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.

I've already suggested something like this in my community suggestions thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4893744.0

I suggested that there's two report buttons and one of them is a 'sig spam' button that sends the report into a separate queue to moderators that only handle signature spam. That way the regular report queue isn't spammed to death with reports on spam (which half the forum is). More patrollers or dedicated mods that handle sign spam could be created to handle those extra reports which I also suggested.

"What if?" What if we didn't allow ICOs to shit up the forum without repercussions? What if Junior Members couldn't even have a signature without earning some merit first? What if we didn't allow people to shitpost on 200 accounts? What if theymos actually started delegating workload between staff instead of ignoring the multitude of problems we have here? What if theymos actually implements just one of the hundreds of suggestions that have been made to improve the forum over the years? What if, what if, what if? Anything that requires any sort of effort by the admins or staff likely won't get implemented anytime soon if at all and we'll just continue to hide behind "freedom" and a laissez faire attitude. Well, when you let people do whatever they want this is what you get. Anarchy and mass abuse by people cutting corners to maximise profits for themselves whilst not caring about the damage they do in the process. The closest you'll likely get to your suggestion is enforcing the signature campaign guidelines we created. If a campaign comes here and is either lazy and/or incompetent then they should be given warnings and then punishments if nothing changes. If this happened then the culture would quickly change around here and campaigns would start doing their job because they can't afford to not be able to advertise here. As long as we let them get away with doing nothing then they will continue to do so. Nobody is going to do work that they don't need to, especially when running even a small campaign of 50 users likely amounts to the hours of a part time job. Some of these ICO campaigns accept anyone and have thousands of users on them and yet do nothing to police them and as such they are exploited by hundreds of bots and farmers that just exacerbates the problems. They don't care about that either because anyone who is wearing their signature is another person advertising for them whether they're shitposting, botting, or not. Until that changes then nothing else will change.

Their 'team' is likely just a few of them and hundreds if not thousands of bots they use. Most of them won't be manually writing this generic crap.


The problem here is two-fold. The majority of them are bumping bots but you also just have other farmers just utilising the opportunity to farm their accounts in those threads and not look out of place. Why contribute to a topic when you can just write the generic 'great project looks interesting' posts instead? I've even seen farmer bots copy and paste a post of one of the bump bots which is just some meta bullshit and yet another example of how bad things have gotten here.

Then probably 90% of threads here need to be reported and locked. Even ones that start off well or interesting just get shitted in by one/two liner spammers who don't really understand the topic or even bitcoin. As long as we've got people who are getting paid to post here then they're going to continue creating generic shit threads to have somewhere to crap in. If we're not going to do something about the source of the problem, which is ICO campaigns, then it's futile even trying to do anything about it because you're just trying to patch up a sinking ship. Take out the cause of the problem which is the sig campaigns that are constantly firing shit torpedoes into you instead of trying to futilely plug holes that are never going to solve the issue that is sinking the ship in the first place.

It wouldn't really work without theymos being actively involved and I doubt joining telegram groups is something he will do. As mentioned above, we do have a twitter that is sometimes used to alert people of issues but it's rarely used and hasn't made a tweet since 29 Nov 2017. If you wanted to create a group though then there's nothing stopping you.

Yeah, the merit system does nothing for bots or spam. It just stops them from rising through the ranks without getting merit. We should require some merit requirement to become Junior though because plenty of bots and spammers are still farming and spamming away on them which only requires 30 activity and anyone can get that by posting over a few periods.


This is never going to happen. We shouldn't be turning people away who actually want to come here for the forum's intended purpose to discuss or get help with things about bitcoin. We should look at tackling the issue with sig spam and bots in other ways though and with penalising or annoying regular users as little possible.

There are rules. We created the signature campaign guidelines because of this, but this issue is that they're not enforced. It's like saying theft is illegal, but not actually punishing anyone who does it, so of course lots of unscrupulous people will take advantage of that because there's absolutely no repercussions for doing it. Punishments need to start being handed out to ICOs and their managers and things would drastically improve here if that happened. The forum is such a shitshow because we allow campaigns to largely do what they want, but if their laziness and greed was punished then the culture would quickly change around here and they would adapt and actually do what they supposed to do in the first place because this forum is too valuable for them to not be able to advertise here.

Why don't you work on that after you're done with he new forum? I've always though cloudflare was crap. If something better can be made then I'm sure you could make a business out of it, or at the very least the forum would benefit.


Because they're dicks. Some people just get off on it and do it because they can. Sometimes people also do it in an extortion attempt: "pay up or we won't stop".

I'm sure it would take a lot of time, especially with the current backlog, but wouldn't it make even more sense to put someone in charge dedicated to investigating and restoring them? The pile is only going to continue to get bigger the longer it's left and I really think it's unacceptable how long users have been left in the dark without even a response. I'd be absolutely irate if I was in their position. For some users they are losing business because they've lost accounts here and a lot more will be missing out on money from signature campaigns etc.


I don't think we should use this is an excuse not to do anything about certain issues. Sure, some people can be greedy and lazy or turn out to be someone they're not but people can be paid after they've done the work and to an acceptable standard, and if they do a shoddy job then they can be fired or let go. You can only do your best and at least you tried, but not doing anything about certain things isn't going to make the situation here any better.


What about the users who have been waiting eight+ months already? Do they have to wait another four months in the hope that the system will be ready by the end of the year? What if it isn't? Wouldn't it make more sense to assign someone to deal with the problem in the meantime? Also, what about those who can't prove their ownership with a bitcoin address or can prove in other ways? Will they continue to languish? The majority of people who join this forum these days likely do so for alt coins and that will only continue to grow and if they haven't posted a bitcoin address then there's still going to be a huge hole here that needs to be manually investigated.


I get that it's probably pretty shitty and unfair that you've become the defacto leader (especially if it's not something you truly wanted to do), but you are the 'boss' here and unless you're going to step down/give up and hand the keys over to someone else (which I don't think you should ever do if you can help it) then I think you should look at ways at lightening the load on both yourself and other mods which will not only relieve stress from you but also the forum and make it a better place in the process. I wouldn't want to have to deal with lawyers either as my previous experience of them has been that most of them aren't very nice people at all and don't really care about anything other than money. I also absolutely hate doing taxes and I know how difficult/stressful it is for anyone running a business, and when you're doing the finances in bitcoin it adds an extra layer of difficulty with capital gains and loses etc (and the tax man not really understanding or 'trusting' bitcoin). If this is something that is causing you stress or headaches then you should look to hiring a professional who can help you with that asap. In the meantime, I think you should look at ways of spreading out the workload here so the forum doesn't suffer in the process. You could have a staff member dedicated to account restorations. One dedicated to running the ad slots. One or two dedicated to adding more merit sources. Maybe a couple dedicated to policing shoddily run ICO campaigns. A team of mods dedicated to policing sig spam etc, and so on. A few of the sub boards still don't even have any dedicated mods which I've been calling for for years. All of these are things that will take away the stress from both you and all current staff and the community and users will be better off for it.

When was the last time you spoke to BadBear? Can't you try contact him and try get him to come back if there's nobody else trusted to be an admin or doing things like restoring accounts etc? I'm sure he could help out in other ways too.

Thanks for your support, but there's only one guy that needs convincing of that. Doesn't even need to be me either as I'm sure there's other staff that can help out greatly here. Rickbig is probably just as active as I am and is probably handling more reports than I do these days. It's not just me who is getting frustrated though. There are lots of other mods and users (who some also probably deserve to be mods by now) that are clearly frustrated about the lack of action happening and could also be helping out in various ways here. I think if theymos doesn't trust anyone to be an admin then he should ask or even beg BadBear to come back if there's nobody else suitable because work just isn't getting done that needs to be right now.


I think maybe we could keep Serious Discussion as it is, but maybe make the merit requirement to post in the Ivory Tower much higher. I suggested a board for high merited users previously here and this would have the same effect. Theymos did even put the idea of sub boards for high merited users in the 'maybe' catagory so I have hope they could one day be implemented.

I think it will be a while before they sack him yet. Give him chance. Glad I got a point from the game, but that third goal cost me half a point, which all add up when you're at the top.


I don't. He's a quality player, but I just don't think he's a good fit for United, and said it before he even moved there. Lukaku at Everton is a much different beast than at United. I'm sure he'll end up moving on.

Realistically, more admins and staff are going to need to be added at some point to keep up with the growing userbase and workload so I don't understand why that time can't be now (or soon). Most staff are already swamped and there are others that could help but can't do much about anything because they don't have the power or ability to. More mods and admins can be added at the touch of a button, and it doesn't even have to be me who does admin duties or account restorations either if theymos doesn't trust me with that for whatever reason, but someone needs to be doing it. Plenty of simple things that would greatly help improve the forum are just being needlessly ignored like assigning sub board mods etc and the forum continues to circle the drain in the process whilst we stand by and watch helplessly.


It does need some improvements as I've already addressed, but have you suggested anything to make it better?

It's actually worse than that. There's no repercussions for doing a shitty job here. Even if they took some job doing menial work in their own country like cleaning toilets or packing products into boxes, they'd be fired pretty quickly if they showed up to work whenever they wanted and did the worst job imaginable and cut every corner they could possibly do and that's essentially what happens here. People are unqualified for the 'work' or tasks that they're doing. I wouldn't be able to work in a factory or office in Indonesia because I can't speak Indonesian, so I'd be useless. The same applies here but obviously they're not going to be fired because ICOs are happy to have them on board promoting their crap which only ruins the forum in the process and puts money directly into both their pockets so they all have a financial incentive to keep doing it.

And I know exactly why they do it. I totally understand and don't even begrudge them for it, especially those that live in poverty and I accept that poverty can make people do desperate or even unscrupulous things, but there's also a lot of greed going on here. I think it's a beautiful thing if this forum makes a huge difference to people's lives (as it has mine) but people can't be earning here at the expense of the utter deterioration and degradation of the forum. If I was in their position then I'd likely be doing the same, but it's more of an issue with the administration and rules (or lack thereof) as we not only let them get away with it but have created a culture where it's acceptable to do so and there's mostly no punishments for abusers and rule breakers. You can come here, bot or farm as many accounts as you want and earn from them by either writing drivel or copy and pasting and we allow campaigns to pay for it with zero repercussions. At this point we might as well rename or rebrand the forum to icospamtalk.org or getpaidtopost.org because that's what this board has become. I'm all about making it better for everyone here and it can happen without it being restrictive to those who just want to post. If you want to be able to earn here via posting then you should earn that right through merit and ranks (or cough up for Copper/Silver/Gold member etc). If people who can't speak English very well want to earn here then they should either stick to their local board or just collecting bounties. It wouldn't be ok for me to go posting in the Spanish board when I can't speak Spanish to an acceptable standard and people there would rightly get annoyed if I was being nuisance and shitting up the place because it is both incredibly disruptive and annoying. Also, ICO campaigns and those that spam on them need to face punishments because otherwise nothing will change and as long as Juniors can get paid for copy and pasting or writing drivel then they will continue to do so and over god knows how many accounts.  It's not that difficult to find a compromise here that benefits everyone, but doing nothing as we usually do isn't going to help.

The people who don't like it are usually the exact type of people the merit system was implemented to stop in the first place. In fact, I think the merit system should be even stricter in some aspects and there should be a merit requirement to become a Junior Member. We can already see that the merit system works because low quality posters likely won't ever rank up past Junior and there's going to be a hell of a lot of people who never make it past that rank, but it's useless when anyone can create an unlimited amount of Junior members here and get paid for them and not having a requirement just forces users to make multiple accounts to maximise earnings from bounties. That's why I'm a big proponent of removing signatures from Juniors and requiring some minimal amount of merit to become one.

With that being said, the system probably needs some tweaks. More merit sources need to be added and people should probably start being more generous with their merit (myself included), or I wouldn't necessarily be against lowering the merit requirement of some of the higher ranks as even for a good poster it may take a very long time to get there but that will become apparent over time and whether it works efficiently or not and can be tweaked and tailored as needed.

Account recovery has been a problem for as long as I've been a staff member here. There's a thread in the staff forum from 2014 by an ex-mod complaining about the amount of hacked accounts and users not getting them back and things have got exponentially worse since then, especially after the hack. BadBear at least used to look into them every now and again but now I don't think they are being investigated at all, which really isn't acceptable. I did at the time suggest BadBear charge a fee to recover them and he did say he "wouldn't say no", but in retrospect I don't think this would be ideal. Users shouldn't have to pay to get their accounts back and this could just lead to corruption (or at least accusations thereof) when there's money on the line for them being restored. All this could be remedied by either implementing more admins, giving certain staff access to restore accounts, or theymos automating the process. Alternatively, maybe theymos and cyrus should just take a day or two out of every month to investigate and restore them.

Also, automating the system will still have issues. I think we have to remember that the focus/usage of this forum has shifted (whether we like it or not). Most people who come here these days do so for altcoins and as such they never post bitcoin addresses anyway, and if so then an automated process will be useless for them unless you code one for ethereum and every other alt coin address that someone may have used. An automated process will also likely be abused by account sellers just to take their accounts back after they've been sold unless theymos has thought of a way to prevent this. There's also those who have plenty of other proof the account is rightfully theirs but can't sign a message for whatever reason and those should be investigated especially if the other info is very easy to verify which in some cases it has been but they're still waiting or probably even given up for obvious reasons.


I don't think I said hectic, but what I probably said was that there's likely more to them than just verifying the address and then restoring it. It's likely not just a five minute job.


Not necessarily. Would you do overtime at work if you didn't need to and wasn't going to be compensated for the time and effort? This could possibly seep into why they're not being restored because whether cyrus handles them all day or none at all he isn't going to earn any less or more, so why make time? He might even be losing money if he has other business affairs or work commitments to engage in on or off the forum. If mods were to be paid at all for recovering them then it should likely come out of the forum funds which makes much more sense to me. With that being said, earlier this year cyrus did start getting an additional 'admin fee' which I assumed was to do stuff like this, but maybe he's busy with other things theymos has him doing. I have absolutely no idea whether cyrus is doing a lot of work here behind the scenes or very little at all.


Then hire someone he does trust, you can't just ignore it because it won't go away. theymos mentioned before about hiring someone with a business degree or something to run the forum, but not sure they'd be any better than one of the current staff members. I have actually have a GNVQ in Business Studies from collage, does that count?  .

The country is irrelevant really and you shouldn't feel shame for the acts of others just because they're compatriots, but when people can't speak English very well, don't know much about bitcoin if anything at all and are doing this over multiple accounts each and as a full time job then that's when it becomes a huge problem and just leads to the utter degradation of the forum. I've made the comparison before that it's like someone going to Chinese-speaking Lamborghini forum to talk about Lambos, when you don't care about cars, can't drive, and can't speak Mandarin, but you can get paid to talk about them so people do and in their droves. It's a recipe for disaster. People should be able to earn here, but there needs to be some standards because the practice is destructive and the poor/barely decipherable posts ruin the experience for everyone else. It's like doing a job that you're in no way qualified to do but people are paying you for your shoddy jobs day after day with no penalties for the job even getting worse as time goes on. That needs to change. Theymos says this board isn't a welfare system for people, but the truth is that's pretty much all this place has become. We can easily change this. Newbies and Juniors shouldn't be able to advertise and a small merit requirement should be implemented to get a signature. ICOs who pay for spam need to be punished and people who can't speak English very well should be urged or suggested that they stick to their local board. If people only got paid for decent contributions then this place would clean itself up dramatically, but the longer we do nothing the worse it's is going to get.

Merit points  
Open for specific very high ranks only    

Well I wish these two options were huge issues for getting onto bounty campaigns. Sadly they're not and pretty much anyone can get onto most Alt coin campaigns these days and that's where the problem lies here. If campaigns only accepted higher ranks and those who have high merit counts then we wouldn't have much of an issue with spam.

Things like joining telegram groups seem silly to me though, and they're probably pointless, but I can see why they request Facebook and Twitter follows etc because it's an easy way to bolster their following to make them look more popular than they are.


If everyone ran their campaigns like Chipmixer/Darkstar there wouldn't be an issue on this board with spam. I've long said that signature campaigns could actually help clean up the forum and rid it off spam, but only if campaign managers do their job properly and set minimum standards and only accept quality users, and this campaign is proof positive of that working. Having a Chipmixer signature is almost a guarantee that that user will be making worthwhile posts. Haven't seen a single shitposter on there and if ever one person did start I'm sure they'd be removed fairly swiftly.

I went for the risky 1-0 to Tottenham. No idea what's going to happen, but I see I'm the only person who went with that score so could do me well if it comes in. I can see it being a very tight game and there only being one goal between them, but could go either way.


Anyone still has a shot at winning and don't forget about the consolation prizes. There's barely 20 points between the bottom and very top.


People are foolish who throw in the towel or even just complain at such an early stage. One good week could take you straight to the top and nobody really gets consistently great result week after week no matter how good you think you are at predicting scores. everyone can have a bad patch of lucky streak. Just do your best and hope for the best.

Interesting perspective, but not surprising. Letting people come here and run their business or campaigns however they want is like a company hiring someone off the street to do your advertising or work in a job they have had no training or guidance for.


There is one: it's called the signature campaign guidelines thread, but it's useless when most people don't read it (or any other guide/rules thread) and even worse when it's not even enforced. As long as people can come here and vandalise the place with no repercussions then they will continue to do so. This is seemingly ok because "freedom".


Well that was the proposition with the newbie welcome message proposition, that theymos did initially "ok", but whether it will ever happen or not is another issue entirely.