All boards should have a description, and some with them should even expanded be upon so there's less confusion. I agree about the Press sub, but I think that board has served it's purpose now and should be locked/archived. It was created when any press mention about bitcoin was exciting and essentially 'noteworthy', but now it's just used to spam any old crap that vaguely mentions crypto. If it's to stay then I think we should prohibit any bitcoin/crypto-based websites but there definitely needs to be some standards pinned in there at least.

I think he's just a troll. Or an idiot. Doesn't matter either way. On pretty much every forum you get a couple of hardcore trolls who's mission is just to annoy and aggravate people, and usually there is one who is overly-religious and won't actually listen to anything anyone is saying because they're so fundamentally fixed in their views (or trolling). I don't see why he would be state-sponsored though and there's certainly no evidence for that, but of course it is the sexiest conspiracy theory.

If there's any paid trolls here then they will probably be paid by rival companies to attack other services, and if there's any government backed ones (which I personally find unlikely) then I think they'd probably be spreading more fud about bitcoin rather than just posting easily refutable crap about Christianity.

There's probably no reason other than that's just how it came to be. That board probably doesn't need three mods, but there's certainly some other boards that do need at least one and Bitcoin Discussion is one of them. In fact, I'd say most sub boards probably need at least one dedicated mod. It just frees up workload and saves everything being pilled up for Globals. Moderating Bitcoin Discussion (or trashing all the shit threads in there) would probably be a part-time job in itself, but until we get a couple of dedicated mods there and clamp down on the root cause of the spam (ICO campaigns) then nothing much will change.

Probably 99% of people who are banned for copy and pasting won't create a thread in Meta about it. They'll either know what they were banned for and the rest just do it as a last ditch effort to try rescue their account from certain death (or they are genuinely oblivious to why they were banned (apparently a lot of people think copy and pasting is ok)).

I think a lot more people will probably just email the address provided and hope for the best, but I'm not even sure if it's being monitored at all (they're certainly aren't getting responded to) so they just languish in uncertainty. The message should probably be removed or edited, or someone should be assigned to monitor and reply to applicable mails. At the very least you could probably attach a message giving the most common reasons for bans so people can work it out. If nobody is ever going to monitor that email then it should just be removed completely.


True, but also there are almost certainly many more people not being banned who are getting away with it. It's just the tip of the shitberg that we're seeing and sadly even those with numerous accounts getting banned will still likely be evading on the rest we missed as we are unlikely to get them all every time.


Again, most will probably just follow the apparent 'procedure' and use the email provided. Meta will be a last ditch effort for them.


They earn little as a single unit, but when you've got hundreds of accounts claiming them the money soon starts to rack up. There have been some cases where farmers have had tens of thousands of dollars worth of tokens sent to an address, so there is a heck of a lot of money to be made from shitposting, especially in volume. When you've got ICO campaigns paying people for one liners or drivel or just copy and pasting this becomes very lucrative and also very easy money. Fire up a bot over hundreds of accounts and watch the money come in. You might have a dozen or even half banned but that's just an occupational hazard to a farmer these days.


They're all people we don't want here in one way or another. If you come here just to post one liners to get paid or copy and paste then there's no reason they should be here. That's why the forum is in such a state. Probably 90% of these users who sign up here do so just because they've heard you can get paid good money here for doing very little. When you know little to nothing about bitcoin and can't speak English very well then this is just a recipe for disaster.

Had 1-1 for Cardiff vs Burnley and doubly annoyed at that Burnley winning goal because I put my free £5 bet on three draws: That game, Liverpool/Chelsea (which had already come in) and today's Bournemouth v Crystal Palace which I expect to be close.


I think they're always going to be close. Last year's was as well. I think this years will be even closer because people get an extra half a point for a close score. Also, don't forget there's still five consolation prizes where you can win your money back for being in the top five highest scorers from a round so there's always something to play for. Not sure who the top five are right now but it's easy enough to work out.

I'm not denying the existence of them, but I think governments probably have bigger and better things to do than troll a bitcoin forum. Most of the "trolls" here do it just for kicks. They're sad and pathetic people and that's how they get off, but that's not something that concerns them.


Where does BadDecker fit into this? Is he a troll or just an idiot? You can often never tell.

Newbies aren't a race of people anybody is discriminating against. It's shitposters who people have a problem with regardless or rank, and you can be a shitposter with a Hero account, it's just a sad fact that the majority of spammers obviously happen to be Newbies or lower ranked members and this was just getting worse and worse as more and more people were coming to this forum just to earn by posting. When you know little to nothing about bitcoin and can't speak English very well then that is just a recipe for disaster and it's those users people are annoyed with because they've made the forum a spam-fest almost unfit for purpose, and that's not just because they're a Newbie. Nobody merely cares about that. If Newbies were coming here and making great posts then there would be no issue, but the matter of the fact is most them aren't. Now with the merit system any decent poster will quickly rise though the ranks, but if you're still a Newbie hundreds if not thousands of posts later then the issue lies with the quality of their content.

Why do we even use it if you think this could possibly be the case? Is it really worth the risk? How effective is CloudFlare at even stopping DDOS attacks or whatever? We've still had a few here whilst we've used it, right?

Is a better Cloudflare-like service something that could be created (I remember you briefly mentioning how you would create one somewhere)? I've suggested in the past that we could use funds that the forum could generate from things like extra ad slots and premium ranks etc for projects that would benefit the community and even the world and this surely could be one, especially with your concerns about it.

You're sadly wasting your time asking the admins to look into this. I've messaged both cyrus and theymos about numerous large scale abuses over the years and they're just not looked into anymore (just like account restorations), and this will just be the tip of the shitberg. I get that they shouldn't be looking into mere cases of just merit abuse but when there's hundreds of accounts being farmed by shitposting and dozens of them have already been banned  for plagiarism then it just makes a joke of the rules and banning them is a waste of time. If ban evasion on such a scale isn't going to be looked into or more admins made to look into this colossal abuse then we should just get rid of the rule and even stop banning copy and pasters because it's just a waste of time. The best we can do as a community is red tag them once found as annoying and time-consuming as that is.

Yeah, two of them are obviously just troll accounts. Big Dicks is almost certainly just somebody's alt account he uses to troll and post inflammatory crap.  


The issue is when people just start doing it to inflame and troll which there are a few that obviously are. As you said, people should just ignore those that obviously annoy them so much, but there are also people who overstep the line and just say things to be disruptive.


Because we have a Politics & Society sub forum, though you could certainly argue we don't really need it, but it's there and I doubt it will be removed and I don't think it should just because sometimes people say things that annoy or hurt others.


So does the bible.


So is Christianity.


Only muslims kill are rape and do acid attacks in the UK? Most of the rapes that happen are probably done by drunken white males on the weekend. Half of them probably even claim to be "Christian" too. Would that be that relevant?


Why is their religion relevant to this? They don't rape because of their religion and there are plenty of paedophile rings run by whites and every other race, but this rhetoric is just used to incite race or religious hatred. Jimmy Saville is probably the biggest paedophile the country has ever seen, but nobody is calling him a Christian paedophile. If you're against rape then be against rape, but if you only get irate about a fraction of rapes committed by certain people then your biases are obvious.

It's sadly too easy to bypass especially for those who are abusing it the most. The biggest abusers of the forum aren't just going to give up because of this requirement, but we're already seeing how they're dishing merit between alts their dozens of alts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037225.msg46135292#msg46135292

That's why I think it should be more than one. One is fine for moving from Newbie to Junior but it shouldn't get you a signature. Remove signatures from Juniors and then you have to get ten Merit and become a Member to get one. Getting ten merit is ten times more difficult and costly and also much easier to spot abuse. Anyone can get one merit just for bothering to make one decent post that they could have copied from anywhere. Ten merit is much harder to get and that would at least be some sort of competency test for whether you should be allowed to earn via signatures here (and not everyone should be).

Bitocoin sent a lot of merit to these two on the 18th:

    September 18, 2018, 03:53:04 PM: 50 to YumukluSucurta for Re: Doğrusu
    September 18, 2018, 03:48:55 PM: 20 to easyboy for Re: kapitalizmin iyi yönleri varmı

All accounts registered October 2016:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=907810 YumukluSucurta October 11, 2016
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=909254     easyboy     October 15, 2016,

Alpsea sent 50 merits to:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=909166     coffeandtango October 15, 2016

coffeandtango sent 50 to:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=909195 kerem89     October 15, 2016

kerem89 also received 4 merit from:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=909459 Hopewithmoney October 16, 2016,

None of those are tagged as of yet. Might be worth seeing where the merit ends up (if they haven't dished it all out already).

Just because little to few merits are given in a certain subsection doesn't mean that board shouldn't exist. Little to no merits are probably given in Digital Goods but that doesn't mean we should get rid of it. Merit is to reward notable posts because people were farming accounts just by spamming or claiming giveaways and doing that is now pointless if you want to move up ranks and so it should be. You shouldn't become a Hero member just because you can be bothered logging into every one of your 200 accounts once a fortnight for 1.4 years just to claim a giveaway. Now rising through the ranks actually requires merit and means something as opposed to just time x posts.

Well you've touched on a huge problem here that needs to be addressed, but what we need to be doing is tackling the issue at the source. And of course the source of the spam megathreads in the campaigns and their managers that pay these users to post in them continually. As long as shoddy campaigns can get away with paying spammers then nothing at all is going to change and a handful of reporters and mods is not enough to defeat thousands of shitposters shitposting every day. That's why there needs to be some community standards for signature campaigns and punishments for those that don't abide by them. Until there is then it's just like fighting a a hydra; you trash or lock one thread and then two more have already popped up in their place.


Well plagiarism is another huge issue in itself that we need to address, but we shouldn't be leaving threads up just so we can catch copy and pasters easier.


As I just said in another thread, theymos has all the stats of all the reporters in each separate sub board and there's already quite a few very high reporters to choose from including some very long-standing and pretty trusted users. I've suggested a couple in the past that I'm sure would make a huge difference, but leaving sub like Bitcoin Discussion without dedicated mods is only going to make it worse whilst putting more pressure on existing staff to handle the mountains of reports coming in which is never ending.

It should have been done a long time ago, but why isn't it as easy as choosing a merit source? I'd argue it's probably easier. Theymos has all the stats of all the reporters in each separate sub board and there's already quite a few very high reporters to choose from including some very long-standing and pretty trusted users. I've suggested a couple in the past that I'm sure would make a huge difference, but leaving that sub without one only makes it worse and others are even starting to lose hope in reporting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5039285.0

Well they should, but the problem is they don't.


Most love any sort of comments because they keep threads bumped to the top so it doesn't matter what gets posted in there as long as something is.


Most of them are bots and there's thousands. The rest are mostly just bounty and account farmers looking to easily rack up their post count.


These aren't that much of an issue to me, especially when they're confined to the bounty sub, but we could disallow this sort of claiming and only allow the announcement there and their TWITTER/Twitter Link: XXXX/Likes and Retweets claims would be prohibited and only allowed to be claimed off site somehow. They are an eyesore and completely pointless. 99% of the people claiming them are probably using multiple alt accounts and completely fake twitter and facebook profiles anyway but the ICOs don't care.


It is. Sadly theymos and cyrus don't seem to care too much and anything that requires much work or time from them is just ignored. Plenty of solutions have been made and some of them are very simple and things like adding more staff and distributing workload between current staff could be done within minutes and the board would benefit instantly. The best we get after a year of complaining is a one merit requirement which is a small step in the right direct but clearly isn't enough to tackle the huge abuses that are going on here and we're already seeing how easy it is to get around: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037225.msg46135292#msg46135292



This is sadly too much to ask. Most ICO Managers are lazy and greedy and because there's no repressions for doing a bad job they will just do the least amount of work possible and spam the forum in any way they can do to maximise exposure for their ICO. This is obviously something that needs to change and several solutions have been proposed, one of the most effective being punishing ICOs who come here and do nothing but contribute to the destruction and unreadability of the forum. If that was to happen then the culture of spam here would soon change.

It really isn't worth my time especially when the admins don't seem to care much and are prepared to do very little about the various issues we have here. This guy could have hundreds if not thousands of accounts we've missed. We need drastic changes and punishments for those who cause the destruction of the forum and the best we get is a one merit requirement which is basically a joke and as we can see from this thread this is very easy to abuse or get around. This will only be the  start of it and it will probably become commonplace for one account to purchase 50 merits or so then just distribute them between their alts. They'll start to get smarter in how they do it as well, or just purchase the Copper Membership to leave no paper trail. Some of these bounty farmers have been making tens to even hundreds of thousands of dollars abusing bounties with alts so coughing up 10-20 dollars for either a merit or a Copper rank is nothing for them. Lets up the merit requirement to 10-100 or maybe even much more and then we might start to see a difference here. Also, without cracking down on ICO campaigns people are still going to be able to get paid for posting spam and one merit isn't going to stop that and it's party time and business as usual once they have it. It's basically putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound to the head. It might stop the bleeding for a second but you're still going to bleed to death very quickly.

Well it shouldn't have to be but it really does need to be pointed out that this isn't acceptable and you can see that from the number of threads from people in Meta asking why they were banned and if they can get a second chance, so people should be made aware of the rules and the punishments for doing this so there's no excuses then.


Sadly I think you're very wrong. Copy and pasting and plagiarism is a huge problem and I'd say this sort of abuse is actually becoming endemic and almost commonplace now. Probably 50+ users a day are being banned for it and many multiples more will be getting away with it. Sure, there will be some times where a few individuals will be responsible for having hundreds if not thousands of accounts botting away, but there also seems to be hundreds of individual 'lone wolves' doing it as well with however many alts they have. I don't know whether there's some website that just suggests people come here and copy and paste posts if they can't speak English very well or people are just telling their friends and family to do so or they're even just actually figuring out how to easily abuse the forum by themselves, but it's mind-blowing how many people are doing it and it's sad to know that the admins don't look into any of it. I'm sure it's only the tip of the shitberg that even I know about and I dread to think of how many people are actually getting away with this on an industrial scale. Banning a few accounts for it when they could have hundreds or even thousands more going behinds the scenes is almost pointless and losing a few accounts a day will probably just become an occupational hazard to farmers. The only change that has been made is that they now require one merit or purchase a Copper Membership but when some of the worst offenders are making tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars from abusing bounties and campaigns they'll just purchase the merit or rank to bypass this. Merits can then easily and quickly be distributed between their alts and that's why I think we should require much more merit before you can start earning here, or at least make them buy a much more expensive Silver or Gold rank.

Well in theory it would be great if everyone was responsible for keeping their own threads clean and spam free, but the problem is that in reality people will just start creating their own rules and they can remove your post for any reason they want if the thread is self-moderated, which as others have said you can already do. Because of this I rarely choose to post in self-moderated threads unless I can somewhat trust the op not to be an idiot. At least Staff members have to follow the rules but anyone who self-mods a thread can moderate them however they see fit with no accountability and that's where the issue lies here. This forum is very liberal with what we tolerate here and most people appreciate that when it's going their way, but that's also its biggest flaw because people just post utter drivel with no repercussions and the chances of having a meaningful discussion here are just drowned out by a sea of spam.

This is something to discuss with your local mod/community, but you don't need a new sub board to do all that in. I'm sure your local mod will update or sticky the new thread if you create it.


There's nothing stopping you from discussing all this in the "free zone". Does it really matter if they're among shit threads? I don't think Local boards should even have their own off topic sections either as they're just prime for abuse with spam, but they certainly don't need a dedicated Meta sub either. If you can't get a decent discussion going in a thread in there then I doubt having your own sub for it would be much more productive.