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.

Well that all depends on how you run it exactly. Just make sure it's in line with the forum rules which can be found at the following and you should be fine: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2766177.0

And there's a Signature Campaign guidelines thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1684035.0

Basically just don't pay people to make spam and don't incentivise them to post in your thread.

Well he would have if they were all on the three o'clock kick-offs. It's much easier to get six results out of ten games as opposed to just the six.


I think they only give the prizes out to the top users over all the site, which is a bit shit. So there would only be one winner site-wide, so if somebody else got five scores but got more points or something then they get the jersey. I could be wrong but I think that's how it works and obviously makes your chances of winning anything very slim.

Well Copper Member is showing up now so you must have done something right.


You can send the money from anywhere. Using exchange addresses I think is only really an issue when either refunds/returning money are concerned.

You don't have to be happy about it, but you don't have to care about it either. Why would you be bothered by what some random person on the internet says about your parents? Why let it bother you? If somebody said something about my parents then it's just irrelevant, childish nonsense that isn't worth justifying with a reaction. Nine times out of ten people only say things to get a reaction and when they you do react they win. If you don't react then they'd probably just get bored and move on to something else but when you show someone a weakness they're just going to exploit it.

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.

One thing that has always annoyed me is people who claim to be freedom of speech, just right up until somebody says something they don't like then they want to silence them.


If your faith is so strong why do you even care about insults to them? Surely Mohammed and Allah will take care of the insults at a later date and you don't need to worry about anything. Just ignore it, especially if it's something that is only going to annoy or enrage you because people will see that and just attack you more, like the idiot above.

Please no. We don't really need the main bitcoin one as it's outlived its purpose and is now just a spam fest where people can get away with legalised copy and pasting, so we definitely don't need an alt coin one which would be an even bigger nightmare and just add a load of extra workload to moderation that we don't need right now. It would just be another board where bots and farmers can get paid from lazy campaigns who don't care that you're only spamming articles all day.

I agree with an Alt Coin Beginners and Help sub though as the Bitcoin one is mostly being swamped with alt coin and bounty related crap these days.

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).