Bitcoin Forum

There is this one old age thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24203.0), which didn't have much discussion so here is quick refresh. What do y'all think? Is it doable? Does this forum needs it?

I personally liked shoutboxes on forums I have been on, it's good for quick chat.

I see no benefit in having this.

No! There is high chance the chatbox will turn to a nuisance place. First of all, the forum is dealing with scammers and spammers everyday, the moderators are fighting deleting malware from the forum everyday. Since it's a quick place where text can be seen on the homepage, it's not going to be safe for people because:

⤷It will be an easy place for scammers to paste malware, moderators will be on watch to deleting malware links and phishing links.
⤷It's not even good for privacy, if you want to quick chat you can dm that person privately.
⤷This is a global forum, how do you read Arabic and Chinese chats? It's going to be boring when you don't understand things communicated.

The demerits of the shoutbox is bigger than the merits.

There’s a fixed to this concern,

-put a rank restriction on who can post on this chatbox. Most of the scammers use low rank account as throwaway account and add some minimum merit to further increase the screening.

-add a translate feature on the chat box or use google translate on the browser. I think some chat box on other forum have this translate feature.

But overall I agree that this feature is not necessary because we do have PM and thread to discuss with other user.

I am in Altcoinstalks and they have that chat feature there. I enjoy it because a few of us catches fun there and nothing so special happening there. The chat is also used to call the admins attention to any thread demanding his attention. Then, there's nothing more that happens there.

So, I don't think BTT with a larger audience needs it. The chat will be clustered with spam and theymos will need to employ new hands to moderate the chat. It will be more of a burden to the forum.

One of the forum admins even set up a discord server for forum members but a few years down the road, there is barely any activity there with just a few members texting once in a while, yet this is a generation where people tend to prefer instant messaging apps

That tells you one of two things about the audience in this forum, and a shoutbox/chatbox/trollbox? I don't think it's necessary, in my opinion.

What about users that buy accounts to disturb boards with harmful links, how do you threat that. Trust isn't moderated, they have different accounts they used for these attacks until they are banned completely. I think the admin/moderators will have to be on knight watch or have restriction on links, and some characters but what is the use of shoutbox. It's for quick notification for everyone to see what's happening and not police what people discussed or chat with each other.

It's best if it's ignore completely. There are other cool features that has been suggested for long time but never considered, this idea will likely be forgotten soon.

I agree with your point here because traffic here one a daily basis is very high, the moderators and admin would not be as focused on the shoutbox as a result of their activities on the platform and that would be an avenue for spammers to infiltrate it with spamlinks and malwares and newbies would be the victim of such act as they would feel it is genuine not knowing that such link would be malicious to them because they saw it on the chatbox so they would assume it to be real and would eventually click the link

Secondly, there are different nationalities here with different languages. What do you think of it when everybody begins to write in their own languages, which would not be well coordinated but mixed up? Or do they expect a different chatbox to be created for each language? I think doing such would only cause more harm to the members as they would be prone to malware and hacks from spammers and hackers who would drop links in the shoutbox for them to click.

It would be applicable to sites like exchanges where the primary thing to do is trade and the trollbox or shoutbox is a place to vent.

Here the entire place is to vent and not another shoutbox is needed for that. Also I agree with the members who point out that it would be another thing to moderate and keep clean.

I dont think this is a good feature to include at the present state.

The forum and its people like privacy; if there is anything that needs to be discussed in public, it can be raised as a thread, and if there is anything a group of individuals wants to discuss, they can also send PMs to each other at the same time without bringing it to the public.

With the high rate of scammers trying to drop phishing links in the forum and it being brought down, these shoutboxes will just end up giving moderators and those who detect and report such harmful links more work.

This is probably the best solution. Anyone who wants to participate can join the Discord Server. Anyone who doesn't want this feature can not join.

Not important, it won't be necessary considering heavy disadvantages.

Not in the list of forum demands.

No... it doesn't take a minute or so to create an account, moreover no identity verification is required when signing up making anonymity still current.

Here agreed forum don't need any other place because most of the members do not love this idea due to too much spam and scam issues having this forum is the best place and all enjoying on good level without any problem.

Few are having their system, but these are not giving results as they were expecting just because of this now these other activities are having not positive response right now just staying here best enjoy and have enough knowledge about crypto don't think about any other alternative.

There was a group on discord that noone really participates in, i am in another group on discord for the fantasy football that hardly anyone chats in, and other forums have a chat/shoutbox that really does nothing useful. Personally it's just a waste of resources. If you wanna chat with some friends just use a messaging app and not make it about the forum.

Forum has this site and some other media channels for communication, therefore I don't have need of more for discussions or spams. Having many channels will become harder to manage and need more moderation resource so it is very unnecessary in my opinion.

[LIST] Official Bitcointalk forum accounts. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5429960.0)

NO, THANK YOU!

In all seriousness, I think this will just take away from the actual discussion on the forum, and probably actually result in hindering it.

No thanks.

I've seen it on altcointalk and I from what I noticed there's much use for it so I don't think that this forum would benefit from it either.

Maybe we can take the reputation or meta boards respectively as our forum shout box, because here you get to know more that is happening in the forum and with its members, as major discussions are being discussed on such regard on the boards, so i don't see the need for us to have such, because this is a large community whereby we can have lots of trolls there and to find it interesting may be challenging, will the shoutbox also be moderated? extra work for no reason.

By shoutbox did you meant something similar to the chatbox that we have at altcoinstalks?? To be honest, I don't think it's necessary here. And, there are many reasons behind it, one is it will turn into spam, a comfort place for trolls. We have seen similar cases at ALTtalk, where admin had to ban certain users multiple times. Even with the limited userbase alttalk has, the admin was forced to take harsh actions. So now imagine, btt at it's place, with vast userbase. So NO!

Shoutbox > messenger apps imo. If messenger apps have low activity that does not imply, shoutbox will have same.

People who are arguing about spam links, links should not be allowed and access should be restricted to certain ranks as mentioned by Beparanf before.


Lol

which could turn into a chat troll fest. I mean, knowing that there are people who come here just to troll, I wouldn't be surprised if it happens. also, I agree with what Cookdata mentioned, scamemrs could use that to spam their scams or post malicious links on it.

I've mentioned it as well on previous thread, and although it's an interesting concept that assists in asking direct questions and chats with other users, it could quickly turn into a spam box from newbie accounts. Is it necessary? Definitely not, would it be a nice addition? Perhaps, I can't say for sure, the antagonizing forum has one, but I personally don't see much benefit from it. I'm not a frequent visitor of that forum though, so I'm not the fit person to judge how it's performing there.

Let's say we have the "shoutbox" and in a normal conversation in there someone ask a question that is basically supposed to be a thread and it's answered within the shoutbox, would there be need to have a thread? of course No!

So you also remember that such chatbox is excluded from none member view or if you're not in the current discussion you will miss something important, whilst this forum, informations that we share on each thread are visible to people and can be a reference point to many.

no

I wouldn't want such an option because it would use excessive bandwidth on page that otherwise load quickly, and might even involve bringing in additional Cloudflare protections, thereby breaking the vast majority of scrapers.

Also there is the issue about malware being spread by newbies via links, but this can easily be circumvented by disallowing links and newbies from the chat.

For this specific forum, I think it is probably not needed. There is already a lot going on, it seems pointless having adding a shoutbox for the purpose of engaging when members are already posting (thus engaging).

What benefits do you think adding a shoutbox will bring to the forum?

Considering admin don't like to put too much limit, IMO it's not doable. I expect it'll be flooded with SEO spam or scam attempt, which makes it's not usable unless a moderator delete it within few minutes.


Not really. IMO it's just something nice to have, if it's actively moderated with fairly strict limitation.

If question was possible to answer on shoutbox, it didn't need to have thread to begin with.


You could have link to shoutbox that redirects to new tab, so to the bitcointalk homepage would remain unaffected.


Benefits? I don't know. I just meant it as place to chat.

Besides, almost every word on the forum is "monetized". I say this ironically, but many will agree that the forum is a place where growth in rank and merits are important for new people. How will they get their merits? No way? Try starting a discussion in such a chat about the importance of holding bitcoin or, stupidly, about push-ups. You will not see a single piece of advice, since it is clear to everyone that all the time for posting in such topics is allocated for a quota or a search for merits. There will only be jokes in the chat, and even then, no one will waste time on sharp and good humor, since this also takes time.

Nope.

It's only a lot of extra work with no necessity or benefits for the forum as a whole. When you have a shoutbox/chatbox, you need people moderating the chat 24/7; otherwise, it will become a favourite place for scammers, spammers, and especially SEO spammers to keep sending their links and stuff. Even if there are certain restrictions and filters added to keep it as clean as possible, there will still be a need for a moderator to be present at all times to make sure there is no unusual behaviour in the chat.

Now, will people be willing to voluntarily take care of the chat in shifts to cover the 24-hour period? I don't think so, which means that the forum administration will need to pay and hire extra mods only to take care of the chat, something which isn't for the benefit of the forum itself, but only a place for people to chit-chat when they have extra time. Besides, it's a discussion forum, and we are supposed to have discussions in the form of threads and posts, and not to have a place to chat.

Things like these will affect the originality of this forum, imo. We can't do everything other forums do because other forums are replicas of this one, and they didn't have Satoshi in them, or all the other OGs who were the reason why this whole industry exists today. So, I think we should preserve the originality, while only adding things or making changes that make the forum a better place, and I'm saying this because I know we have seen a lot of changes, but they were all necessary for the forum.

To my knowledge, I cannot recall this question being asked before therefore reading some of the replies has been interesting (as there is majority consensus against having a shoutbox). I reiterate my earlier view, there is far too much going on in the forum therefore there is no need to have a shoutbox.

Unless there are other features that are  in the shoutbox aside chatting, and these features are not found here in the forum, otherwise there is no need for the shoutbox or whatever it is called to be added to this forum. There is no point taking the traffic of the forum to another platform when this forum is in need of such traffic. We ain't teenagers here that are always looking for every chatting sites that's available out for them to create an account.

Every forum must not have the same options available in them, secondly if an option could works smoothly in another forum while it might not work the same way in a different forum. Without the shoutbox on Bitcointalk, communication and discussion is still effective and there's really not going to be a big advantage of the shoutbox.

There is no problem at all if this forum features that exist in other forums, that is normal but does it need a shoutbox? I doubt it. I suppose if it were added with a hide/show icon, it might satisfy all parties. As the forum has been performing well without a shoutbox for a number of years, it seems clear it is not an imperative requirement.

After mixer ban, some forum users moved to altcoinstalk forum and they raised their proposal of new features or new things that are copies from altcoinstalks.

They can raise their request and the forum is free for them to use and bring up their ideas for improvement, while whether forum actually needs such improvement is unknown. In my opinion, forum likely does not want to become a copy of altcoinstalks as this forum is better than altcoinstalk in security, privacy and also development ideas.

I actually did not see OP as a great idea, especially in the global forum. If it was to be in the local board, we could say dudes will use it as a hang out discussion place.

This could actually be guarded against by limiting the number of words per chat (conversation)  50 words max will not encourage discussion on the chat.
But in general, I do not welcome the idea.

Nope, I don't think that we need it. From all forums that I used, shoutbox is something that I never used. Maybe it can work in smaller forums, but not in place like Bitcointalk where there isn't much common between different members.
And I'm just going to quote post from that old topic. Not that I completely agree with it, but it's just epic:


I don't think so. Nobody is going to change posting for signature campaigns to chatting for free.

I wonder if a shout box would have a positive or negative effect on the wacko trolls here. On one hand, it would give them an outlet to spew their nonsense without permanently polluting the forum. On the other hand it would probably get them all riled up to get in even more fights with each other. It would be an interesting experiment to watch from the sidelines while hoping to not catch any collateral damage.

I see that to be a social field which many forum users including myself don’t take much interest in. We have pms for conversations and building what there might be for relationships but, it’s barely active for most. That would be the same with the so called  shoutbox if a patch is created with the forum software. It wouldn’t help the forum very much if you ask me, most users here like to remain anonymous and private on certain matters and this wouldn’t encourage that very much.

I don't think if this could be implemented over here but if you really wanna make use of shoutbox then it's good you go over the other forum to make use of it. I think viewing from the other forum it makes it bulky and having much chats displayed at the top which doesn't make it that simple anymore. However, there is always need to make reply or probably to exchange and send pm to each other could likely solve this.

Unfortunately this community has a lot of negativity surrounding its positivity, and negativity weighs a lot more than positivity, so a shoutbox would be bound to cause net negative results such as unfair treatment based on popularity or perceived trustworthiness, fighting between members, and inevitable censorship when someone takes things too far or says something that they "shouldn't" (which is subjective to everyone, complicating rules and etiquette to a degree that would be very hard to manage for the community and staff).

Audiences and users are somehow different between "General" forums and "Crypto" related forums.

In general-type forums, this is more of an entertainment and social interaction purpose. If you are a forum enthusiast from a decade ago, you will notice that general-type forums always had a shoutbox, and the number of users lurking there was really great. In crypto-related forums, most users are crypto OG, crypto hodlers, crypto enthusiasts, and users who want to focus on "how to earn" rather than just socialize and spend time to just talk and talk and talk.

No harm in adding shoutbox here, but I doubt it will catch the attention of everyone. The shoutbox might just become inactive.

It will be hard to monitor the shoutbox, aka Global chat, for a large community like BitcoinTalk forum. They will need some moderators to handle the global chat ban on the spammers often. The moderators have to cover it 24/7 so the spammers and scammers cannot get away. Probably it is possible if the administration decides to appoint some chat moderators only to handle the shoutbox without paying them anything. I guess they would find plenty of users who would do it without taking any special benefit.

I think we are good already. But adding a shoutbox won't hurt if it can be handled properly. Probably add some restrictions so people could start chatting. For example, a member rank must be Jr. member to be eligible to participate in the chat.

I think shout box will be abused rather than being inactive because there’s a lot of users here especially scammers and spammers that wants to get attention from members.

We have a lot of conversations here on all discussion thread and we do have friends here in the forum so shout box will be popular for casual chatting with other members.

The only cons is it might be abuse by scammers posting malicious links.

If really pushed, forum admins surely know those CONS, including the possibility of posting malicious links. Therefore, with just a simple coding, they can put restrictions on who is just allowed to post a link or remove the option of posting links. Admins can set the terms. Anyway, like I mentioned, I don't think it's necessary to have a shoutbox here, as that will just be turned out inactive for sure.

I have thought about the advantages and disadvantages of adding a shoutbox yet cannot see any benefits at all. I think well over 99% of the members post here to earn from signature campaigns therefore would they be interested in a shoutbox? Keeping that aside, as mentioned earlier the forum has operate for a long time with it therefore it is not really needed either.

This is a bad idea because this forum was created for discussion purpose and like the way it is people create thread and people comment on those thread and that is how discussion happens in the forum and people learn from each other because knowledge and ideas are being shared now if a shoutbox is created I don't think this forum will be the same again, people may stop posting or creating thread or the shoutbox created may be useless because people may not have interest in talking there reasoning being that there's a system of growth set in the forum, in other to grow your account you most have some number of activities and merit, now if thread are not created anymore growing in the forum will be very difficult, I'm sure no one who wants to grow will be interested in discussing a very important topic that can give him or her a merit in the shoutbox so most likely majority of the people or members in this forum won't have interest in the shoutbox.
We already have social media account where you can discuss some things you won't like to create a thread for.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitcointalk
So no need for shoutbox, the forum is better this way.

I don't understand how shoutbox would breach the privacy!? Users here comment/pm, the same way they would be chatting? Plus, fwiw, there was this feature on forum I was on years ago where if you would chat by having, "/private" as prefix and that chat would remain private between the two users chatting.

A thing of the past, I used to see it in almost every Blogspot I visited.

It still remains active in YoBit, one shady ass exchange.

This automatically shows us that even though the shoutbox is implemented here there would be no need for it or people using it. When you look at the other forum you would see how littered the interface of the forum looks like, and to say the reality here I don't think there is any use for such box to keep displaying at the top of this forum as it makes no sense for any day.

I also do not see how chatting on the chat box will breach someone's privacy. This will only happen when an individual reveal their identity or leak their data themselves.
The major disadvantage I see with the shoutbox is that a few people will hijack it either for fun or any other thing. And after the first few months, people will no longer find it useful.
The forum is just fine as it is, there's no need adding many more things.

I don't think there is any need for Shoutbox, because every user who has discussed it in this forum has discussed its misuse. So it is not reasonable in any way because to manage this Shoutbox, one must endure extra pressure.
But in my opinion it is better to keep it away which is worthless and meaningless to every user.

In my entire time on this forum I haven't seen a suggestion on this forum that has been so disagreed with like this!

Everyone is not in support of the opinion, not even one hence Op you should rethink or probably lock the thread and let the opinion deminish on it's own.

It idea isn't compatible to the forum and it's nature of operations.