Bitcoin Forum

With the slew of hacked or locked accounts awaiting recovery should there be a mechanism to reallocate the temporary accounts: Activity, Merit and Smerit.

I'm not even sure I've seen an account recovered, but it is inevitable that some will be. It would be nice if these members could feel like it isn't time wasted. My thoughts are that if an account is recovered, the user will have created a temporary account to follow the steps for account recovery (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497545.0).

From here they can carry on being a member of the forum. Upon their account being returned, all stats should be merged including posts and feedback; but the first 3 are what most would be interested in.

Edit: A few things I forgot.

When the main account is recovered the temporary account has to be locked for any transfer of activity or Merit. Ideally the signature space would then be used to link the profiles. This could help with preserving post history, because transferring posts would probably be more hassle than it's worth. That would also be helpful in linking feedback.

The idea seems nice however how would you do this merge things? There will be data loses and this could create a mess which could be bigger than account recovery. In the merging process we will see alter in merit system and trust system which is also against the forum rule. Remember merit and trust are not moderated.

What did you mean by first 3?

You are talking about altering Merit and sMerit which we know is not on the rules. Activities can be done but this can create a mess on data arrangement, quoting etc.

I agree OP has good ideas & intentions but I think recovering the accounts would be easier to do than merging them, don't you agree?  :) Not to mention that you would keep your post history which is more important than any of those metrics.

I think the solution here would be to assign more people to investigate the cases. Now, I know mods have a lot of work to do but maybe we can select trusted members that could volunteer to help out - a system that is working fine already with the merit sources.

I know I'm not a trusted member here but I would be willing to help out if needed.

It's not like they are recovering a large amount of accounts in a day. A program could be written to automate this but I would propose it be a manual adjustment carried out by the Admins. Like with anything there could be human error, but overall it would be simple addition, which I think is well within the skillset of Admins.


Nothing about my suggestion has anything to do with moderating. In regards to feedback that can be handled by the users themselves, but would require users to know when dealing with an alt account. I suggested that because along with the good, should a member chose to be untrustworthy I feel the red tag should follow them.
Your right we would see an altering of Merit, but it would be more of a reallocation from the temporary account to the recovered account. There would be no net increase or decrease in the total amount in the system.

I don't recall anything in the rules prohibiting this. I would see this as a role filled by the Admin team.


You may have missed the general idea. This plan is in addition to account recovery. The idea is that after the account is recovered, the members original account be awarded the accrued activity and merit from the temporary account.

Edited OP.

They are having hard time recovering the accounts and on top of it you are asking them to merge posts and other stuffs. Too ambitious I guess  ;D

Merits are not moderated, trusts are not moderated.

exactly. The idea is nice, the problem is the recovery is already the simplest job ever that requires 2 minutes. The suggested here scheme requires actually more work :D

You're right.

This in no way replaces the recovery of an account. This is meant as a step after recovery, to provide incentive to remain a valued member of the community while someone waits on recovery.