Bitcoin Forum

The reality of this forum

There has been a lot of controversy these past few months regarding the spammers that flock to this forum in order to obtain money.   The merit system helps but most of these "legendary" and "hero" spammers got there by shitting out one liners the past few years.

The obvious solution is to remove signature campaigns all together.   This will undoubtedly get rid of the people who are here for the wrong reasons.  But Theymos and mods know this will absolutely kill the traffic to this website and ad revenue would absolutely plummet.

A lot of the boards don't even have real discussion. I guarantee a lot of these guys just skip to the last page, post something that is somewhat relevant to the topic and dip to the next thread to fulfill there bounty quotas.

The best boards in my opinion are the mining sections.  Great insight, no spammers, no trolls, barely any paid sigs in the mining boards.

The reality is this place is excellent money for those living in poorer countries.  Why work 12 hours a day making iphones in a factory when they can get $500 a week posting from their 10 alt accounts.

Wall Observer in Speculation sub is my favourite thread, sigs are blanked out (hidden) & we mainly discuss what we’re all here for - bitcoin & the current & future price.

Give it a go, I’ve formed some good online friendships with a few people there. It’s a hood laugh too a lot of the time.

Mining sections have less spam than general discussion but you will still get megathreads and vague, pointless discussion.

The fact of the matter is, unless the section requires a degree of sophisticated knowledge, you will get posters who will spam the same redundant common-sense crap everywhere.
Something something bitcoin trends go up.
Something something house edge.
Something something merit is good.

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Technical Discussion might be the most spam-free part of the forum because (let's face it) most people here still don't know how Bitcoin works. On the flip-side, you have the spam-ridden "good project sir" Altcoin Discussion sections, which should be set ablaze.

(Technical Support is half-half. You'll only get good discussion when the thread is not about "my transaction isn't coming through!")

Yes I forgot about technical discussion and serious discussion. Those are great boards.  The bounty boards and altcoin boards.... You are so right,   "Good project when moon," "good luck dev" etc

Funny, just a few minutes ago I was thinking of when I first joined this forum 4 years ago. And the pro Bitcoin, banks are out to get us posts, and just a few minutes ago I thought, "those post were probably not sincere." They were probably people trying to fill a posting quota.

This problem is i think a never ending problem with this forum. As long as there are bounty threads there would always users who will take advantage on it. Tho after all there are alot of users here who were fighting spammers like the signature campaign managers. Theymos and the other mods were also providing new strategies if not to totally solve  but to atleast lessen the problem.

Perhaps there is a little truth to that but it is dwarfed by comparison to the mountain of shit by jr and lower accounts.


I used to think this as well.  I even made a post with that sentiment a few months ago

I've done a bunch of thinking on this issue and have made a few conclusions that I have yet to see addressed, so here they are!

1)  After considering it a lot I realized that theymos has done almost nothing to increase the revenue streams of the forum as it's gained popularity and climbed Alexa!  We have the same 9 slots available to advertise that we have had for as long as I can remember.  He has not added any other banner ads or referral ads/links in fact he appears to have done none of the traditional things a "for profit" business running the site would do with the increasing popularity of the site to grow the revenue stream.

This site could be an absolute cash cow for theymos, yet he has not done a single thing to indicate that is his primary motive.  So to me either he is the worst business man on the planet because even a 12 year old could take a site ranked this high and make hundreds of thousands a month OR he has another reason or values the traffic differently.

Consider also that the financials of the forum are available for anyone that can search.  When I found the financials it isn't hard to see that the forum is a very early adopter of BTC and as such has been tremendously fortunate if one views it in terms of fiat...

Based on the fact that I now felt that the driving force behind theymos' decisions was not $ I began to wonder what value the traffic could have to him.

I wondered why not just get rid of the sigs and go back to a better ratio of signal to noise, what value does the traffic have??

I think the value is that new people are finding there way here, Bitcoin is growing.  Bitcoin is affecting and changing peoples lives for the better, especially people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the first world...  The more people know about it the better chance it has of changing the future.  Honestly isn't it great that someone can make as much money (without abusing alts) posting here learning about BTC than a week in manual labour??

I honestly believe he is making every effort to encourage as many new people to the forum and bitcoin as possible while doing his best to keep out the straight up whores.  What a difficult balancing act because one of the worst things would be to stagnate new users.  If a user comes here for the wrong reason but learns about BTC and becomes a decent user, that's good IMO.  If spam is the consequence of growing bitcoin can we deal with it??

I'm not suggesting to not work on the spam problem at all.  I think the merit system shows that he is hearing us about the spam but it is clearly not an easy fix if you don't want to stagnate growth.

I am not trying to speak for theymos and I have never spoken to him about this.  I came up with these (for good or bad myself and are my personal opinions).

To be honest I think is shows that it was a good decision to give BTCT to theymos as I'm sure that many people wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation to turn this site into a full on for profit business and make fucking bank!

With that being said perhaps this will help when people are trying to think of ways to fight the spam.  I honestly think if you could present a workable solution to theymos that WON'T stagnate new growth or affect normal users you would probably get a lot of support from him (IMHO).

Compulsory solutions = Fast results, absolute failure or absolute success.
If you have an injured foot, do you cut it or treat it slowly? "Same with the Spam problem."[If everyone does well, there will be no problem]
Campaign managers must set a minimum of merits, and then force participants to earn one merit per week to get their full payment." will reduce advertising costs and increase good posts."


After the merit system, it will be difficult to manage ten accounts, especially if there are high limits to participate in campaigns and points every week.
Also, your income will significantly reduce which will push you to find another job or focus on high-quality posts from one account.

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Read -----> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg29540717#msg29540717

why you say that? you want to attract more account spamming?

people are already drifting into alternative communities its also why bitcoin drops in price.

we will have to develop a new cryptoeconomy anyway, and there are people having their signatures like me that represents their project

regards

Right, I don't care about making money from the forum personally. (I've actually thought about getting rid of the forum ads, since it's often a big headache and the forum has enough reserves for a long time, but operating at a significant loss while there's money basically just sitting on the table feels wrong, even if the level of loss is sustainable for quite a while.)

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.

We have to commend the Admins for creating the truly democratic platform in the world. All shades of opinion and full expression are accommodated, yet regulated.

I think there are certain things that should be done as far as monetization that would be good for the forum as a whole. One example would be to charge to enable features such as the ability to have a signature/avatar, or to enable certain signature related features. This would force users to pay for the ability to earn money via the forum, and eventually users who know they are unable to meet forum standards for post quality will be unwilling to pay for signature features.

Proof of captcha is a decent way to fight spammers, however proof of money is significantly superior. 

I think the merit system had good intentions, however far too frequently, I see posts with merit that I believe received merit because the sender agreed with the content of the post, and not the underlying effort put into the post. I believe that over time, the merit system will only contribute and encourage groupthink. 

That was an interesting post by Theymos, and I'm grateful to him for clarifying some of the policies and motivations behind Bitcoin Talk.

There are a number of things that responsible members can do to help the forum. One thing is to try to maintain an efficient flow for thread readers. For example, a poster of member rank should be aware that full quotes are usually redundant, so the quote by BitNaija immediately after the post by Theymos is both redundant and annoying. I'd like to revisit this thread, so I put him on ignore to save wasting my time when scrolling.

I'd like to make a couple of suggestions with regard to posting permissions. I believe that it would be worthwhile to restrict thread starting in the serious discussion board to members and above. In fact it may be worth reviewing the permissions for thread starting.

The combination of merit and reputation tagging seems to be having a beneficial effect, but there are still some abuses of the awarding of merits. The awarding of merit for reporting posts is discouraging for members who want to see the merit system working to improve the quality of posting. It allows low quality spammers to improve their ranking without contributing to the growth of information available in the forum. Account and merit selling is a rising industry here, and it prompted me to try to build a database for merit awarders to use. Hopefully this would deprive the new underworld of merits, and reduce the profitability of their ventures. I think it would be better if the forum staff controlled this, as there is too much scope for errors if is administered privately.

I also think merit system needs some tweaks in order to achieve it's utmost goal. As far my knowledge merits should not only given if the sender agreed with the post.
That is chopping opportunities for getting merits whose thinking out of the box and that will ultimately produce some kind of groups of members who blindly agreed with the OP in order to gain merits.

I assume that you mean that merit awards should not be restricted to posters who agree with the philosophy of the awarder. The diversity amongst the merit sources, and the ability of those who have received merit to award merit, means that anybody creating a decent post should be able to reap a reward. It falls down if awarders don't use post quality as the primary criterion.

This was something that concerned me when I became a merit source. I have quite a few English opinions and standards, and I felt that these should be modulated in an International forum ( well a little bit anyway). This is why I created a chat room for merit sources and mods, and I hope that they have created a more tolerant attitude in me. I don't respect sycophants and beggars, so I hope that I don't create such groups. In fact I believe that "Great minds don't think alike, they think for themselves".

LoyceV has created some interesting research tables, and they seem to be used to highlight members who are awarding merits for personal promotion, rather than for the benefit of the forum. I hope that the next stage will be for merit awarders to use this research to starve the abusers of sMerit to award.

I think this means every newbie that would really aim for the interest of learning in the forum will go through scammers and spammers just to gain "Knowledge"

Hope this request will be granted. It would be great to join a discussion with real members rather than spammers that would only shit post.

50 merit requirement could be a great ceiling for a member rank. Just an opinion.

Never had a thought that full quotes are redundant and makes hard to read answers, and I always used them, but now when I thought about it, it really makes sense. You live and learn.

I think 10 is hard enough without discouraging genuine posters. The main problem I'm seeing lately is the Jr. Member copy paste spambots all signed up to signature bounty campaigns. Maybe a 1 or 2 Merit requirement for Jr. Member would be more useful.

OPs comment looks less of an insight and more of a rant from the person who missed the train. There are forum-members who are working on improving traffic and contents, whereas some are just here for making good money. Current rules for profile have been enforced to make the forum a better place. Just because a new member finds it difficult to make progress in ranking due to these rules does not mean the reboot of forum should be implemented. This kind of attitude only underlines the lack of conscience and nothing else.
It is better to accept the reality as it is and move on.

You have highlighted one aspect of the forum and I agree that those useless posts are a problem especially for readers looking for some reliable information.

But there is also a lot of positive here and that is why the forum is so much popular. You get to read the posts and experience of people who are associated with the launch and development of bitcoins for free. Any campaign posted here is exposed to thorough examination by so many experienced members and many scam are caught in the process. Similarly, there are many other benefits of using this forum.

I suggest to lift up current merit requirements of lower ranks, 10 merits for Junior member and 25 merits for member.
Full member and above ranks remains current merit requirements.
This new lift-up merit requirements for Junior and Member rank will reduce spamming endemic, which has not stopped yet after the launch day of merit system.

I only want to highlight the point what "Theymos" said at the first place when he introduced "merit" system for the forum. Is there any mods who reviewed ( at least randomly) how the merit sources send their sMerits? Someone can argue that " I can send my sMerits by my own way" and do you believe that's fair when we look at the big picture of making forum less spammy.

I'm also agree with you that English opinions and standards matter when it comes to the international forum though I'm not a Englishman and my native language is not English either. But since I have joined this forum I think I am able to improve (actually I can't say only from my  view) my English knowledge which is a added benefit for my professional career also. So to be honest I feel why I didn't know about bitcointalk before?

I'm shocked by the alt announcement board. I've decided that I'll create my own coin at some time in the future, and I decided I'd post a statement of intent in the Alt coin section. I looked at one board, and the first two pages were full of threads that had been updated within the last 10 minutes. I didn't bother to look at any of them, and I decided that the whole board was a waste of computing resources. I wonder what Google thinks of the threads. :) I'm also having issues with the mining boards. It looks as if they are focused on earnings potential, and have forgotten that Bitcoin Talk used to be a learning resource.

Spot on mate.

Absolutely. I had the same thinking of not monetizing the forum but seeing the response from theymos had me no doubt that the motivation behind running this forum is far more noble than making it a cash machine. 



The motivation is the freedom of doing that you want to do. Problem is there are people who will take advantages from anything.

Google indexs them fine annoyingly. They are likely getting hits off google which is driving a lot more people to their thread and to this forum this might sound like a good thing but its exactly the problem we are currently having with these people registering accounts and spamming the altcoin board in order to earn shares in their altcoin. I am not sure what Google thinks of this as its just generating traffic on their side. But if they go the route of banning adverts of icos like Facebook and other companies have done then we could see a reduction of users signing up and the spam.

Don't want to be rude but almost everyone from the creation of forum talks the same shit about this forum, brain is just....
Yeah people spam here but don't read shit topics if that makes you anxious and why to read something unvaluable? Also did you ask question and not get answer? Has that ever happened? I bet noo... Community is amazing here, I know some people who helped me a lot, really a lot. Just ignore spammers and keep using forum... :)

Correct me if am wrong.

While the bitcointalk.org community was established to create a knowledge-base system for bitcoiners and future adopters of the cryptocurrency model, monetizing, bounty as an economical by-product has helped the community grow so large.

While we may not all have equal access to internet money making ventures that work, I'd say that this forum has brought about freelancers, professionals, dreams and redefined purposes. And putting a cap on that, might not be the best option.

There are many out there who would be the next Satoshi or Vitalik or even you, who can contribute immensely to this great economic revolution and should be given that opportunity even if they don't have the 'necessary resources' to get there in a jiffy.

There are still some high ranking 'shit-posters' (pardon my tongue), who scaled that bridge and had their ranks 'hero-ed'(not epic at all), and while I know that they are carefully being watched, they still have their ways around the system, or don't they?

The obvious solution is to expand/enforce the administrative responsibilities to include calling bounty managers to do due diligence and report shit posters, having specific ordinances that govern bounty hunting with a specific level of service to the BTT community or the larger crypto-family as a whole. - I'm also afraid that it might centralize this once so 'free' and 'democratic' society - but it's all for the greater good ai.

The idea of a ranking/merit system should be one of value, whereby when you see a Hero/Legendary post, it should mean something as priceless as experience and the other ranks should be able to hold such to account.

People still create newbie accounts when they want to comment outside 'their usual self', and you could tell that this person isn't a newbie at all.

I should suppose the ideal state of a newbie is someone who is ignorant and wants to learn more about what cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, altcoins, trading and the sorts are all about. And as they learn, they can contribute their own perspectives, and results should be growth not just in activities but also in rank, to be able to establish their well being in the community.

Practically, a good number of good [informative and educative] posts can catch the eyes of 'meriters', you'd even find merits being wasted on comments that truly add no value. (would love to draw examples here, but no need to be petty).

Finally, we must be aware of the real state of affairs, bitcoin may be popular, cryptocurrencies may have been widely spread, but adoption is the goal and still dependent on the reliability of this still developing 'cryptographic economics'.

I agree with the author that the prohibition bounty on the forum will reduce traffic. You can close the main Board from advertising and to develop a forum.

If you're trying to say a bounty hunter is the next Satoshi then I will disagree with you 99.999% of the time. If they spend their time in useful sections outside of megathreads then they may have potential. Other than that, they're just shitposting.

FTFY. I would estimate that 95% (at least) of Hero+ members post garbage.

There's nothing wrong with having rules. We're not made better with having fewer regulations.

If managers cared who was advertising for their campaign, none of them would allow negative-trusted members to participate.
If managers cared about the spam on the forum, none of the bounty threads would reach the ridiculous page lengths that a lot currently do.
If managers cared about post quality, then 30% of the forum would be cleaner. None of the useless, redundant, garbage posts would be accepted and the spammers would have to move on or learn that they would need to increase their quality.

Exactly. Which is why when newbies come to Bitcointalk and see all the Hero and Legendary members act so inexperienced, it's disheartening.

A lot of new members come here just to earn money from bounties. It's sickening.

A lot of this is abuse. It'll eventually dissipate.

This is the best piece I have read today and I am glad hearing that the reason behind the forum was not based on milking money but was based on genuine desire to let many people in on the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency at large. And truly by far, that goal is being achieved. I personally have been able to learn one or two things ever since I joined the forum and to that, I am most grateful. Who knows if payment was required before having entrance into the forum, people like me might not have been able to make it here.

I don't disbelieve you when you say that you don't care that much about making money from here as there could have been numerous ways that you could have personally enriched yourself both legitimately and illegitimately from the forum over the years and I've even suggested that you pay yourself a reasonable wage and do admin duties here full time before because one is badly needed, but saying things like you've thought about getting rid of ad slots baffles me. Why? Because they're too much of a hassle and headache for you to organise? If so, can't you either automate the procedure of people buying them or delegate a staff member to be in charge of advertisements instead of just considering removing them completely? Delegating workload to various people will seriously free up your time to do much more productive things and stop you from being pestered about things you don't have the time or energy to do (and other staff members are then pestered who don't even have the means or authority to help). The forum shouldn't be losing money or throwing it away and even more ad slots wouldn't hurt (especially when the forum is covered by sig ads that the vast majority only contribute to the deterioration of the board). Even if we don't need the money the reserve funds won't last forever, but you could even put the money made to good use. Use it to finance worthwhile projects that will benefit bitcoin or even the world, or even give it all away to charity. Nearly 500 people died in floods in Kerala, India last month. We could make sure it gets into the hands of people who actually need it there. What's even worse is that you always get scumbags popping up here trying to use various tragedies to scam by asking for donations. Happens with every natural disaster. I'm sure if we had some sort of official donation drive many people would contribute to it in knowing that the money will actually get to the right people and make a difference.


This forum is probably one of the most free and liberal on the internet, but there are rules here and without rules or when they're not enforced efficiently it just descends into pure chaos and anarchy and that is what we have now. There needs to be some basic laws for a functioning society and this forum is a perfect example of what happens when you do away with law and order and let people do largely whatever they want. You say you don't want to destroy the economy, but the forum has already practically been destroyed as it's unfit for its original purpose and is now mostly populated just by spammers and scammers. This shouldn't be the culture here and it can change, but it won't as long as we do nothing. There are numerous compromises we can make that don't even encroach on anyone's freedom to post here. Everyone should be able to post and I agree with your reasoning for removing things like Newbie jail, but I don't think everyone should be able to earn here straight away and especially by contributing little to nothing, especially those who literally have no idea or interest in bitcoin other than somebody has just told them they can earn money here for posting. This is what leads to the wall-to-wall illiterate spamming and copy and pasting which ruins the true purpose of this forum in the first place. What do you even expect them to do? If you have little to no interest in bitcoin and can't speak English very well if at all but you want to get paid here then that's a recipe for disaster. That's why we should look at things like punishing ICO campaigns that are financing it in the first place and removing signatures completely from Junior Members and/or requiring them to get a minimal amount of merit to become one. That is not too much to ask and isn't restrictive to anyone posting here at all. We really should start 'reshaping the environment' before it's too late. I don't think we should ever fully ban signature campaigns, especially when a compromise can be found without impinging on anybodies right to post, but if we continue to do nothing then removing them will likely be our only option eventually. To make that work efficiently though you would also have to remove avatars and personal texts because people would still utilise them for adverts. The logical explanation to me is to do something about it now and we can do so in various ways that are not at all oppressive to people posting.


I agree, but the problem is that not many people are doing it constructively. I've always said I think it's awesome that people can earn here, but there needs to be a compromise and we can't just let both ICOs and spammers and bots do whatever they want. People can't be getting paid for generic one liners and bots copy and pasting content over x amount of accounts each. Where do we draw the line and when do we say enough is enough? I've been saying for years that's it's not going to be long before the only people posting here are spammers and bots just earning their 'daily needs', but that already happened long ago. Go into any thread and spend a few minutes reading the replies and you'll see this how bad it is.

This is probably the best example I've seen recently about how bad things have got here:

https://i.imgur.com/JqAIiTJ.jpg  

There's so many things wrong with that post:

1) He's a haiki/doge bot.
2) He's a Junior Member.
3) He's on a signature campaign.
4) He's posting in the Howeycoins thread about how great it and its team are: A non-existent fake ICO with a non-existent team.
5) That will just be one of dozens/hundreds/possibly thousands that never get looked into. How many others is he getting paid on?

This is another:


That's a picture someone provided to prove that they weren't alts and are all separate people posting away. Just check their posting history. All generic one/two liner spam. Sadly, the forum has actually become some sort of "worldwide welfare organization" and that is literal picture proof of it. The longer we sit back and do nothing the worse it gets.


But what about when the barriers to join are too low and anyone can get paid just by singing up with an account here? A bot can even do it and get paid as evidenced by the haiku/doge bot above. Also, what about all those who come here to actually discuss bitcoin or get some help and they just leave because it's useless and full of barely decipherable spam and wrong information? I've lost count of how many times I've seen people giving wrong advice on something they know nothing about or complaining about all the lazy, generic crap that gets posted everywhere purely for payment or ranking up.
 

It annoys everyone other than those making and profiting from it, but I don't think it is difficult to curb. If you keep paying people to spam then you're not allowed to advertise here. Simples. If you remove signatures from lower ranks like Juniors or require some sort of merit amount to become one then that stops the worse of the worst getting paid to bot and spam. Those are two very simple suggestions that could be implemented today and would have a tremendous effect on lowering spam and stopping people from earning by posting drivel. It's acceptable to do this because we allow it. Please change this culture before it's too late.

@hillariousetc

Shit i believe that picture is coming from my country and i am really in shame now. That is what happens when you treat something wrong. This is a forum and should be treated like that, and getting money should be the least priority (bonus) for their self, but it is like they are making money by doing a shit work which a kid even do. They deserved to be labelled as a spammer. We can accept it if they do some work like excellently managing a campaign as a team, translation as a team, but they made a spamming service as a team and selling them to the bad managers who want to hire them, that is the next level play.

I agree with you that very often signature campaigns are the reason for shitposting, because people just want to fulfill bounty quotas. But at the same time, signature campaigns can be a motivation to write better and more qualified posts. The problem is not in the existence of signature campaigns, as such, but in the fact that they put forward different demands on their participants.

There are campaigns that take everyone in a row, but there are those which set a high bar. And if the participant doesn`t reach it (not enough merits, bad history of posts, etc.), then he doesn`t get into the spreadsheet. Perhaps, instead of eliminating the very phenomenon of signature campaigns (which will have a bad effect on the website's traffic), it is necessary to establish certain rules for recruiting participants. If the bounty breaks them and reduces the set bar, then the admins will close it.

The country is irrelevant really and you shouldn't feel shame for the acts of others just because they're compatriots, but when people can't speak English very well, don't know much about bitcoin if anything at all and are doing this over multiple accounts each and as a full time job then that's when it becomes a huge problem and just leads to the utter degradation of the forum. I've made the comparison before that it's like someone going to Chinese-speaking Lamborghini forum to talk about Lambos, when you don't care about cars, can't drive, and can't speak Mandarin, but you can get paid to talk about them so people do and in their droves. It's a recipe for disaster. People should be able to earn here, but there needs to be some standards because the practice is destructive and the poor/barely decipherable posts ruin the experience for everyone else. It's like doing a job that you're in no way qualified to do but people are paying you for your shoddy jobs day after day with no penalties for the job even getting worse as time goes on. That needs to change. Theymos says this board isn't a welfare system for people, but the truth is that's pretty much all this place has become. We can easily change this. Newbies and Juniors shouldn't be able to advertise and a small merit requirement should be implemented to get a signature. ICOs who pay for spam need to be punished and people who can't speak English very well should be urged or suggested that they stick to their local board. If people only got paid for decent contributions then this place would clean itself up dramatically, but the longer we do nothing the worse it's is going to get.

Why are you ashamed of them, it's not your fault, and I'm not ashamed even though I come from the same country because they and I are different in "looking at this forum". instead, we have to prove that not all members are from Indonesia like them. who only searched for .002 BTC / week by breaking the forum rules (Spammer).

When people are poor and live in terrible conditions, they take any job that brings them money, even if they don`t understand it. They are forced to do this and this behavior can be understood. The situation is the same with shitposting. Many folks have heard that this forum allows you to earn money through signature campaigns. And since many bounties don`t make the right demands, many newcomers who don`t understand the subject are gladly accepted for such work.

I don`t justify those who write low-quality posts only in order to fulfill bounty quotas. I'm just saying that such people can be understood. And the forum community can help them. In order to do a good job, people should be interested in it. The primary goal of this forum is to unite crypto-enthusiasts from around the world, to create a platform for free communication of those who are fond of crypto-currencies. But over time, a lot has changed and now the forum is filled with people who pursue material goals and who don`t have the desire to understand the crypto sphere, because they are not interested.

I believe that it is the duty of the leaders of this forum, of those who really are crypto-enthusiasts, to interest newcomers, who initially think only of easy earnings. Admins can set more stringent merit rules, participants can continue to create an endless array of topics about how they are fed up with spammers, but the latter won`t go away without our help. Instead of increasing the propensity between those who serve the original purpose of the forum (sharing news, discussing developments in the market, making predictions, increasing their knowledge of crypto-currencies), and those who are pursuing the goal of simply earning on signature campaigns, we should try to interest the latter, so that they aspire to improve the quality of their posts.

In order for this theory to work, it is necessary to create and consolidate topics for beginners about the initial mission of this forum, about how the crypto-currencies changed the lives of the bitcointalk participants, how to write quality comments, where to look for crypto information resources, etc. When people are interested in some field of activity, they are improving. We can help beginners and together make the forum better.

It's actually worse than that. There's no repercussions for doing a shitty job here. Even if they took some job doing menial work in their own country like cleaning toilets or packing products into boxes, they'd be fired pretty quickly if they showed up to work whenever they wanted and did the worst job imaginable and cut every corner they could possibly do and that's essentially what happens here. People are unqualified for the 'work' or tasks that they're doing. I wouldn't be able to work in a factory or office in Indonesia because I can't speak Indonesian, so I'd be useless. The same applies here but obviously they're not going to be fired because ICOs are happy to have them on board promoting their crap which only ruins the forum in the process and puts money directly into both their pockets so they all have a financial incentive to keep doing it.

And I know exactly why they do it. I totally understand and don't even begrudge them for it, especially those that live in poverty and I accept that poverty can make people do desperate or even unscrupulous things, but there's also a lot of greed going on here. I think it's a beautiful thing if this forum makes a huge difference to people's lives (as it has mine) but people can't be earning here at the expense of the utter deterioration and degradation of the forum. If I was in their position then I'd likely be doing the same, but it's more of an issue with the administration and rules (or lack thereof) as we not only let them get away with it but have created a culture where it's acceptable to do so and there's mostly no punishments for abusers and rule breakers. You can come here, bot or farm as many accounts as you want and earn from them by either writing drivel or copy and pasting and we allow campaigns to pay for it with zero repercussions. At this point we might as well rename or rebrand the forum to icospamtalk.org or getpaidtopost.org because that's what this board has become. I'm all about making it better for everyone here and it can happen without it being restrictive to those who just want to post. If you want to be able to earn here via posting then you should earn that right through merit and ranks (or cough up for Copper/Silver/Gold member etc). If people who can't speak English very well want to earn here then they should either stick to their local board or just collecting bounties. It wouldn't be ok for me to go posting in the Spanish board when I can't speak Spanish to an acceptable standard and people there would rightly get annoyed if I was being nuisance and shitting up the place because it is both incredibly disruptive and annoying. Also, ICO campaigns and those that spam on them need to face punishments because otherwise nothing will change and as long as Juniors can get paid for copy and pasting or writing drivel then they will continue to do so and over god knows how many accounts.  It's not that difficult to find a compromise here that benefits everyone, but doing nothing as we usually do isn't going to help.

There is definitely nothing more all of us want than the betterment of the forum and getting rid of what has, unfortunately, become a nightmare for all of us, but such theories actually don't work as much as we think they might. I totally understand that most of the spammers are from third-world countries, having no sources of income and are forced mentally to do all this in order to earn something, but a very large majority of this is too ignorant to grasp the things that you have mentioned to be done to help them. Where some of them might have even a little knowledge about what they are doing, there are some who doesn't even know what is a Cryptocurrency (https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-are-cryptocurrencies) or what is Blockchain (https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/), but all they know is that if they post 20 times a week, they will get x number of tokens which they later can exchange for money. Or, if they tweet/retweet/share x number of Social Media shares, they will get x number of tokens which will turn into real money later sometime. I can even guarantee you that about 70% - 80% people participating in Bounties doesn't even know what ERC-20 stands for and how it works. All they know, or learn from others that are already in it, is that they would require an Ethereum wallet to receive the tokens.
The point is, you can only teach the people who come for learning, not the ones who are not even interested in it.

Deep condolence mate, that's my country too. I don't mind what they are doing as long as they are not shitposting or break the rules. It's not different than being in an internet cafe and chill (IP wise). But, I'm pretty sure that they were the culprits who contribute to my 99.99% report accuracy.

Let's imagine that they were actually scripting bitcoin or design fancy bitcoin wallet. Just kidding.

As long as you're not doing what they do and you're not adding garbage in the forum then you're free from guilt likewise some part of nationalism is getting hurt here.


This may need ton of work from the staff to monitor a lot of bounty campaigns which obviously popping everyday. However, if this will push through we can see this forum the way it's used to be.

Also the bounty managers will get the full responsibility to this or else he'll be the one who will get in trouble. And to lessen the spam posts, manager will require their participants to at least have a particular merit, in this way people will force to improve their post quality. Or the least we can do is to review the post history of the participants before it gets accepted just like what we have in bitcoin campaign.

There are no words of "nationalism" or feel ashamed for such bastards (Spammer)


I really know their true situation, the fact that they aren't poor but greedy. Poor people in my country rarely can operate the Internet let alone know about this forum. This is a fact on the ground, poor people who you think like toilet cleaners, working in factories don't do things like this.

The questions now who did that?

In Indonesia, there is the term "Cukong" = rich people have a lot of money to buy a number of accounts and take actions that aren't commendable. that's where I call it greedy. Poor people in my country aren't as bad as you think. instead the poor in my country are more authoritative but greedy rich people who leave a disability.

This is called the poor in Indonesia

https://i.imgur.com/UFB3QiE.jpg


This is called Cukong

https://i.imgur.com/lxCymx9.jpg

Maybe before, the signature campaign was really one of the biggest reason why most of the users are spamming. Yet look at how the signature campaigns right now. The current standards of most of the signature campaign that can be found on the services section(except for the ICO's or in the alt coins are still on this problem) is really high.

You are actually been seeing the rules quite some time for some of the known campaign managers in this forum. That issue should really be addressed into most of the signature campaign that can be found on the alt coin threads.

The other big issue for me right now is the bounty hunting aside from most of it are just scam it has also been dragging the forum standards down.

I agree that you can teach only those who are interested. Therefore, in my post I suggested starting with interest, not with crypto learning and trainings. We know that many people come here to earn money. We also know that many of them don`t want to study, because they are not interested. Therefore, it is necessary to ask the question: why are they not interested? It would seem that crypto-currencies and blockchain are a global breakthrough, which we have the opportunity not only to observe and evaluate, but also to take direct part in it.

I believe that people are not interested because they don`t understand. Remember the children in the school who did anything except study? They weren`t interested in what the teacher was saying, because they didn`t understand him. But when the material was explained to the child with the right approach, he began to show interest. The same thing happens on the forum. Coryphaeuses of the forum, true crypto-enthusiasts should feel like teachers and interest newcomers. Then the latter will have a desire to learn and they will do it right, because there will be mentors who will guide them.

Can I vote hilarious for president Admin? For many months now, I can taste your frustration about what is happening to this forum, and the frustration that even as a Global Mod, you can't do much about it.
You seem to have the time, dedication and attitude to make this forum better.

I back you on that call Loyce. hilarious, like yourself is a credit to the forums & I enjoy what he’s all about. Have conversed with him over a number of years & always found him strict but fair. Likeable dude too, if only he didn’t keep doing so well in our Premier League betting pool so far this season.

;D :D ;D :D

Correction, until now dude ;D. Sad to say but many poor high-ranked members can still be able to continue their bad posting habits without getting noticed because of two reasons: 1: others feel hesitated everytime they want to advise an oldie. 2. the eye of this forum was too focused on the mistakes of newbie shitposters. To sum up, it seems that they got exempted from the negative criticisms coming from the others :(.
Then you should be the one to make the first move, you are now free to remove the signature you advertise. Hmm, I bet you can't. Your word is a two-edged sword my friend.

Why do you want signature campaigns to get removed if these contribute to the collected revenue of our forum? And besides, you can join campaigs while not harming the forum at the same time, right? My point is, the real problem here are the ones who came here for wrong reasons (as what you've said) and not the campaign itself. Those kind of users are the main responsible for all of this mess :(.

Ps: No offense sir. Peace ;D

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Not a bad idea coming from sir Jet Cash. I'll will also agree with this one. Recently, I noticed that most of the repetitive or even nonsense threads came from jr. Members and newbies and I have a good feeling that disallowing them to do so will cause great spam reduction :).

I completely agree with you that the problem of proficiency in English at the proper level goes in parallel with the problem of superficial knowledge of crypto-currencies. And if the Honored bitcointalk participants may interest newcomers to understand the crypto-currency sphere, then it is more difficult to encourage learning a language. Forum participants, who don`t know English, should read and write in local branches. After reading and being active in local boards, they will gradually be able to read English-language branches (of course, if they set a goal and take English lessons as well). Such participants can be helped by "members" of local branches who speak to them in mother tongue and who can explain the features of the bitcointalk forum. I believe that bitcointalk should become a field for supporting people from all over the world. I am sure that crypto-currencies are our common future. Therefore, the interests of the forum participants include helping each other.

Thanks for your support, but there's only one guy that needs convincing of that. Doesn't even need to be me either as I'm sure there's other staff that can help out greatly here. Rickbig is probably just as active as I am and is probably handling more reports than I do these days. It's not just me who is getting frustrated though. There are lots of other mods and users (who some also probably deserve to be mods by now) that are clearly frustrated about the lack of action happening and could also be helping out in various ways here. I think if theymos doesn't trust anyone to be an admin then he should ask or even beg BadBear to come back if there's nobody else suitable because work just isn't getting done that needs to be right now.


I think maybe we could keep Serious Discussion as it is, but maybe make the merit requirement to post in the Ivory Tower much higher. I suggested a board for high merited users previously here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4854646.msg43759760#msg43759760) and this would have the same effect. Theymos did even put the idea of sub boards for high merited users in the 'maybe' catagory so I have hope they could one day be implemented.

Well the idea of spamming from the high rank members is really disgusting and serve not as a good example to newbies or the beginners. The reality is that most of us are here to raise funds but the bad aspect of it is that many people don't even care to know what the product the are dealing with is all about  which is very bad. And the idea of stopping signature campaign on this forum as you have already stated above will have a negative impact on the number of people visiting here and the beginners will have no much information here to access.

One of the most interesting fact of the BTT forum is there are thousands of Spambies turned back to Newbies as effects of new rank requirements.
Newbies and Spambies by now highly correlated each other.
I am not the one, who invented the term - Spambies - but I love this term, which immediately provide quick assessment on quality of forum users.
Newbies who have hundred threads published in total will be truly Spambies. It makes lot of sense because only trash threads can not get merits, especially no merit point with hundred or thousand threads
Spambies will be stucked at Newbies if they will keep spamming the forum and can not get at least one merited thread.

That is the whole point of the current merit system and we obviously are seeing that effect.

The stuck fever is not just happening to what you called "spambies" but to other high member spammers as well.

The only problem that we have to deal right now is the abuse in which spambies who have connection and budget can really go up because they can easily talk about sending each others merit

We all need such massively positive effect.

This is one of main reasons why I have a idea that someday, @Theymos should implement new rank requirement which focus on the automatically raised required merits for each rank chronologically.
What I meant is, over a schedule timeframe, for instance 6 months, users at each rank have to satisfy their required merits (new required ones) in order to keep staying at their current ranks. If not, they will be automatically demoted.
To be more clarified, if someone is a Full Member for now, and fortunately stood at the rank with 100 automatically airdroped merits because they was Full Member before the beginning day of the system. Then, what will happen if those guys have perfect opportunities to stay at Full Member rank forever?
It is truly un-fair, right? If someone can not earn even 1 or 10 merit over six months, it makes a lot of sense. And, those ones should be demoted somehow, in my stance.
As you wondered, Spambies are not only Newbies, old Junior Members, but also included some higher-ranked users.

You have to understand as well that not all poster here has a high standard. That is the reason why demoting somebody is not allowable and not fair as well in my opinion.

This forum consists  a lot of different type of posters
Highest standards quality posters.
Above average standard quality posters.
Average standard quality posters.
Below standard
Spammers.

Now most of the average standards and below standard posters doesn't get merits for some reason that includes(posting into wrong threads,wrong timing in which their good posts were not recognized)




You have a lot of holes for your idea. Another disadvantage is that there are some users here who are actually just providing their services and will only reply to those and take note that most of them are not getting merits as they are not that active. Therefore no watter what will you do for me theymos will also has the same reasoning for that and will not consider demoting certain users.

I think, you just think about winning yourself, yes, you have got a pretty big rank here. And you will think of helping to try to remove spammer, who is dominated by small rank, Newbie. And I read a lot of posts and comments, since the new rules (Jr Members need 1 merit) newbie rank is getting oppressed here.
Let's see, why is Newbie so hated this end → being considered a spammer → why is there a spammer? - because there is a prize for that (wherever there is a spammer, there must be income for him).

Why only see a Newbie account as a spammer? Surely you think, it's easy enough, just create an account (without the need for quality contributions), follow the campaign, and get a prize.
And I, Newbie account owner think otherwise, why don't you see a spammer at a higher rank, and bully him too? Don't you think, a high rank account with a lot of merit will not produce multi-account users or spam workers to join the prize campaign?
In fact it is higher than the income of a Newbie account spammer. Just imagine.

If there are still gift systems that rely on high rank accounts as a requirement and a high number of prizes, such as the Signature Campaign. Believe me, spammers and multi-account cheating will still be there. Think about this, this is the task of forum developers.

And introduce me to beginners, first I join this forum, just look at the point of view of Bounty. Yes, it's very natural to be interested in earning income rather than other topics, but I don't immediately understand how to join a bounty campaign, so I search and read a number of related posts on how to follow the Bounty and over time to increase knowledge, I am also interested in reading other topics. Well here are the main uses of the forum.
And the purpose of speaking as above, I want to voice the opinion of a Newbie, that we are also like you first, but we join at different times, forum is advanced, and many rivals to make quality posts and help, and even quality posts are not guaranteed to get merit . Merit is good for sharing.
Our enemy is now a spammer, because we feel oppressed here because of that.
,


Believe me, your statement does not help, and will make things worse if done. Just imagine, like in a school class, you can get knowledge, values, awards from within. As you say, who will let cheaters, cheaters get good grades or praise from the teacher? That will produce something worse in the future.

We don't and I'm not sure why you would think we are just picking on Newbies. You now merely need one merit to become a Junior Member. You need ONE HUNDRED to become a Full Member, and ONE THOUSAND to become a Legendary. Why are you not complaining about us attacking them? The problem is people are coming here in droves to farm thousands of accounts just by spamming and we need to stop that and the best way to do that is to make sure they're making quality posts and once rewarded for them via merit they get to move up ranks. If they spam or make low quality contributions then they will forever remain a low rank as they should.

You really made a good point, but like they said change is constant, some of the hero members in this forum has been here when their nothing like bounty, they join the forum because they love bitcoin and want to be part of the community,

Since the inception of ICO's and bounty most people that join the forum do so because of the bounty and i won't deny i am one of such, bounty attracted me to the forum in the first place and it is the same with majority here.

So I think what is implement on the system is right and those hero members deserve their spot because they are true supporters 

Then what would you or forum developer do to overcome them, spammer or multiple accounts that already have a high rank, the large amount of merit can divide into other cloning accounts only to join Signature Campaign. Then whether the post with high quality still applies to them, I don't think so. Similar to the government system, high ranking officials will be more flexible even though what they do is wrong, and the people will get punishment even though they are innocent.

Forum Reality, ideally creates a new paradigm and concept and even new policies on rules to produce good Bitcointalk Members at the Bitcointalk Forum. This means that people no longer think backward, generally think ahead, the Forum is an object of knowledge / information, but not the subject of a place to make money.

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<> Along with the development of information technology, dedicated, and oriented to the progress of the Forum, all will show one of them in the quality and sustainability of the results of the Forum Rules that have been implemented. Hopefully?

<> Plus, there are no two identical or identical brains. If there is no exact same brain, doesn't that mean there is no processed information about the Reality Forum, which is the same between one human being and another?

<> Even so, I also don't like it if the problem of differences in perspective or definition of reality is actually used as justification in the name of ego and laziness, not working in the real world.?

I think you are talking about the members who received a lot of merits in the introduction of the merit system. Merit is not moderated by the forum but DT members will red tagged if any member found guilty for merit abuse scenarios regardless of their rank. So it's not about the rank mate. The truth is they can't trade their merits for their alts forever. They will eventually dried up their initial airdropped merits. Most of the good bounty managers now put earned merit requirements for joining signature campaigns and also they will manually overlook the profile of the candidate whether merit abuse scenario happened before approval. Even most of the managers will not accept the members having red tagged (specially for merit abusers) for their signature campaigns. As a whole admin/mods/DT members were taken the necessary actions to overcome the spam and merit trading problems but sometimes even they can't stop these problems 100%. They all are humans too and spammers will found new ways every day to beat the system. So what we can do is report every time when you found out merit abuse scenarios to DT members which having solid evidence.

Giving away your sMerits for quality stuff is up to every individual member. If we all do their part there will be no complaining about the way merits distributed. Punishment for breaking a rule is always there whether higher rank or lower rank. There is no flexibility when it comes to the violation of rules and also we all should remember if you are not knowing the law is not an excuse when you found guilty for breaking a forum rule. I have seen that most of the members who break the law were saying that they are innocent in the first place and then saying we don't know the rule so give me a second chance.

BTW can you point out an example where officials became more flexible for a higher rank member found guilty for violation of forum rule?

You mix two different problems with each other: spamming and account farming. Spam, which by the way is most often manifested in the terrible quality of posts, and not in their huge number, comes mainly from the newbie rank participants. Spammers are those who don`t understand the subject at the proper level, so they write silly, useless comments, just to fulfill bounty quota. Therefore, no one says that only newbies are spammers, or that all newbies are necessarily spammers. Members of higher ranks may also suffer from this disease. But most often spam comes from newbies, as they aren`t familiar enough with the rules of the forum, and throw their strength to get easy money from signature campaigns.

Account farms, in turn, can be created by anyone, regardless of rank. The fact that a person has alternative accounts and with their help participates in bounty campaigns doesn`t mean that he`s a spammer, since he can write high-quality and constructive posts from all his accounts. Another issue is that these people also violate forum rules, but they do it in a different way than spammers. The apogee of these two problems are members of the forum, which combine the features of spammers and account farmers. They become the main reason for widespread violation of the rules, and cause a huge wave of dissatisfaction and irritation of forum participants seeking to follow the original goals of this site.

The merit system was implemented to prevent people just signing up here with multiple accounts just to milk campaigns for all they're worth and that's what it curbs. Why are you people so concerned with others and something that doesn't effect you? You're acting like the kids who want to take their own ball home because if they can't play then nobody else can. This 'rich get richer' bullshit is tiring.  Concentrate on yourself rather than others and either deal with it or go away because whining isn't going to do you any good at all.

As for people who abuse the merit system, they are dealt with by the community with negative feedback and that's the best we can do, but I'd concern yourself with your own posts and merits rather than anyone else.

Why do I care? Because I am part of this forum, even though with a low rank.
And if there are rules of forum members that are changed, surely everyone will feel it, even though it is very difficult for one side. And if there is no concern here, even though it does not benefit yourself, then I consider the purpose of this forum to be a failure. Because if everyone is selfish, everything will be messed up.

And thank you very much for praising me. Your final answer has explained everything. Hopefully this forum can improve itself and benefit all people.

Thank you, nice to meet you

The bigger a forum gets, and the more niche and limited the topic, the less there is to actually discuss. Aside from the usual "who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" type posts, and the day-to-day price movements and happenings, there's not a lot of things to talk about. There's more people on here than possible discussion material. You get people who care a lot about their rank and making money just posting nonsense, but if you banned all of these people, there wouldn't be more quality discussion, there would be about the same as before, but you would just notice it more because all the crap is gone. When you lurk for a while though you quickly develop a sense of which topics and sections are good parts of the site.

It's a little crazy how a lot of users on here care about magic internet points though. Maybe there is some psychological thing about a fascination with points, because it seems to be a thing on every social platform. I remember how even decades old forum software had those reputation points, Reddit has karma, Facebook has likes, etc. It's like nobody builds anything social without some sort of point system attached so users can compare the length of their virtual dicks. Maybe this explains how Bitcoin caught on so well when it was unknown, because it was pretty nice and somehow satisfying to own a lot of useless internet currency, but the more people thought that way the less useless and more valuable it eventually became.

the reality of the forum is that it has grown and become bigger than expected i guess!! when satoshi was creating this forum am sure he did not think of having much traffic as it is now!! what do you expect from a large community? let me ask how many of you have tried to be active in any group with lots of folks as a leader!! how easy has it been to manage!! trust me you can only control a certain number of spamming but you can take it out!! the forum needs traffic... i still learn good stuff from the forum and that is the good i can hodl on too...

Some of the boards are completely gone but there is still a lot of good discussions in Ivory Tower, Technical Discussion, Mining Speculation , etc.

We are living in a digital age.  People are willing to spend a lot of money on digital costumes in video games and other similar nonsense.  I think it gives people a feeling of superiority that they lack in their everyday lives.

Yeah, obviously you're a part and all of a sudden you came up here from your local section and start posting something different aside from your endless bounty reports. I know you feel deprive for your rank and feel emphaty to your fellow ranks, and actually you can get yourself out of that. And guess what, those who doesn't complain or throwing blame to others, smoothly rank up since they more often use their time in creating useful thread or post rather than ranting here. Try it sometime, it wouldn't hurt.

I speak here, because I have a different opinion, and believe me it's more painful to be silent than to express it

There are actually a lot of things to discuss about cryptocurrency. Specially the development area and the technical support. I got your point that the more users here and the lesser to talk about causes spamming. That is right, however most of the people here who do spamming doesn't actually contribute at all. Mind that there are actually a lot of good topics here that were swarmed up by those spammers cause no matter how good the topic is, if  those certain users doesn't plan to contribute at all then that is where the real problem starts.

On the other hand, why this forum actually creates a point system. Here we only have 2 point systems (based on my perspective) and that is the trust and merit system. Unlike facebook's like which is just a complete nonsense merit and trust system plays a very important rule on this forum.


Trust system was created(if i am not mistaken) for the obvious reason of eliminating or at least to lessen the (scammers). Tho we all know that it has a lot of holes the purpose is still meaningful.

Now one of the biggest problem is the bounty and signature campaign. For some reason it causes a lot of damage in this community that is why theymos should act and try to solove this problem by handing out the merit system.  Good thing is that there were a lot of users right now who are trying to cooperate aside from the fact that still this system has a lot of holes.

This is really a big concern and a harsh reality in this forum. Even I admit that one of my biggest reason in joining here is to gain money ! Yeah you are right that this is one of the best alternative way to gain money than working 12h a day like here us in Philippines which is one of the poorest country and has a economy but upon using this forum for almost a year now (this is a new account because I have been banned before thats why I am afraid to post comment in the forum because I might be able to get banned again so I comment only seldom but this topic is interested me thats why I am making my comment)  I learned so many things about blockchain and cryptos and so many ways to apply this is a real world I have been joining seminars and meetings with crypto experts to gain more knowledge so maybe I myself will maybe start my own ideas to apply with blockchains too. Yes ! I see in this forum that there where may 80 to 90% of useless topics in this forum but still there are few topics that really is helpful and not only to gain merits, popularity or something but its the intentions of the authors to help and not asking for any returns. Especially when I was just a beginner I rely everything that questions in my head on all of the topics in this forum and it helped me a lot to gain more knowledge but in the end the harsh reality is that we gain knowledge to gain money . ! :) Money Runs The World That's The Bad Reality ! Have a Great day Everyone !

At least you admit your here for money, your not trying to make other excuses.  I don't blame you considering wages for jobs in your country are quite low. 

Seriously? Maybe you plagiarized something that's why you got banned. Posting something that you want to express isn't a crime, I believe there's a democracy here. And they won't ban you if you follow the rules, so stop saying that you didn't want to post because you're afraid to get ban. Don't create such drama.

Not to mention your long bounty reports. It sucks.

In my stance, the most impressive reality of the forum is the latest waves of wipen-out Spambies, who have toxidized the forum for a long period of time with their massively shitshows around many different boards, from Altcoins boards to Meta.
With the latest rank requirement implemented around 2 weeks ago, the forum has been much cleaner because all those guy are not able to wear signatures before they get at least one merit to rank up to Junior Member rank.

I agree!

By the way, I would like to contribute my dieas on two points:
(1) As we all can see that over months (around 9 months after the launch day of merit system), there are many higher ranked users who have not received any merit, even some Ledgendary users. How to explain those cases? Is it really ridiculous?
The fact has actually happened.
Someone actually made a good initiative on this issue:
[Merit Analysis] Users ranked Sr. Member & up that have not earned any merit (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5041668.0)
Moreover, there are lots of Hero and Ledgendary have not earned any merit.

The percentage of users at Member, Full Member, Senior Member, Hero, and Ledgendary have not earned any merits till October of 2018 are 83%, 82.6%, 79.8%, 73.3%, and 47.2%, respectively. Amongst all ranks, Ledgendary is a outstanding one with nearly 47% of them have not received any merit. Ranks from Member to Senior Member (even with Hero Member) are almost the same.
Detailed statistics given below.

(2) Furthermore, sometimes I have a feeling that threads published by higher ranked forum users have less odds to be deleted. I have seen many higher ranked users posted one-line (less than 10 words) threads, and don't follow to see whether those threads will be deleted later or not, but I guess those threads rarely deleted than same sort of threads published by lower ranked users.

I don't have suitable skills to get those statistics, but if someone can do it. I think we all can have a really interestingly clear picture on what's going on in the forum 9 months after the start day of merit system. A very clearer general picture on forum users on all ranks.

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I don't want to fall into arguments there, but it's something like unfair system, even for lower-ranks, of course above Junior Member rank.
Do you agree at this point?
How fair the forum and merit system, rank system are if someone started as a Newbie and get 100 merits to rank up to Full Member rank. In another case, someone who is a Full Member and will not get any merit over the next one year, will be able to stay at Full member, forever.
It will become more clearly unfair for higher ranks, such as Senior, Hero and Ledgendary ranks.

Outside the forum, in real life, in some nations, there are strict requirements on professors, associate professors that they have to satisfy strict criteria, which require them to have new contribution, new project, new published scientific articles during speficic period in order to be as Professors / Associate professors. If they can satisfy those criteria, they will be demoted (as Junior Member rank witnessed weeks ago in the forum).

By magical internet points you mean merit? People only care about merit because that's the thing stopping them from earning here (or earning more).

People always like to be rewarded with things though, especially for effort, and even more so when there's financial benefit to them. This sort of thing goes back to my very early schooldays. How many people used to get some sort of points as a reward? We had a thing called 'gems' in high school which teachers awarded for good work or behaviour. Once you got x amount you actually got things like Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum certificates once you achieved like 100/500/1000 gems over the year or whatever. Some of them came with actual rewards like McDonalds vouchers and book tokens and shit like that. Merits (and ranks) are now like the adult version of that and have significant consequences on how much you can earn here from bounties and signature campaigns so that's why people are so desperate for them or even irate about the whole system when it prevents them from earning.   

It seems that you haven't understood what i was trying to say based on your perspective you find merit system unfair? Because i was talking about how unfair demoting can be.


Actually receiving no merits since it have started is not a problem for me as long as you were not spamming. As i have said there are few users here who only provide services who is also muchlikely has a lower chance of receiving atleast one merit.


To that jr.member who got demoted that you were talking about has a clear explanations. There post got deleted therefore their activities aswell but the 10 merit still remains

i think there should be a section in the forum for bounty campaigns only this would eliminate the spam and all the one liners everyone keeps talking about. Then everyone who complains about these bounty treads wouldn't have to go to that section at all so they would not see it and stop complaining so much.

If you really learned a lot during the year you spent on the forum, besides you visited various cryptocurrency events, then why were you banned? There must be a reason. For the year you can get a great experience and learn to understand the features of this site. It`s very weird that you don`t write posts, because you`re afraid of being banned again. Do you have a reason to fear this? If yes, then you aren`t sure about your comments and knowledge about the cryptocurrency sphere. If you question yourself the quality of your own posts, how should other forum members treat them?

I totally agree, bitcointalk.org is a FORUM, its free to join and its monitored
by both board moderators and signature campaign administrators.

The forum is here to be used by all and anyone who wants to be involved
in crypto. There is no restriction to getting involved by a persons technical
or linguistical abilities. bitcointalk.org provides a platform for educating,
learning, expressing opinions and as a source revenue which we are all
entitled to under the rules of the forum.

It is refreshing to read theymos' post after reading the OP's which to me
seem a bit elitist

The forum has already had those specific sections/ boards/ child boards for bounties.
So, what did you want, something more than that, such as a new board/ childboard in which posts can be counted by campaign managers.
And, this section if implemented, will be a perfect place for spammers and bounty hunters because they will have a specifically legal place to show their shitshows. By saying 'legal', I meant threads posted there will be accepted by campaigns' managers.
Personally, I don't see any probability to see @Theymos create a new place like your suggestion.
In contrast, it is a perfect place (reasons mentioned above) for spammers, and spamming endemic will not be wipen out with this 'solution'.
Of course, they will reduce, I meant only reduce, their complaints because they will have better place to spam.
Nevertheless, as we all known that merit system has still been one of a hardest things spammers have to pass through in order to rank up, so they will keep complaining about merit system.

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In a word, I don't see any reason for potential successful scenarios with your proposal, which should not be implemented in the future.

The forum was created with a purpose. And the owners have consistently told us that the forum is intended for a democratic model. I agree with you that the influx of new members is tending to derail to original ideas but the mods are on top of the game. I am sure you too will be affected if every suggestion of members is implemented.

more than 6 months - 189 posts and the majority are bounty shit. so you know what, you add fuck all value here, you are not trying to integrate into the community you just want your shitty bounty funds that equate to less pay than a paper round - so you know what, if you were here or not makes fuck all difference to anyone here

I agree that in general, recognition and respect in the Internet space through Like, Karma and other reputation points associated with the psychological motives of the participants. Our life is gradually moving to the electronic world, where we need to win back our place under the sun. Those who we are in reality, and our profiles on social networks are completely different things. Success in real life doesn`t guarantee recognition on the Internet. And vice versa. Just as we`re trying to assert ourselves in our everyday life, we are trying to earn respect in the world of social networks, which are becoming an integral part of our existence, and for some people - a priority "reality".

But merit on the bitcointalk, in addition, has another nature. Considering that the majority of forum members hunt for easy money, which in turn is associated with bounty campaigns, and they put forward demands for rank, it`s merit they need for money. Few people want to get it for self-affirmation. Therefore, merit appears to be a necessary (and often hard-to-reach) means of making money than a reputation indicator.