But ranks are meaningless when all you need is time and they were being colossally abused because of that because all you had to do was log in and make one post every fortnight regardless of quality. Do we let eighteen year-olds drive or fly a plane as soon as they turn 18 or do we require some sort of qualification from them before they're allowed to do so? Now that you need merit ranks will actually start to mean something and are at least some sort of achievement if you earn them, but they previously didn't mean anything other than you've made a certain amount of posts over a certain amount of time.


But this just wasn't the case. Many ICOs accepted anyone, even Newbies, and people were literally farming Junior accounts by their dozens and in some cases hundreds (and probably even thousands) just to abuse campaigns because that's all they needed to do to maximise earnings. That really needed to change and one merit is only a small spanner in the works for the biggest abusers and doesn't go far enough in my opinion.


I wouldn't call them elitist. I only wish more campaigns only accepted certain higher ranks, or just people who actually made great posts. If campaigns did their due diligence and had some quality control then we wouldn't have even needed ranks or merit in the first place, but the problem is many campaigns accepted anyone regardless of quality and that was the whole crux of the problem.


The only people who wouldn't agree to it are those who now actually have to start writing half-decent posts, and that isn't a bad thing. Any 'renowned' member wouldn't have an issue getting merit because they already make great contributions so it's largely irrelevant to them, but something needed to be done about the droves of people coming here just to post utter drivel over their 200 alt accounts each, especially when they can't speak English very well or know little to nothing about bitcoin and are only here because someone told them they can get paid for spamming or copy and pasting. Merit isn't a perfect system and it does work, but if you have a better solution I'm sure everyone would love to hear it.

Why are you asking this and why does it even matter? People get banned for breaking the rules and you were banned for plagiarism. Why is whether staff ban people 'simultaneously' or not a burning question?


"Friend". Do we really have to go over this whole rigmarole again? Why the hell would you create an account with the same name as your "friend". You even said it was your account in your first post here:

The user was probably removed and replaced with the two new people.


Can you sign a message from that address? There's huge gaps in your post history from August 24, 2016 to May 08, 2017 and then June 06, 2017 to September 06, 2018.

If you want a shot at this campaign you should probably follow what actmyname said, but also be more active here.

Please let me know where I can purchase a Lambo for the price of a solitary merit or a Copper Membership, or stop with the dramatic exaggeration. These idiots need to get one merit, and if they can't achieve that or afford the ten dollars for a Copper Membership then they should find another 'job'. There is no entry barrier to posting here and that's the crux of the whole issue in the first place as anyone is free to post away without limitation (other than the spam-control wait times) and when they can get paid for that it just becomes a recipe for disaster. I actually don't think there's enough barriers to be able to start earning from posting here and you should have to have actually achieved something before you're allowed to earn from posting and begging or buying a merit certainly doesn't qualify someone to do so.

It doesn't have to set an absolute precedent whatever the outcome, but merit abuse should probably be taken on a case by case basis. The fact that he received merits for two separate posts within a minute by the same user who is also a scammer and was trying to sell merit it is pretty obvious some shenanigans went on here. If we were going to give people the benefit of the doubt then in probably 99% of cases there's never going to be be enough evidence to be wholly conclusive.

But it really isn't hard. People shouldn't have to just make one good post and then they're good to go. Any idiot can do that, and once they have it they then don't have to bother making any more good posts because Christmas has come early for them. They can just go back to shitposting again, so that's why they should have to demonstrate they're not a one-hit wonder and can make a handful of decent posts. This is why I would argue we should make the requirement ten merit, and I actually think it will make things easier for everyone. People will be more liberal with their merits and so users are more likely to get merited, and shitposters won't be able to abuse the system as easy. When one merit is all you need to earn here people become weary about giving that user a license to get paid, and making one solitary good post really isn't enough to measure their capability especially when you can just beg, buy or trade the merit quite easily.

I think he was talking more about things like coding and handing off the management of the forum to somebody else, but even if he wasn't is there honestly nobody trustworthy on this forum or planet earth to restore accounts or handle other admin-based duties? What's the worst somebody could do who is tasked with restoring accounts? Steal accounts to sell themselves? That would soon be found out and would it be worth risking your reputation here for a few bucks.


But they're not even being looked into right now so chances of having them restored are next to zero. Do you think that is acceptable? Imagine being locked out of your bank or exchange or facebook account and just having absolutely no response from anyone at all and you're locked out indefinitely. It's also a serious security problem when there's no chance of you having your rightful property returned to you. Giving some more trusted staff the basic tools to just restore accounts isn't that much of leap and there's probably not that much damage they could do.

Or makes good business/traffic sense. Most men are simple creatures and are far more likely to click on a video if there's a woman in the thumbnail. I'm not saying it should be a woman and don't care either way, but just stating facts and I don't think it has anything to do with being PC or a SJW, arguably even the opposite if it is done just for clicks/views. I think a better option would be to have a mix of all genders including those who identify as non-binary gender-queer pansexuals and attack helicopters.


It can be easily solved, but not without action from theymos which is the hard part. All of these are things that have been suggested before, and theymos even agreed to signature blacklisting problem campaigns but it just never happened (likely due to him not having time to look into these things). I still think we should tackle those issues first before any youtube channel is started.

It might not be smart in terms of chances of winning, but it's smart in business terms. Winning is just a bonus when there's millions of dollars on the line just for stepping into the ring. Connor made a million more than Khabib from the purse even though he lost so there's no losers here. Conor probably made much much more from additional sponsors and got to promote his whisky for free. There's not much money in a 'tune up' fight and nobody wants to see him fight bums or people he's easily going to beat. Connor hasn't just been sat on his arse since his last MMA fight and he's been doing a lot of training in between, but giving him a year to prepare to fight Khabib again likely won't make much difference. Khabib will also have the same amount of time to improve.

I agree something needs to be done. The problem of hacked accounts would be solved very quickly if there were more people given access to do so, but at the moment the only two people who can restore them are theymos and cyrus and they don't because they just don't have the time. Much of the forum workload should be delegated here between current and new staff and things would start to improve immediately. If the admin's aren't going to be doing certain things like restoring accounts and replying to emails etc then that work really does need to be given to someone who can and ignoring it is only just going to make it worse as more workload stacks up and adds to the already huge backlog.

No. If you can't get one merit then you probably don't deserve to be a Junior Member anyway. Many people would argue that no merit should have been 'airdropped' in the first place, but I don't think we should be making everyone a Junior just because of when they signed up, and if you can't get one merit then that's something they're going to have to figure out for themselves. If we allowed this then there'd be a hell of a lot of bots and farmed accounts that would be able to continue on with their shitposting shenanigans.

But then the argument would be why should that effect the content of their posts and be relevant within that board? You can obviously make the argument both ways though and sometimes it is helpful in determining trolls and people who are just being inflammatory because that's all their account is worth now, but there will be then those that just discredit or ignore a persons posts or opinion merely because they have negative feedback. Either way I doubt it's something theymos will change.

Well that's something I think should change and more admins would solve this. If theymos isn't that bothered about enforcing bane evasion then we should just get rid of the rule and make it that you can just create another account to use because that's what people do anyway.


Well I anticipated this and that's why I've suggested we need signature bans/blacklists as well and that's what was meant to happen with the Signature Campaign Guidelines. If a campaign was banned then so would their signatures.


I've also suggested this, and theymos did at least put it into the 'maybe' category: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4893744.msg44432901#msg44432901


theymos doesn't have to care about the money and it can be given to charity, but I think ICOs should have to pay something to operate here. Do Facebook and Google let you advertise for free? No. Not only do they advertise for free but they do it at the detriment and destruction of the forum and that shouldn't be allowed to continue. I'd estimate probably at least 90% of staff workload is caused by ICOs and the spam they cause so they should probably have to start compensating for that. It really annoys me that staff are effectively defacto campaign managers for ICOs that are too lazy to do their own job and they sit back and often collect millions in the process.

Once they've paid the fee here we could give them their own sub board in the Alt Coin section and this would also eliminate paid bumping because it would become useless and futile, so there are numerous benefits to this in my opinion.

Just report those posts; they don't belong there. I wouldn't necessarily be against showing trust site-wide, but I get why theymos doesn't want to do so, and it doesn't really need to be in boards like Bitcoin Discussion and Politics. Also, we can't be responsible for every idiot who decides to give their money away and merely showing the negative/positive trust doesn't save people as we can see from the Marketplace.

My personal opinion is that one merit is fine for becoming a Junior and at least that is some protection for bots so those users can still be nuked, but I think Juniors should have their signatures removed completely and you only get one until you get ten merit and become a Member. Requiring one is just open to far too much abuse, and as we've seen people are reluctant to even give out one because of this. I would personally be more liberal like you if the merit requirement was higher because one merit isn't life or death and the one fluke merit doesn't give you the ability to earn.

Theymos posted this earlier:


The thread is locked so you can discuss this info in here, but is further evidence that misinformation is being spread by the 'Railroaded' series.


Well it is silly, but what actually is a life sentence in the US? A life sentence in the UK is usually 30 years I believe, and not actually until you die. Sometimes you can get out in half of that time depending on the parole setting but many life sentences carry a 'minimum' term of 15 years and you can get out after that due to good behaviour or whatever.

It doesn't have to be the next big UFC match. It very likely wouldn't be this year, though maybe they could make it the big fight at the end of the year like they sometimes do. They've had big fights on Dec 30 the past two years but looks like they've both been suspended anyway or temporarily at least, but I'm sure it'll get extended. Khabib could even be stripped of the belt, but I doubt it. Conor will probably won't a lot of time to train as well, because it's probably the only one way he's got a chance. McGregor will probably do the trilogy fight with Diaz at some point and it would probably be the next best thing for him in terms of money, though it probably won't be an easy fight for him.

But isn't this attitude counter-productive? We're meant to be rewarding users who make decent posts and if a user makes one then that post probably should be merited. I get your logic though, and this is why I'd argue that I think we should up the requirement to ten because I think merit sources would actually be more liberal with their merits and users would also have to make a few decent posts to get the merit and not just one. When all they need is one it makes their job much easier and merit sources much harder because they don't want to give a shitposting bounty hunter the merit if that's all they need. A lot of users will probably just give up trying to make decent/great posts once they'd achieved Junior rank and I think that's a real issue. It's a bit of pain when we have to start checking user's post history just to check if they should be merited, but if the requirement is ten merit then we probably don't need to do that and can start being more liberal which benefits everyone.

People were already really just farming Juniors because that's all they needed to join bounties. To maximise profits they just created dozens of them and this was big business hence why we needed some merit requirement to stop this abuse. It's been made a little harder now but one merit still isn't much and is too easy to abuse, hence why I think we should make it ten.


Well they don't really have a choice. 'Farming' high ranked accounts in any significant number has become practically impossible. Nobody is going to waste 1.4 years trying to farm Heroes, especially when the chances of them getting the merit is going to be incredibly difficult. The only people who will become Heroes now are those that are committed to just one or two accounts and can make great posts. Prior to the merit system any shitposter who had the time and energy could farm as many accounts as they liked because as long as you made the shitposts over time then you'd hit the rank eventually. Farming accounts industrially is out of the question now really, but shitposting with Juniors and Member ranks isn't.

I don't think it has much to do with that, but rather that they just don't have much choice. When you can't speak English very well if at all and know little about the topics you are posting in what do you expect them to do? The money is too good here to turn down, and it's too easy to copy and paste. Greed and laziness also comes into it, but for many others they don't have much choice if they literally can't really come up with their own acceptable posts. Many actually get away with it for quite a while as well as it's hard to spot and if we didn't have as many community members looking out for this behaviour many more would be geting away with it.


The account could belong to a farmer (or bought from one). There's been a fair few farmers (some using bots and others not) that just chose 'real' random names for their usernames here. Maybe they pulled them from somewhere or used a generator but it's not that uncommon. They also might think that using a real name gives them an advantage or makes them more 'real'. I dunno. Probably not worth spending too much time thinking about the hows and whys of this though  .