and I try my best to express my own opinion, I think even my grammar is bad, you can still understand what I'm trying to say it's? At least it doesn't make you confuse.

Just let you know, everyday when I have free time I always try to learn English to write more correctly, but I'm not sure where's the problem since I still couldn't write like a native, perhaps it take times.


However this kind idea is similar like newbie jail where theymos disagree about it and would damage the forum nature.

That won't be necessary in my opinion. I do not see any reason this forum needs that. For shit posts, we do often report to moderators. If a post lacks good written English, it would be more of a shit post. To be candid, I do not see this as an issue on this forum.

To say the least, this is synonymous to the classical IQ April fool stunt thrown to users by Theymos months ago and I feel this would be met with the same conclusion, as the discussion on its validity preceeded. It might take a different line but ends in rating to enable posting and that doesn't seat well with me, given the fact that some users are at advantage than others. Those who have finished college, went to better schools, not from poor countries and have English as there official language.
It entertains bias and you don't start a rating on all with such and we've also got local board posting to consider too!

As much as I see reasons how this could restrict users without proper use of English grammar from posting too rapidly, the same can't be said for those that speak proper English as that doesn't guarantee that they won't spam!
I guess the best approach to this would always be report to moderator and have them decide if its worth dumping in the trash or not.

I don’t really think it would be implemented not an I asking for it to be..
Just an idea I thought would be interesting to discuss..

Maybe grammar isn’t quite the correct word to describe what I see problems with..
Language syntax would be more correct..

Maybe right NOW it’s not the peak of this problem.. Think back to like the yobit signature campaign days..

This campaign? Yobit.net signature campaign (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5188047.0)

Well if the shitposter is a signature participant, then the campaign manager itself is the one who responsible to count and not count the post.

If its only for those who participated a campaign, yes, although the manager can decide for that since some requiring local posts.

But for a simply asking for help or question or maybe some kind of discussion? Meeh, imagine a user from a non-english country asking some urgent help but cannot proceed because of this. Although there are local boards but not all of these boards have many active members that can answer eventuall or knew say its a technical related question.

I'd say better to report the post instead having this kind of feature.

This is starting to appear like a paramilitary forum, which will be difficult for other members who aren't proficient in English and don't have a local board to communicate fluently. Also, we have several types of English, such as British America, Australia, and the US, how do you think the forum will manage this, or will the site reject my post because my official language is British? This is a waste of time that will never happen, and you are increasing the load on the forum and the speed by adding this feature.
The Mods are here for a reason, if you see a shit post, report it and any of them will look into it when they check.

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Disclaimer: I picked the post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5404038.msg60440165#msg60440165), randomly and used character shuffler.

What id the the “grammarly ” like score for this post? 😉
This is not an English learning forum but bitcoin forum but adding some cool feature to help correcting grammar will be helpful. Although a Firefox extension works just fine.

You want the staff to be fired? 😂

Yeah it'd definitely make the forum look like it favours only a few ways of writing then too. There are Asian, European and African dialects of English that are easy to understand but grammarly probably hates (because it's not designed for them).


Grammarly does more than English but there's probably going to be a local board missed out with this too (and Boards like Scandinavia having 3-6+ different languages - just an example, not sure how active that board is).

Campaign managers can shove users posts into grammarly too. Realistically, grammarly hates my grammar and I'm a native English speaker so I could imagine they'd have a hard time trying to do it and probably wouldn't get something very constructive/useful.

---

Also grammarly itself would probably charge for this unless there's an open source version.

I'm not a native English speaker, I just try my best to write so that whoever reads it understands what I'm trying to convey. The OP's idea might be a good one to have a good standard of language on the forum, but it would certainly cost a forum a lot when only 10% of its members are native English speakers. I can't imagine how I should reach the 70% threshold when posting in English. Of course it would be annoying if such a feature was introduced in the forum. I would totally agree if anyone can't post English properly then local board is the best place for them.

Although the OP's idea would be very useful, but I didn't hope to be introduced by the admin. Just report the shitpost if that user can't post well in English.

I don't agree with the idea of preventing members from writing on the forum due to poor English.
We are an international forum with members from all over the world.
It's completely natural that English is not the primary language of communication for a large number of members of this forum.
Clearly, someone speaks English better and someone writes with a lot of grammatical errors.
On the other hand, all members of this forum have equal rights and one of them is that they can freely express their opinion on different topics.
By introducing a new rule that members who do not know good English are not allowed to write in the English part of the forum would actually divide all members of this forum into two categories, suitable and unsuitable, and that is by no means a good idea.
Also, the question is how this rule would be actively enforced and who would have the time and knowledge to review thousands of new posts every day and decide which post is written in good English and which is not.
Personally, I think that this rule should not be introduced and that anyone who wants to, should be given the freedom to write on this forum, even if there are problems with English grammar.
In fact, I don’t think we’ve had any serious issues so far with posts written in bad English.

[GUIDE] Making Quality Thread + Grammar Check (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5154705.msg51480821#msg51480821).

Grammarly is helpful to check and suggest correction your grammar, vocabulary. Shitposters are not too bad and their language are understandable enough. Quality of their posts is very low, unacceptable because they don't put efforts in. It's not about grammar.

Grammarly does offer (https://developer.grammarly.com/) an API that the forum could feed raw text into to evaluate its score.

In addition to concerns about not needing to speak perfect English that others have mentioned, enforcing this type of rule would effectively give Grammarly veto power over what people can post.

There are also certain circumstances in which people write that are generally accepted as being "correct" on the forum, but may be "read" as incorrect by Grammarly. One example of this may be when someone is describing the amount of their bitcoin -- they may say "...all of my bitcoin..." while Grammarly may want the word "bitcoin" to be plural.

On one hand, it would be nice to have more posts/participations which are grammatically correct here on the forum.
However, we should also consider that the policy concerning the language on the forum may also imply social and economical factors for some of its users.

I assume in some countries knowing English is a privilege for those with access to a relatively high education, so in my humble opinion the fact that those users from said countries try to have a relatively understandable english in order to participate out their local sections is a example of willingness to integrate with all of us.

Perhaps, measures that targeted specifically spammers and account farmers would be better?

Remember that the purpose of this group is not to learn English and be pro in it. There are millions of people in this group who do not understand English and they are fine in this group. That is why I appreciate the existence of local boards.

I know how it feels if you are a native speaker of English and see how others murder the language. But if I were an English guy and see people struggling to make simple sentences, I will be happy and helpful to them, because it's not easy to learn a new language.

In as much as communication can flow, English grammar is not the most important thing. Then, anyone can develop personally without being coerced to do so.
I remember when I started here, my English was not good and yet was not so bad. I made a post and I was told to download and use grammaly. I took it upon myself and did so. I used grammaly for majority of my works in this forum. But today I can type, vet and post without grammaly.

Is the grammar important or it's ok if its not Grammarly correct as long as you deliver the message and the readers understand it?

I know this is a good suggestion but I can't imagine how much work for this one especially on creating this kind of tools here on the forum. If you are not confident about your English, you can always google to correct your grammar and I think this can work only if the user are willing to do it first before posting here in the forum.

English is not the main language of many, let's appreciate those who are posting quality messages despite of the language barriers.

I think the biggest issue in this the forum may be not posts with poor grammar or syntax, but posts that are grammatically correct however devoid of any meaning or purpose.

Just a random post from Bitcoin Discussion:


This doesn't have any major grammar or syntax issues, no more than e.g. the OP of this thread. However it's a useless shitpost. It doesn't say anything useful or interesting or anything that hasn't already been said earlier in the 10+ pages of that thread, or many other threads. It was typed (or copied from a translation tool or whatever) by someone who has zero interest in a discussion. Many threads on many boards devolve to this kinds of nonsense after the first 5-10 pages. In fact many of those threads are useless and repetitive to begin with.

Try reporting it and you'll get a solid "Unhandled". Basically the forum has surrendered to this shit.

I'll take a non-grammarly post that has an actual opinion, information, argument, even trolling over this kind of perfunctory indolent tripe.

I don't think language should be a barrier to discuss bitcoin.
What if someone doesn’t want to share their country of origin but also have poor English? In your definition of quality, they will be not allowed to learn/discuss bitcoin because they don't know how to write properly? I have seen a few people with poor English but still having merits. That means people are getting his message, nothing wrong with that.
Also, I don't think theymos will ever put such thing on the site as we know how he thinks about the forum.

It is not definitely but if a member think his English is bad, let's try to learn English together with learning about Bitcoin. First you need to understand what you read; second you should be able to express your opinion well and easily understandable enough with your writing. No restriction but if you write and others don't understand, it is your own barrier.

Nobody restrict others like this. But each member must self-feel about it and must see a need to improve their language (reading & writing).

It can be either motivation for a new member or merit for fun or merit abuse. It's not a big issue but to be a constructive member, you must be in a same language of others at average level at least.

Learning is endlessly. After you are in intermediate level of writing, you can learn more and improve it with topic sentence, topic title, etc.

• Bitcointalk posting etiquette (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5184741.0)
• Topic title style guide (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102944.0)
• Make your topic title, posts more attractive (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5182260.0)

Grammerly is American, so it often contains errors and incorrect spelling for those of us who use the mother tongue. Please do not try to enforce a local language over correct English.

The other issue with spelling and grammar checks is people who post form mobile. I have posted some things form a phone wile on a train. Sometimes they are long well formatted posts. Other times they look like I was drunk posting. And when I go back later I really wonder how I did not catch / fix a bunch of the mistakes before hitting post.

Eliminating that reason however, many times in a technical discussion there is no proper grammar. There would have to be exceptions for posted snips of code. And quotes would have to be ignored. And a way to show that something is math. Log files would have to be ignored and so on.

-Dave

You won't really improve forum post quality by correcting shitposter grammar mistakes, and I wouldn't force anyone to write only ''correct'' English language.
Most web browsers have built-in basic spell checkers so it should be simple for everyone to notice mistakes as they type if they enable this option.
I have a simple solution for this when I notice some member is making low quality posts multiple times, report to moderator and ignore him if he is doing this all the time.

70% grammar if this will going to be mandatory or requirements to be a good use of this forum this contains two types of impact, first it will lead to the forum being more fluent in grammar and increasing the high-quality posters.  But in real life, it's hard to fix your post if you did not know the exact word you used or let's say exact grammar. Even if you are using Grammarly it means that there's still a chance that you made a mistake and posted with wrong grammar because we all know that nobody is perfect.

Not sure I would agree, I don't find the grammar of most users a stumbling block, even when they're spamming, and something like this seems like it would hurt the legitimate users, rather than those that are trying to spam. Plus, I bet Grammarly would disagree with how I phrase, and setup sentences. I'm not the greatest English writer myself, and I'm sure if any of you have met a Welsh person or even a Scottish person, we don't exactly speak the best of English either.

I don't know, most of the spam I deal with isn't because of grammar at all. I assume when you say grammar you mean sort of hard to understand sentences, rather than putting apostrophes, commas, and periods in the right place. If it's the latter, I'd probably disagree entirely.

Ultimately, we're a multinational forum, and therefore varying degrees of English. As long as it's somewhat understandable, I personally don't have a problem at all.

IMHO, this is the forum which is actually meant for interacting with others so grammar doesn't play a big role, a ship post can be created with grammatically correct and no error in spellings so I won't recognize a post without proper grammar as a good post, as we need is we can understand the context of the post and discuss further so that is what actually it should be.

The root of the problem is that any changes in the current version of the forum will entail the addition of edits in the new software.

That's why we don't see any innovations.

Also, whenever you add software to a existing code set, which you hadn't coded, therefore scalability might have not been considered at the time of coding it, things can get a little tricky. Since, even basic implementations end up breaking unexpected things.

Although, we've definitely seen quite a lot of newly added features over the years, and they're usually carefully thought out, and well implemented. I'd prefer that, over a slap job of just putting any, and all ideas that come to mind into the software.

Its indeed a good idea but like everyone else have said here, this is not needed for several reasons, and one of those is that this kind of feature will create a big divide on the forum, those who are not really good with English will see this feature as a discrimination against them rather than a way of learning.
And also do not forget that we have the local boards, where users post in their local languages, will the algorithm be able to detect when a user is posting in their local board so as to automatically turn off the grammar enforcer so as to allow the user post without hindrances?
This and many more reasons are the reason why I also think this is not needed.

No.

No

I don't think the approach should be to force people to do something the way I or we like it. I put a lot of effort into my posting. I am concerned about the grammar and spell-check everything. But if the person next to me doesn't want to do that or even wants to sound like an illiterate idiot, that's their call. 

It would stop the average shitposter, but then again, the admins can stop them as well and not give them 100 attempts to better themselves. However, the forum doesn't want to be that restrictive. 

It might also prevent legit users who are terrible in English from posting and I wouldn't want that. I don't think we should measure someone's knowledge and interest in Bitcoin with how well they can write in English.

It is a good suggestion but the problem is that you can't enforce this on this forum because this is not an academic forum. There are people who just come to post their services or projects and we can't just ask them to first pass an English test. They already have to buy a copper membership to eliminate the limitation of newbies and now we cannot just put another hurdle in their way.



Doesn't unhandled means that mods have not seen it yet and it will be handled shortly. But yeah i have these 5 unhandled for a long time now  ???

https://i.imgur.com/MnnN3kp.png

It does at the moment when you make the report. As soon as you report a post to the mods, it's status is unhandled. But if the post remains as unhandled for days, weeks, and several months, the admins have seen it but don't agree with your report to delete the post. Consider your long standing unhandled reports as being partially bad. If they were good, the mods would have acted on them.

So if the mods have seen the report and don't agree with me, why not make them classified as bad reports (I have 2 bad reports as well).

The above explanation will now make a confusion between a bad report and a unhandled report  ???

The explanation why some reports remain unhandled can be found on the following link :


This means that some of the unhandled reports can actually be considered as something that does not exist in official statistics, and could be classified as soft-bad. I suggest that you don't worry too much about these questions, because realistically you can't change anything.

your advice is very good. But for me if this forum is complicated with things like good and correct grammar. so I think this forum is not suitable if you have to use rules that require members to always use good and correct grammar. because considering the members in this forum from various parts of the world or from various countries, with different cultures and languages. they all want to continue to contribute even with all their limitations in good and correct language. at least they have tried to convey. related to grammar which is still far from literary and grammatical rules, then this is not a problem. The important thing is that we all can understand the meaning of what is written and the purpose of writing.

but the rule that recommends using good and correct grammar so that it is easy to understand is acceptable. but do not make it mandatory or mandatory rules. because it will only make this forum a place of rigid and monotonous discussion.

I myself work as a writer in real life. but I in this forum often use free and informal language. because the discussion forum prioritizes the content of the topics discussed and the delivery in order to understand each other between those in discussion. unless this is a formal formal forum such as containing serious discussions related to education and government. then that's understandable. but this forum is a discussion forum that is free of expression with certain limitations. So far I'm comfortable in this forum even though I haven't joined for a long time. because the rules are friendly. but if the rules are complicated like a formal forum then i think i will give up and leave.

It is correct to say that posts with good and correct English grammar attracts attention and always good to read and contribute. Apart from good English grammar, there are other things such as cohesiveness of the post. That is the relationship between the tittle, the introduction, the body and conclusion of the post.

Notwithstanding, this is not an English forum for learning English grammar. In as much as your post can be understood and it carries some weight, you are good to go. Grammar and others are just added advantage and not  prerequisites.

That is really down to whether Theymos will code in a PHP grammar library in the part of the SMF area for submitting posts.

I can already see classification problems that will arise from this. Software commands, types of hardware, companies etc. might degrade the score as a grammar checker can already recognize those as words, and its not like Grammarly has a PHP integration library.

My point exactly. It's a bitcoin discussion forum and the use of English in boards tha arebt pertaining to a particular local boards are just an addition to generally accepted mode of communication in most of our world. Not so many are fluent in English not to talk of writing or being grammatically constructive. You've got to pardon to pardon the non English natives for not being up to standard and might be abusing your spoken language. It's jus the way It is when your a foreign national learning a different language other than  your own.

Most foreign nationals to English language uses the help of transalators just to contribute on the forum and you could agree with me that they are doing their utmost. The best that could be done is to correct or report to moderators should the post be a shitty or spam post.

I was aghast that in the twelve days since this thread started, OP has received zero merits.  I was preparing to fix that...

...but then, I noticed that OP ends most sentences with two periods.  And the topic title has a lopsided stray space inside quotation marks, only on one side.  And... and...

What gives?

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When I become forum administrator,^* I will permaban anyone who fails to conclude a declaratory sentence with a period.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/world/europe/period-full-stop-point-whatever-its-called-millennials-arent-using-it.html

Come to think of it, the “nuke user” button was invented for this reason.

One period, Eddie.  Or do you double your periods in protest against that moronic trend?  Lulz..  Perhaps I should try it myself..

Also to be nuked:  Anyone who writes contractions without apostrophes.  ’Tis the cant of illiterates.

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^* I am undecided on what to do about the global pandemic of noun modifiers.

I don't know man...  Sounds kind of racist to me.  I'm sure there are lots of brilliant people with good ideas and contributions but English is not their first language.  Maybe some people dismiss them or don't want to read what they have to say as a result, but I don't think excluding those users from posting because they speak a different language is a positive development.  As others have stated, you wouldn't have been able to make this thread with your ending sentences like this.. 

I rarely (is this my first time?) pull the race card, but it seems appropriate here.  If we're going to focus on censoring individuals here, I think we should be more focused on censoring lies and attacks, not grammar. 

At some points we fail to understand the purpose of the group we are into. It happens every and not only in this forum. It is obvious that OP has forgotten the main aim of this group and if given the opportunity to be an admin, he will end up implementing what will not help the group.

You would have better suggested that everyone who doesn't have a bitcoin address in his profile shouldn't post here. It means the person doesn't own, use or believe in bitcoin. Something like this is making more sense.