Numerous people including myself had suggested something such as 'likes' or something similar, though merit is a little different and probably works better than others envisioned.


It's much longer than that. Theymos sticked the thread in the New forum software in March 2014 and it had been in development before that: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=523070.0

From what I understand theymos is the sole person working on it, so that's both likely why it's taking so long and he has less and less time to dedicate to here as well.


This is it. They barely have a signature that is useful for anything anyway and it's largely worthless to even ICOs, but they don't care. They pay people for free and at least it gets their name out there they might as well utilise it as they have nothing to lose. This is why it needs to go and wouldn't be a huge issue even if it did. Users can still purchase a Copper Membership anyway to get a signature and I think that's something the forum should experiment with or even move towards (purchasing larger signatures via donator ranks like Silver and Gold etc).

Combo was broken yesterday 


Merit ruins lives  .



Not necessarily. I've given a few merits out to people who I didn't agree with, but they've certainly made the effort or put their point across articulately. I agree that people tend to give them more to posts they agree with or 'like' but there's nothing we can do abut that other than try urge users to give posts for effort rather than you just agreeing with them or liking their point.

And memes can be both funny and constructive. At least they lighten this place up a bit. I'd much rather merit a meme that a one-liner (especially if they've actually edited/customised the meme to be relevant).



Yeah. Neither of these things require much effort from theymos, he just needs to actually implment them and let staff handle the rest.

What makes you think theymos cares much about traffic? Theymos recently said he thought about removing the ad slot here completely because it's too much of a hassle for him (which I think would be ridiculous to do), so I'm not sure if theymos cares too much about traffic or the Alexia rank because traffic is only really good for monetising the site. I always assumed that sig campaigns and bounties were only allowed to remain here because to get rid of them would probably kill off at least 80% of traffic. What he should care about though is the spam and usability of the forum, and I know that bothers him too, but he's the only one that can do anything about that and he needs to start implementing certain things and listening to the community on ways to combat it. We can still find a compromise without having to ban them or removing signatures completely but it's not going to happen without some help from him or permission to start dishing out punishments for the worst of campaigns.


As I said above, theymos recently mentioned getting rid of the only ad slot we have here so I'm not sure how much the forum being monetised efficiently or not is a concern to him. Theymos makes very little directly from this forum and an active mod makes more than him per month. Most ad revenue probably goes into the pot to pay mods (and we might actually be losing money on a monthly basis), but if theymos wanted to enrich himself personally or just the forum he could do so in a multitude of ways and many I have suggested myself (more ad slots, pay himself a reasonable wage and do admin duties full time, more donator ranks amongst other things). Regardless of whether theymos cares about ad revenue or traffic we should work together to make sure the forum is fit for purpose and he himself said this board shouldn't be a 'welfare system' for people but that's what it is right now so we need to find a compromise between people getting paid and what is and isn't acceptable to be paid for and punishments for people who do it the unacceptable way. If we let people get away with paying and being paid for spamming then they will continue to do it.

Yeah, I think good reports will only be taken into consideration. Otherwise people wouldn't care what they reported good or bad as long as it counted towards their badge.


These badges will be cool and all, but they're pretty far down on the list of things I'd like to see implemented here. I would much rather more mods be added (or current ones promoted to dedicated sub mods), and more importantly signatures removed from Newbs and Juniors and/or a merit requirement added for the latter.


I like them, but they're too hard to distinguish between.

A lot of posts in Politics & Society are taken from elsewhere. That user has probably used some text jumbling service to avoid detection, and this is becoming a huge problem because a simple google search will usually won't be fruitful. It's a sad state of affairs where users and now going to have to google a post before they merit it. something else really needs to change with the culture here because people are just going to find more and more ways of being sneaky to avoid being caught. One thing I know though is Newbies and Juniors shouldn't be able to get paid for doing this and that's why their signatures need to go because ICO campaigns will keep paying them to do this otherwise.

Read the rules. Often you can work out what they were likely was removed for. However, I do think the deleted notification should be changed slightly, and a link to the rules provided as well, so again, people can try figure out why their post might have been removed. Most of the time users just aren't aware of the rules and the post may appear legit to the person who made it, but could have been a duplicate, double post, or in a necrobumped thread etc.


An option for staff to leave a note or choose from a drop-down menu of the most common reasons would be helpful. Ie "double post", "off topic", "no ref links" etc.


Nah. Most users won't do it and if it's against the rules then staff should just remove it.


It should be anonymous. Staff members would just be hassled if it told you who deleted it. I sometimes even get angry messages asking why a post was removed even though it had nothing to do with me but users assume it was me because my username is on that sub-board. Thank yourself you even get a notification though. On many other forums you don't and your post just disappears with you being completely unaware.

As others have said, it it was just a 'thanks' then that maybe why.

There's a few things that have happened that people have mentioned already like the homographs and the 24 hour bump deletion thing, but don't forget about the merit system as well. Theymos is probably reluctant to spend too much time coding things for this forum when he's busy working on the new one (and any time he spends here he loses time on the development of the new one (though maybe/hopefully the same work/coding can just be implemented on the new board as well so it's win-win and not a waste of time)). If the new forum software is still a year or two away though then I think some more things should be implemented here in the meantime. Workload definitely needs to be distributed between staff and a few new mods being made to help out wouldn't hurt either and that's something that can be done by theymos with a few clicks and they'll help clean up this place and keep some order in the meantime.

I'm hoping that something will be done about removing signatures from Newbies/Juniors or requiring the latter to achieve some merit to become one. Clamping down on ICO campaigns who do little to nothing other than pay for spam would also go a long way and these are things that wouldn't require much effort from theymos and the staff can take care of the rest.

Well we are probably the exception. For as long as I've been here I've never taken signature campaigns for granted. People used to complain that I was 'spamming' merely because I was making a lot of posts (many more than I do these days), but I was never banned despite numerous people requesting so, and I always made sure to put a lot of thought and effort into them. I still do now, maybe even more so. I know I don't need to write a paragraph or quote multiple people in the same post or write as much as I do even on Chipmixer. I know I could get away with just writing a short paragraph or even just two sentences or so, but I don't. You've also got to remember we are native British English-speaking people who have at least an above average understanding of bitcoin. It's a sad fact that many of the new people who sign up here these days do so just to earn and have probably only heard of bitcoin via someone telling them that they can earn here merely by posting. Now, imagine if you're an Asian schoolkid who doesn't have much money, can't speak English very well and knows little to nothing about bitcoin and cares just as much about it. That's a recipe for disaster, but they need to get paid and this is their best opportunity to earn online, so they either force out a sentence or two of largely hollow nonsense, or copy and paste someone else's post and that's all they need to do when campaigns will pay them for it. When there's no repercussions both for making low quality posts and those that pay them to do so nothing is going to change and in fact things will just get worse because they realise they can get away with it. Some users posts will in fact just get sloppier and sloppier as time goes on especially when they start creating more accounts to maximise profits. If more users started getting bans for sloppy posts and campaigns started getting them for paying users to make them things would change. If every campaign were run properly like Chipmixer then the forum would clean itself up rather quickly because spammers wouldn't be able to get on a campaign at all, so they would be forced to up their game or languish forever. That's why we need some standards or regulations on how campaigns can operate here. It can't be acceptable to do nothing about all about spammers and until there's punishments for that they will continue to be both lazy and greedy.


Things can change, but not without more manpower being thrown at it. Theymos says money isn't an issue so we can hire more mods to help with this. We could have a team of mods set up just to police ICO campaigns or deal with sig spam. We also need to delegate workload between staff. The need for more admins aside, either new or current staff could be assigned to certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion and they can then dedicate their time to cleaning up their own subs up. I've been saying for years that Bitcoin Discussion needs it's own dedicated mod (or even two). They can then trash crap threads on sight and that place will become a lot more usable in the process. These are simple fixes that will benefit the quality of content here remarkably.

Why would they bother doing more work when they don't need to? Imagine going to work where the boss was never there and would pay you at the end of the month regardless of the quality of work that was done just as long as you met the deadlines of when it needed to be in. You wouldn't bother going above and beyond because there's no point putting in the extra work because as long as you meet the minimum requirements you'll get paid regardless. That's exactly what's wrong with the culture here. Why would anyone actually bother contributing to discussions and with anything in depth when a one liner will get them paid the same. Time is money when you're a bounty hunter or farmer so they're not going to bother writing a paragraph when they can break that paragraph into five sentences and post it over their five accounts and get paid x5. With Juniors being able to be farmed or botted merely with 30 posts over a couple of activity periods this just leads them to abuse campaigns in such a way because they need to do that in order to be able to earn a substantial amount. That needs to change. Get rid of signatures for Newbies and Juniors and let them earn ten merit before they can earn by posting (or purchase a Copper Membership).

The forum has moved away from its original purpose, but we are trying to find a compromise to meet somewhere in the middle and make the forum a better place in the process. People should be able to get paid to post, but they shouldn't be able to get paid to spam or copy and paste. The people who complain about merit do so because it effects their ability to get paid to post and that is a good thing, but I think we need to go further with it. You already need merit to be a Member and every other rank after it in increasing proportions. This requirement should also extend to Juniors because that rank is now being exploited because it's the only one you can earn from without any merit. The merit system works in that it stops the vast majority of spammers being able to rank up past Member, but does nothing for Juniors and people are now exploiting that and farming or botting Juniors to do the abuse instead.


Isn't that exactly what we're doing? Numerous ideas have been suggested to help clean up the forum but we now just need theymos to implement them. Removing signatures from lower ranks, requiring merit to become a Junior and punishing badly run signature campaigns seem to be the most popular and easiest to implement and would have a drastic effect on both the spam and culture here.


We already have the six minute waiting time between posts for newbies, which can be extremely annoying. I dare say it actually turns a lot of users away, but the people who are determined to earn here will grin and bare it. We need to make suggestions that don't effect or annoy people who just want to post here so they don't leave, and the compromise isn't always that easy to be found. Removing signatures from lower ranks or requiring merit for Juniors doesn't effect anyone's ability to post here nor does punishing ICO campaigns and that's why I'm strongly pushing for them.

It wouldn't effect traffic at all, nor does it effect anybody being able to post here. All it effects is your ability to earn via signatures as a Newbie or Junior and that's not what this forum is about anyway and I don't think they should be able to earn here straight away because that's what leads to the abuse and people trying to post about something they little to nothing about. Newbies and Juniors who come here to earn aren't going to magically just throw in the towel because they can't earn by posting straightaway and they now need ten merit or whatever. They can still collect bounties for a start, or just cough up for a Copper membership... or, you know, just earn the merit naturally by making meritable posts. Ten merit isn't a lot and you could probably achieve that by writing one great post or a few at most. I'm sure other members would be more liberal with their merits if this happened as well. I want to see people making worthwhile posts and I want them to be able to earn here in the process. I just don't want copy and paste bots and lazy farmers writing a hollow sentence over however many dozens of accounts they have.

I didn't say that. Quite the opposite. It's theymos who has stated that the next solution will likely be to just remove signatures, but that's not as easy as it sounds either (you'll have to remove avatars and personal texts as well) nor do I think we should ever do that fully. I don't think it's fair to remove them from everyone when it's the newer users that come here to spam in their hundreds that have ruined it for everyone. What about those who just want to advertise their own business or their items for sale in their signature? They're then penalised because of the behaviour of others who have decided to monetise and abuse theirs. The penultimate solution if you were going to go gung-ho and remove signatures would be to remove them from all lower ranks. Maybe leave only Hero or Legendary or those that have got a great deal of merit (and not just auto-merit) so this doesn't penalise those that have been here a long time or made a lot of quality contributions. You could even go with my suggestion of removing signatures completely (or from all lower ranks) and allowing users to purchase them via donator ranks (copper, silver, gold etc). The problem with signatures here is that it's free to create as many accounts as you want and people do. When there's a cost to have a signature nobody is going to be able to afford them on all their 12 to 200 accounts.


Theymos has already said he will never bring back newbie jail which is essentially what you're suggesting, so you might as well forget about that and look at other ways to prevent abuse.


It also stops genuine users from making posts. Those that come here to abuse the system will just swap over to one of their 12-200 alt accounts whilst they wait. Abusers will always find a way to bypass the system whilst it puts off genuine users who can't be bothered jumping through all these hoops just to post or get an answer to a question.


Theymos recently said he thought about removing the ad slot here completely because it's too much of a hassle for him (which I think would be ridiculous to do), so I'm not sure if theymos cares too much about traffic. If he doesn't though I'm not sure why he allows signature campaigns here (or lets them do what they do). I always assumed that they were only allowed because to kill them would probably kill off at least 80% of traffic. We can still find a compromise without having to ban them or removes signatures but it's not going to happen without some help from him or permission to start dishing out punishments for the worst of campaigns.

People need to accept that this is not a discussion board anymore; it's a post or copy and paste to get paid one. Until thyemos is going to do something about that or put someone in charge who will then not only will nothing change but things will get worse.


The problem is the way we allow users to make money. Getting paid to post is great, but it needs to be regulated. We can't let ICOs come here and literally accept anyone and everyone including Newbies and Juniors and ppay thgem for whatever dribble they can drool out or copy and paste. If you accept Newbies and Juniors then it is going to be exploited by spammers, farmers and copy and paste bots. It can't be acceptable to earn from this forum by copy and pasting but that's what is happening. That's why Newbie and Junior signatures need to be removed completely. They then cannot get paid for this until they become a Member and earn ten merit. Ten merit is not a lot to ask, but it is if you're a bot or the worst of the worst of posters.


Well that's unfair too. The jump from Hero to Legendary is huge and will take a very long time to achieve if everyone thinks like you. What do you define as a 'high' rank as well? Full? Senior? If people are writing great posts then they should be merited for them regardless of ranks.

It's not activity they care about. It's post-count. As long as they can still get a +1 by posting in there then it will keep being spammed. As I've said numerous times before that board has served its purpose. It's now largely used just by sig spammers to get away with legalised copy and pasting. Anyone who wants to post an article can do so in the main board as many already do. I don't see any reason for the Press board to stay. It was created at a time when any news hit was in fact notable and exciting. Now it's not and we probably get mentioned every other day in some form of another, but I don't think we need a board to post an article from CoinTelegraph about some random guy that said bitcoin is bubble or is going to go to 1 million or John Mcaffee says he's going to eat his own dick if some random shitcoin he's been paid to promote doesn't go to a dollar. Pointless.

Each to their own, but I don't find them too intrusive, and it's not like the vast majority of websites on the internet don't offer such banners.


Nope. He just walked away. That's what happens when too much responsibility is placed on one person. It just becomes too much to handle. I always said it was too much work for just one person and now cyrus just doesn't seem to bother either so nothing gets done. At least BadBear used to look into half the stuff that needed doing.


I doubt it. I'm surprised people even bid on them to be honest. Especially when you can create your own crapcoin token and pay people for free to advertise. The slots are also barely even noticeable and are drowned out by all the signatures.

Ha, I was just about to say that those posts are possibly copied from somewhere. This is another big issue and what's colossally wrong with this forum and shows you what a sad state of affairs it is. Often when I'm going through threads and and I actually see a post from someone putting some thought and effort into them they stand out like a sore thumb amongst all the spam and one liners, but I have to google them to see if they're plagiarised and sadly probably 7 or 8 times out of ten they are.


If you see someone actually writing worthwhile posts here just google a sentence or two of it. Such a shame that this is what has become of this place.

Theymos, so when are you going to remove signatures from Juniors and/or make them achieve some sort of merit to become one? This would have probably stopped this guy from earning anything. Newbies and Junior Members should not be able to get paid for copy and pasting.  If you can't earn some minimal amount of merit then you don't deserve be able to earn here.

Cyrus could be busy doing other things behind the scenes that we don't know about. Or maybe he isn't. No way to tell unless someone says otherwise, but I don't think we should be getting rid of admins.


It might have been bringing in 1btc a long time ago, but I can't see them going for anywhere near that at current value. Maybe theymos should sell them at a fixed rate instead of running auctions. I've suggested before that there should be premium ad slot at the top of certain sub boards like this:



Businesses could target their market better (and which they would obviously pay more for). For instance a dice site could advertise in Gambling sub or a Campaign Manager in Services etc but theymos doesn't seem interested.

Well hopefully it falls under the 'Or not yet' or 'Or the idea would need to be significantly modified' parts. Everybody I've mentioned this to seems to be back it in some capacity (and some think it should be much more than one merit). I haven't yet seen any better suggestions to stop or at the very least curb bots or the very worst of the worst of spammers from getting paid as Juniors.


They don't. Why does rank matter? If they can't get merit then they're still shitposters regardless of ranks. Requiring a small amount of merit isn't hostile, especially when it's majorly Junior Members that are causing so much damage. People can still post here without earning any merit nor do they need a signature to be able to do that.


I don't think it has anything to do with business decisions. Theymos has already said he thought about removing the one and only ad slot we have here so he can't care too much about traffic effecting forum revenue. The people who come here to earn aren't going to just give up because they need one merit or so to get a signature either. How about all the traffic and users that are lost from genuine users who leave because this forum is unfit for purpose and is 90% spammers posting nonsense about things they know nothing about just in order to get paid? That needs to change or this board will wholly become a welfare system for spammers. Requiring a minimal amount of merit isn't ridiculous nor restrictive. People can still post here or claim bounties, they just can't get paid to post until they've got the merit and I think this is how it should be, otherwise nothing will change and people will continue to farm Junior accounts in their hundreds if not thousands and that needs to be stopped somehow.

Hell no. That board isn't being moderated as strictly as it should. Not only is it just for bitcoin news but it's meant to be from notable sources only, not any old random crypto article from a blog site. That board has served its purpose in my opinion and should just be locked/archived or at the very least a thread stickied there noting that content has to be from notable non-crypto based sources only so that doesn't include CoinTelegraph and cryptocrapnews.net. If you want to post these things then they go in the alt coin board.

I don't get the logic behind that. Surely that would be more incentive to add somebody else. What good is an admin if they're doing very little? Workload could be distributed between various mods. Theymos recently said that he's even thought about getting rid of ad slots because they're time -consuming to run and that just seems silly to me. Kill off the only source of income this place has? Pass that work on to someone else so theymos can crack on with coding the forum. The more workload he delegates the less stress and hassle for him and he's then free to do the more important stuff and the forum benefits in the process.