How SMF 1.x handles reports is that it sends an email to all mods with jurisdiction over the reported post, with the email's from address set to your email. bitcointalk.org still does this, though I also added a reports queue, which is what most mods actually use.

Fixed, thanks. Though I guess Yahoo IM is defunct, so the icon isn't very useful.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.25.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 1.10 PoohFace
3 1.00 djselery
1 1.00 Technomage
1 1.00 whalecubco
1 0.95 irfan_pak10
2 0.95 Chronobank

Yes, I regret that I didn't plan for language pack support in the beginning, but now it'd require very major changes.

Sorry, that's not logged.

I guess Trump is just going to post a "help wanted" ad in the paper for all of his cabinet positions: https://www.greatagain.gov/news/help-wanted-4000-presidential-appointees.html 

Lauda just pointed this out to me: Mike Hearn is no longer involved in Bitcoin much, but is still the moderator of this section. Probably he should be replaced. Is there someone in the "official" BitcoinJ project willing to replace him?

Note that moderators of the alt client sections aren't considered full staff members, and aren't paid by the forum. They're mods here so that they can sticky topics and such.

Absolutely agreed. I think that the people of the US would be much better-off overall if the US was dissolved and all of the states became independent. A lot of people's first reaction to that is that US states aren't self-sufficient, but that's the case with many countries -- that's what trade is for. I think it'd work out fine.

A willing complete dissolution of the US is very unlikely to actually happen anytime soon, though. I think that the secession of a handful of states (California, maybe Texas, maybe some of the east coast after California secedes) is at least somewhat plausible, and some improvement.


I was very disappointed in Gary Johnson this campaign. He was ineffective in working toward winning, many of his policies were non-libertarian, and he largely failed to spread libertarian ideas. I'm absolutely not a Trump fan, but Gary Johnson often looked like a Hillary shill.

This is especially disappointing because I think that Johnson did have quite a good campaign in 2012.

Probably the Democratic party in the US would change its platform to have more chance of winning. Existing Democrats wouldn't be happy about this, but maybe some of them could move to the California Republic.


Not very likely, but in many ways it'd be political advantageous for the Republicans who are now in power. But there'd be huge practical consequences, and I doubt there's enough political will in California for it.

I wonder if it'd help for California to secede, as some people are now advocating. I think that a large portion of Democrats are located in California, so there'd be a lot fewer Democrats who would have to worry about Republican policies, and vice-versa.


You can't.

My personal feeling is:

I don't particularly like Trump, and I voted for neither him nor Clinton. Trump has expressed several good policies, but also some terrible/evil policies. And my overall feeling is that he doesn't actually have much ideology, so I don't trust anything he says anyway. But I can't stand Clinton, who is nearly the worst possible candidate, so I'm happy about this surprising result, and I can't help but be a bit optimistic even though there's a high probability that Trump will not actually be an improvement on net.

Bitcoin-wise, I think that Trump might be a bit better than Clinton, but it's difficult to say.

Interestingly, this is the first time since the 1920s that the Republicans have held the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Let's see what they've got.

Fox is projecting that Trump will be the next president of the United States.


(Edit: there was a video here, but it doesn't exist anymore.)

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.25.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 1.10 irfan_pak10
1 1.05 Rupert Murdoch
1 1.00 RussianMiner
4 1.00 YoBit


The issue mainly is that your ad might be unsafe for forum users.

Sorry, due to the DDoS and other things, I lost track of time. (When I went to check, my guess was that only about 8 days had passed...)


Sorry, you have a negative trust score for me, so I won't accept your bids.


I investigated this issue somewhat, and I agree that crowdsale.vdice.io is misleading, which is not allowed in advertised sites. vdice.io may have merit, but it is not decentralized: it apparently relies on random.org and TLSNotary, which are both centralized.

The auction will end sometime in the next 30 hours. I need to determine what irfan_pak10 and Rupert Murdoch are going to advertise; depending on their response, I might reject their bids. The current state is:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 1.10 irfan_pak10
1 1.05 Rupert Murdoch
1 1.00 RussianMiner
6 1.00 YoBit
1 0.95 djselery
1 0.85 XBTFreelancer

Note: If you haven't bid already and it is not obvious what you're going to advertise, PM me or include in your post what you're going to advertise. Otherwise I will reject your bid.

The auction continues.

The most recent 504s were due to an accidental misconfiguration I made. I'm tentatively hoping that my countermeasures were in fact successful against the DDoS.

I changed something which may block the UDP flood. We'll see.

Email is probably broken again for most people. Note that the email is being sent, but your email provider is blocking it -- whenever I change IP addresses, I have to take a bunch of steps to make the IP look more "clean" for email purposes. I will fix this in a few days.

I have some ideas for how to mitigate the DDoS, but I might not finish it today.

As someone mentioned earlier, I don't want to use Cloudflare because Cloudflare can see/modify all encrypted traffic, they are a massive central point of failure on the Internet, IMO they probably assist and are supported by the NSA, they only protect against fairly small-scale attacks, and they really make life difficult for Tor users.

The UDP flood is causing high packet loss. What this will look like when browsing the forum is:
 - When you first connect to the forum after not browsing any pages for a while, it might be especially slow, and it might time out. After it completely fails / times out, just keep trying. It will eventually work.
 - After you first connect, browsing should be much smoother because at this point you'll already have a TCP connection open, though it might be a bit slow, and occasionally a page might time out.
 - If the page times out while posting, press the refresh button in your browser and accept any warning it gives you. Keep trying until it goes through.

I thought for a while that it was just some sort of upstream congestion, but I've found that it is a very large UDP flood that is causing issues despite being blocked outside of the server. I will find some way of mitigating it.