What do you think juries are for? They're to remove the possibility of bias from the judge. Would you seriously prefer it just to be one person who presides over this? What happens about their ego? If a problem campaign is spotted then you get the opinion of the other members in the group so you don't have to rely on the possibly bias opinion of one. It's taking away power and responsibility from one person and sharing it among several allowing for more impartiality.
 

No, but he's a campaign manager who should have faced some punishments because he's been allowed to 'run' his campaigns by doing absolutely nothing other than paying people as long as they bothered to make the spam.


But what about the "egos" of the mods?

What do you mean the opposite? You mean you need something like 500 merit to become a Junior? I think there should be a merit requirement for them as well as their signature being removed, but it shouldn't be unnecessarily high. They will already struggle to get something like ten merits, but a decent poster won't have much issue with that whilst it will also severely curb the worst of the worst posters and also bots etc.


That has literally been suggested, along with being able to prohibit certain users from posting in it so you don't need to waste time removing the posts of users you don't even want posting in there or breaking your 'local' rule etc.

I think custom titles would be a nice perk for a premium donator rank and at least people could choose there own then. I think it would be a big selling point, especially for businesses who want to put thinks like "Dicesite Community Manager" or whatnot under there username. Theymos doesn't seem to be in a hurry to add more donator ranks though. I still think we should get rid of signatures completely from lower ranks and give them the option to purchase them via Copper/Silver/Gold ranks etc. The benefits are numerous.

It has already become largely unfit for purpose. The vast majority of people posting here are just those churning out one/two liners for payment )or farming) and that much is obvious if you spend a few minutes reading a random thread in Bitcoin Discussion.


There are rules, but a lot of the most important ones aren't enforced efficiently (bans or ban evasion to name a couple). The list of rules is also mostly community generated and the rules theymos initially created were very few and consisted of mostly things like no off topic replies. I'm not sure whether he even cares about enforcing half of them, but if certain rules aren't going to be enforced we should just get rid of them and go back to having only a handful of rules and let people already do largely what they want because that's what most do anyway. I don't think we should do this or allow it but not much else we can do about it without theymos' help.


He's recently stated he's the only person working on coding it now so that's likely why it's taking so long and he also why he doesn't have much time to commit to admin duties here.


Blacklisting signatures requires theymos input unless he creates a tool for other staff or admins to use.

You can argue whether they don't care or not, but they're not getting looked into because the admins don't have time to look into them (in their own words). An automatic recovery tool is apparently being developed according to theymos and will hopefully be ready by the end of the year, so unless any more staff are given access to restore them then you're likely going to have to wait a few more months for that unfortunately.

Anyone think Liverpool could struggle at Leicester today? Not sure whether to go for a risky one or just back Liverpool to win. I#ll wait to see what the line-ups are like before I commit though. Not sure if Vardy's back yet and that will make a huge difference.


Luck of the draw really, though they have been playing well. I don't think they'll stay there for long though. Tomorrow's game against spurs will be the real test for them. If they can get at least point out of that game then there's no telling where they could go.



Wondered why you didn't seem to be making them.

What if the guy doesn't want the title? Has he acknowledged what it has become anywhere? Could be a deep source of shame and embarrassment for all we know  .

Should give one to the guy who first complained 'merit ruins lives' as well.


It seems he logged on a month ago, though he hasn't posted in a while.

And so can users. In the very post you say "whoops" and realised it was already answered. Redundant.


But that's a different matter. There's no case for this being a mistake by mods yet. Mods are human and do make mistakes but most of the time when people complain it's usually users that have made the mistake and broken a rule somehow.


If something is against the rules then it's against the rules. It's not censorship. If it was removed because it was multiposting then just edit the previous post with the info or post it another time.

If you're not a merit source then you can probably run out of them very fast, especially if you're giving out more than one per post. Remember, for those that aren't merit sources you will only have them to give when people actually merit you (which isn't that frequent for most) and then you only have half the amount to 'spend' so it will quickly go and when users don't merit others more than one/two/three  at a time often that leaves little merit to send on.

Did you post them in threads about bitcoin? If so, they were likely seen as off topic.


Who said it was a mistake? Whether it was or wasn't depends on the context and the threads they were posted in.


HostFat might not even have authority/ability to remove them. It depends what board they were posted in.

I think the issue is two fold. Most people don't have many merits so have to be frugal with them, and posts can get buried very fast. Even threads with worthwhile discussion happening where gems can be found they quickly get buried by dozens of users making generic one/two liners. When those users are getting paid as Juniors or whatever rank they automatically have it doesn't really matter to them and there's no real incentive for them to improve. That's why I'm strongly pushing for a merit requirement for users to become Juniors. If we removed their signatures completely then thus would force users to have to get ten merit and become a Member before they could even earn in the first place. I think this will have a huge effect on the quality of posts here as bots and spammers will get no where or not very far without getting the merit in whatever capacity.


I'm sure he will be eclipsed soon, especially as he's MIA now. Though as I mentioned above the lack of people giving merit is an issue. If it wasn't for Welsh giving me some yesterday I would have broken my combo despite writing 9 or so pretty decent lengthy posts (in my opinion). Again, I'm not going to lose sleep over merit as it's largely irrelevant to me now but there are plenty of others possibly even more deserving who will go umerited. Quality users will get there eventually anyway, but 'average' or even above average users will likely struggle.

Of course it will survive. I'm not sure survive is the right word you're using here. The forum isn't going to 'die' when the traffic continues to grow due to bounties and sig campaigns. The majority of traffic will be trash and the forum will become even worse than it already is and unfit for it's true purpose in the process, but it wont die.


The forum is badly understaffed in my opinion, but I honestly don't know whether theymos prefers it that way with minimal moderation and rules etc. It doesn't make for a very usable or user-friendly forum though and you can see that from the number of complaints about various issues.


Semantics. Either more admins need to be added or more people doing admin duties. Doesn't matter what title you give them. If theymos doesn't trust some of the current staff members with some of this then they probably shouldn't be mods in the first place. You could have people running the ad slots without them even having to hold any money if that was something he's worried about. Theymos could continue to hold the addresses and the staff member is just in charge of making sure the money gets paid there. Sure, a staff member might try divert funds to addresses owned by them but is that worth ruining their account over? They probably couldn't get away with that much for a monthly ad slot anyway and there are probably easier ways a staff member could make money or even scam someone here.


He also isn't happy with the spam just like everyone else, so a compromise needs to be found here. You don't have to remove signatures either but the culture needs to change and only those making quality contributions should be getting paid here. If this forum is going to continue as it is then it is no longer fit for anything other than being a welfare system for those who will just continue to find ways to cheat and abuse it.



Well that's a misconception they're going to need to get over or actually think about what they're complaining about. Just because something is decentralised doesn't mean there are no rules. Bitcoin has rules. You can't complain that there should be more bitcoins in existence or bitcoin should be the run the way you want it because decentralisation.


ICOs tend to not bother because they don't really care. They're not business that are here for the longrun; they want to take in as much money as fast as possible then disappear and paying someone to run their campaign properly is both needless, counter-productive and an unnecessary expense to them. Bitcoin paying campaigns tend to have proper business behind them that care about their reputation and actually want to build something. That's the difference. There needs to be some standards here. Imagine a society without rules or regulations. There's a reason why a civilised society has things like building regulations because people would just cut corners and do a shitty job as cheap as possible and and put lives at risk in the process.


I don't think it'd be easy to enforce who can and can't run them, but it's easy to police when they're doing a shitty job. There's new campaign managers who do a great job, but there's plenty more who don't and those are the ones who we should go after.

There's nothing stopping you or anyone leaving negative feedback for anything they want. The idea of a group was to make it more impartial like having some sort of jury and if the majority or all agree the campaign gets warned first and then negbombed if nothing changes. I don't think it should be left up to one person to decide though and I certainly don't want to be that person hence why I proposed there be a team to police them.


I did, but I removed it after a while. I recently left negative on ElonCity due to the absolutely ridiculous amount of copy and paste bots and farmers that had been permabanned baring their signature. I was banning a dozen a day at one point and have probably banned upwards of 100 from that campaign alone. This can't be acceptable. Signatures on these campaigns should be blacklisted because negative feedback or bans don't stop the members from posting while the campaign is banned.

Yeah, he does, but probably half of the users here deserve a ban for shitposting. The campaign that is paying him deserves the ban more than anyone else and ElonCity have been due to me personally banning upwards of a hundred copy and pasters on their campaign alone as well as having their thread locked. It's obviously pointless though as the hundreds of other users on that campaign can still spam away and that's why theymos needs to blacklist signatures otherwise punishment is pointless and staff shouldn't be expected to issue hundreds of bans and do the campaign's job for them.

Doesn't matter what my opinion is, it's theymos you need to ask or persuade. If I was in charge of this then there'd probably be very little spam here coming from signatures. If it was up to me shit campaigns would be banished the moment it was clear they were doing nothing and lower-ranks wouldn't even be allowed to earn here via signatures at all unless they've received a decent amount of merit. If only quality posters got paid and everybody ran their campaigns like Darkstar then we wouldn't be having this issue in the first place. Until it becomes unacceptable to post crap and those that pay for it get punished then nothing will change here.

Interesting info. Thanks for compiling it.


And I've yet to receive a single merit today despite making some quality shit. C'mon, fuckers. Don't make me merit myself from my main account and get negbombed  .

Seriously though, I think the amount of merit sources or people actually giving merit is actually an issue right now. I don't really care that much about receiving merit personally because it's useless for me as Legendary now (unless additional ranks or badges are awarded for high merited users), though it is nice to know people have read and appreciated your posts, but there's a lot of quality posts I see that just don't get merited at all. I think even decent/great posters will struggle to rank up to levels of Hero and Legendary if this doesn't change, especially those users just signing up. Hopefully theymos will add users more frequently but this is one more issue that will likely be put on the backburner of things to do but never get done.

Reddit and web-forums are different beasts altogether but both have positives and negatives. I don't really like reddit and don't use it, but they don't have the issue of sig spam and if they did then it would just be the same as it is here.


I don't think this place is struggling to survive at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The board continues to grow, but the majority of traffic and new users coming here are just shitposters looking to earn and it's certainly struggling to be a place that is actually useful for anything other than earning by spamming.


Delegating workload would have a huge impact, and I'm not sure why things haven't been done already. I'm not just talking about making new admins either. Most sub boards need their own dedicated mod and this is something I've been requesting for years. More staff should be added as well to help with the clean up. If some users can spend hours upon hours reporting tens of thousands of posts then they'll probably make a pretty good staff member and they can then handle these things themselves without having to waste time reporting them which in turn just puts more pressure and stress on the current staff. New staff members and sub-board mods could be made/assigned with the click of a few buttons for theymos and this can be done today. If theymos doesn't have time to run things like the forum ad slots of respond to emails and restore accounts etc then this business should all be delegated.


What annoyed me the most about that is he didn't even put them into simple 'yes' or 'no' categories. He's smart and careful what he says so nobody can hold it against him and say, well you said yes to this or you would do that, or you said you would never do this etc, and at the same time he didn't commit to anything either so he doesn't have to do any of them at any point. My only solace is that he didn't actually outright slam them all with an exclusive 'no'. I'd really like to get his reasoning for why he is against some suggestions though, especially things like requiring at least one merit to become a Junior Member etc. That is essential in my opinion if we're not going to remove their signatures altogether and nobody else has really made a workable suggestion on how to stop or at least limit how we can prevent spammers and bots getting paid to post or copy and paste here. Hopefully he just thinks it needs tweaking etc rather than outright never doing it in some capacity.  


This forum isn't decentralised. There needs to be some minimal rules and they need to be enforced otherwise it is just chaos and disorder and the greedy and nefarious dominate over everything ruining it for everyone else. The forum can't continue on as it is or we might as well just rename/rebrand it shitcointalk or getpaidtopost.org because that's all this place has become. A forum for people just to post generic crap to get paid. 95% of people here don't care about contributing to a discussion, just churning out a mindless sentence of drivel then moving on to the next thread. Rinse and repeat all day over however many accounts you have. This can't be acceptable and is why there needs to be rules and regulations to make sure it doesn't happen and ruin the board in the first place making it unfit for its true purpose.  


It is huge, and I'm glad it's here, but it needs tweaking. It stops people from ranking up by shitpositng but it does nothing about bots and spammers being able to get paid as Juniors. Requiring merit or removing their signatures would help with this. People also need to start giving out merit more and more merit sources need to be added. There's quite a lot of people making decent or even great posts that just go unmerited a lot of time and I think even decent posters will take a very long time to get to Hero or Legendary if they start from scratch.

Well that would certainly solve all our problems once and for all with the farming, spam and shitposting, but as I've mentioned before though you'd also have to remove avatars and personal texts as well because people will still utilise them. People might even start advertising with their usernames. Bounty rules: Sign up to bitcointalk and create a username with 'shitcoinico' in and get paid to post. I think there are several other options we should consider first before removing signatures completely though and I've suggested them numerous times. One penultimate solution to removing them altogether would be to only allow signatures for very high ranks. Imagine if only Hero or Legendary users were the only people who could advertise here. That would certainly have a drastic effect on the spam and stop all the shitposters just signing up here just to shitpost because they would get nowhere and only the very top contributors would get anywhere. If you hadn't paid your dues here by gaining the required merit over time then you can't earn here. In addition and if that was too extreme, you could allow members to buy the signature with Silver/Gold ranks, but only if they're sufficiently expensive as to stop people from just buying them on their dozens to hundreds of accounts (something in the range of $100-1000 would be ideal). Farmers really would be priced out of the market because it just wouldn't be financially viable to spend so much on each one and most users would be limited to one or a few accounts at most. Nobody would be penalised from posting here in the process as well but if you want to earn here then either earn that right through merit and activity or cough up for a Gold/Silver rank.


Yeah, those are really annoying. They usually bump threads just to post some generic crap in and within a matter of hours there can be pages of spam to remove and it's incredibly tedious to do so.

Sure. You or anyone else is free to create such a thread if you wanted. Nothing stopping you. No guarantees that it will be enforced though but people can chip in whether they think a thread has outlived its purpose.


One week is too short. Setting some sort of automatic expiry would just lead to too many issues and closing threads that people still find useful. Users would likely then just open a v.2 version of it anyway.  A much better fix is to tackle the issue at the source of the problem which is crap campaigns that are paying people to make the spam in the first place. Punish that and spam will stop or at the very least lower.

ANN bumping bots are the least of our worries right now as at least that's limited and quarantined to the alt coin section and in ICO crap threads which we don't even have to go in so I don't care that much about it (though I don't agree with it happening and have suggested a couple of things to try prevent it). However, sig campaign spam is something we can do something about now and is something we should have tackled a long time ago because just ignoring it has too much of a negative effect on the forum and makes it unfit for purpose. This board now is just somewhere for people to spam rubbish to earn and it never should have got to that place.


Theymos probably considers a lot of stuff, but not much help if nothing ever gets implemented. When will sign campaigns guidelines start being enforced? 2020 when he's finished coding the forum? There's still going to be lots of extra things like this that are going to take even more time coding so will likely take even longer to happen, and in the meantime the forum becomes even more unusable and unfit for purpose.


There probably should be some dedicated sign campaign mods that are responsible for dealing with campaigns and their spam etc. ICOs should probably have to start contributing to the cost of the spam here as well and maybe that could be used to pay the sig spam mods. I've already suggested that ICOs have to pay some sort of fee to advertise here in the first place because they cause too much damage and get a tonne of free advertising in the process.