I'm all for brainstorming. I'd rather my ideas be shot down or picked apart than nothing getting discussed at all. I'm not saying all these ideas are great either and some certainly have flaws or may cause more harm than good, but I'm just putting them out there. I'm sure many of them can be improved by others suggestions, and hopefully people can suggest far better proposals. Somethings like captchas just might not really make much of a difference and cause more annoyance than issues they solve, but other things like assigning sub board mods and requiring a merit achievement for Juniors are no brainers in my opinion and are not disruptive. Same goes for punishing ICO campaigns who are responsible for the majority of the destruction here.


Theymos seems to be against them going by a comment he made today. One at the top of a few of the main subs like this would be lucrative:



That way advertisers can target their market ie a gambling site would advertise in the gambling board and so on.

Guess what?







































#meritsaveslives

The top merited user as well:

Why not? We shouldn't create a rank that there will be loads of people instantly either. I'm only 13 periods away from 1920 on my main account so it's not that bad. I'm not exactly an old school member either, but it's a rank that people will gradually achieve over time, and the high merit requirement would make it extra special, but I don't think only theymos holding it right now would be a big deal. People will soon join him. There's far too many Legendaries right now and I think there should be a distinction to separate much older members and those who have put in the contributions to receive the merit as well. I dare say with the auto-merit distribution there's probably a lot of shit posting Legednaries that will get little to no merit so would be nice to distinguish between them.


I wouldn't expect much to be introduced here within 2 years to be honest.

I know. It gets worse every time I go in that board. Even threads that are created about something worthwhile quickly get spammed by Junior Members writing their generic one/two liners often just replying to whatever question is asked in the title. Even worse is that when you see a constructive comment written it's often a copy and paste from somewhere else online or some other user in that thread.


People could go back and merit all the posts that are deserving. I know there will be hundreds of my posts that deserved merit that were made before the introduction of the merit system. I think we should concentrate on the newer users that are signing up here just to claim bounties and sig spam etc though.


I've suggest that some of the potential money brought in from something like more donator ranks or ad slots could be used to fund the development of new projects such as a decentralised forum and a better captcha service. Do you have any suggestions for a more efficient one? If a foolproof one could be created wouldn't it have been by now? 

It would solve a heck of a lot of problems and it's not an unreasonable or unreachable requirement either. Ten merit and being here for 2 and a half months is nothing. Something needs to change and we can't just allow people to come here who are 100% only here to earn. Many users literally have no interest or knowledge about bitcoin other than they've just heard you can earn here. Add into the mix when you can't speak English very well and it's a recipe for disaster. These users are then essentially forced to use google translate or just copy and paste a post. It's like signing up to a Lamborghini forum when you can't drive and don't even like cars. Why would anyone do that? Nobody would normally sign up to a web forum for something they have little to no interest in but this one is different when you're throwing payment into the mix. Adding a merit requirement would severely curb this behaviour and force campaigns to not accept and pay anyone for any old crap they can be bothered to make or copy and paste because they can't be trusted to do their job. Sadly, I'm not sure if anything from this list will be implemented anytime soon if at all other than maybe adding a few moderators.


It is when it's temp. It just doesn't on the permaban button. You could put a message and just set the ban to never expire which will be the same.

It is the only way we'll likely stop them from being a nuisance and an eyesore, though it's a lot more work for staff. The benefits of it stopping 99% of bots outweigh any negatives though. Many other forums have this sort of post verification as well. As for captchas being bypassed, anything can be got around but it's one more hoop for them to jump through. I don't think I've joined many websites or forums before that didn't require email verification and if captchas are so pointless then why does pretty much every other forum use them? They have their benefits and will stop some bots at least.


Agreed. A mere one merit requirement really puts a spanner in the works of bots and the very worst of posters. It doesn't effect anyone else's ability to post here either. It has no drawbacks at all as far as I can see.


These could all be implemented today within a matter of minutes and the board would be better of for them instead of current staff being swamped with more things to do (that often aren't getting done) day after day.


At a minimum it should be one. Maximum probably 5 or something. I would be more for it being just one if Juniors had their signatures removed completely. Then you need ten merit and enough activity to become a Member to get a signature. Either way the requirement should be something and one would be better than nothing. 

This is the thing. Merit doesn't actually effect anyone's ability to merely post or discuss things here (you know, what this forum is actually for). It only effects your ability to earn and that's why people are annoyed. The people who open threads complaining about merit are the users who have only joined this forum in the first place just because they were told you could earn money easily here. Now it's not that simple or easy. Merit doesn't stop them shitposting though and there are new ICO campaigns that pop up every month that are happy to pay them, they just won't ever rise through the ranks and will remain indefinite Juniors until they up their posting game. I think we should even go further and remove signatures from Juniors or at least require some token amount of merit to become one. That would really put a spanner in the works of the worst sorts of posters because they wouldn't even be able to earn anything all then until they've at least done something to get the merit.

It is anarchy. This forum is what happens when there's little to no laws or the ones there are are sparingly enforced. I joined this forum a strong libertarian, but my views have waned largely to how things work (or don't work) here. A community just doesn't function well by letting everyone do whatever they want with little restrictions or regulations because the greedy and tyrannical rise to the top and shit on every else below them on the way there. If you have an account banned here then just create another from the same IP. You won't be caught. People are being caught farming literally hundreds of accounts and they have to be painstakingly manually searched for by mods and admins are not looking into them at all. I could find and ban fifty bots or copy and pasters that obviously belong to the same person, but there could be hundreds if not thousands I've missed. Copy and pasters often work in patterns and they're often too stupid or lazy to use a fresh connection for every account. An admin would be able to group them all together with a couple of clicks if so, but it's just not happening. Nothing is happening and the forum continues to circle the drain in the meantime with users finding new ways to abuse the forum all the time. People are offering bumping services to spam threads with thousands of accounts. People are farming thousands of accounts to copy and paste content and get paid from alt coin bounties who will pay anyone for anything. We might as well get rid of the rules all together because they're really not being enforced effectively which is waste of time for everyone.

But you're missing the point. These users can already buy accounts here. Often they're hacked or farmed. If it's going to happen then why not make it safer and take away the money from farmers and hackers and put it to good use? Besides, you wouldn't actually be buying the rank of Hero or Legendary or whatnot with my suggestion. You would still be a Junior or Senior Member or whatever, just with a Silver or Gold Member title underneath it. You would still need to earn the merit and activity over time to rise through the ranks. Some signature campaigns would pay merely for the Silver and Gold title but there will also be ones that don't and they will also still require a high merit or activity. ICO campaigns probably won't care but most bitcoin paying ones will. The benefits are numerous here. If people are prepared to cough up money to bypass ranks and they're buying accounts anyway then let them do it 'legitimately' without running the risk of being scammed or buying a dodgy account which further fuels the scumbag economy or hackings and shitposting farming etc.

There should be an addition rank made. It could supersede Legendary and Legendary is bumped up to a higher activity requirement. Legendary is becoming far too common now and will only become more so as time passes. I have suggested fixing Legendary at 960 activity and the new rank is double that at 1920. You could also make the merit requirement very high for this rank so it's only for the very highest contributors. 2000 merit would probably do as that would be very difficult to achieve and would only be likely done so by the very top percentile of contributors here.  

Todl? A new bitcointalk meme may have just been born.


Yeah, I like it. Maybe we should crowdfund it to get some cards professional printed. Satoshi could be the rarest card of them all  .


Haha. You know it. I'd happily throw some merit at that for some good designs.

What do you need merits for?

For the same reason Morgan Freeman starred in London Has Fallen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJVH6OdqWo




Not really. It's a system to reward posts that are deemed useful or meritorious and to distinguish a shitposter from the rest and prevent them from abusing the ranking system by contributing little to nothing here over multiple alt accounts. There's a huge problem here of people making very low-quality contributions just to farm accounts to use for claiming bounties. The merit system is a way to try curb this.


I'm not an expert in cryptography, however, I am one of the most merited users here (not tying to suck my own dick). I got most of my merits in Meta from helping out and proposing solutions to the many issues here. Merits are not an indicator of how trustworthy you are either.


Ranks on this forum mean nothing elsewhere as well, just as Reddit karma means nothing here either. Merits are a system for this forum not any other.


I reckon you already know the answer to this, but merits aren't their true goal. Merits are actually in the way of achieving what they came here to do and that is simply to earn money. To earn more money you need a higher ranked account to get a bigger signature. To do that you need merits. That's why they're desperate for them.


There are bigger issues here than the people creating threads about merits, but practice what you preach.

I wouldn't expect him to do anything major here if the new forum isn't far off, but if it's going to be years before it's released then that's a different matter. However, simple things like punishing sig campaigns and assigning sub boards mods can be done now and take little to no effort from theymos. Meanwhile, the forum continues to the circle the drain getting worse and worse which each passing day. One day we're going to wake up and the forum will be 99% bot accounts and copy and pasters. Anything else can just be considered for development on the new forum if it hasn't already.


How about we remove the default merits completely and everyone starts from ground zero? That would really sort the wheat from the chaff and stop all the whingers about it not being fair.

No, it will effect the quality of the forum and greatly so. If you don't contribute anything here and get merit or aren't going to cough up for a donator rank then you shouldn't be allowed to spam away and earn here by posting rubbish. People are literally coming here with no knowledge or interest in bitcoin other than they just got told you can earn here. Many can't speak English to an acceptable standard so they just garble out nonsense or copy and paste. This can't be acceptable.


Then people would just make sure their posts are 20 words or characters or whatever and would just make things worse:

Give me bounty. Very good. I like the Project. Great time. Much support. When is airdrop? I like free money. Blah blah blah. Is this twenty words yet?


2fa is coming on the new forum, but if that isn't coming anytime soon then I agree it should be implemented here.


I'm suggesting at least one merit. Currently it's nothing. I wouldn't be against it being 2/3/4/5 or more etc. You could even bump up the Member merit requirement to something else. Personally, I think I would probably prefer something like Junior should be at least one merit but only Members and above can have a signature. That way you would still need ten merit to get a signature which spammers will struggle to get. Currently anyone can have a signature as soon as they've hit Junior and this is being colossally exploited by farmers and bounty abusers. It's so bad even bots often become Juniors now. Bots will never even get one merit.  Theymos has also stated he is against restricting new members just to one board so this almost certainly isn't going to happen.


You can already disable avatars, but those are just some of the examples of possible perks, not they should definitely have these rewards. I'm not a huge fan of animated avatars either, but people have already worked out how to have them here anyway.


It would only be for the Premium rank. I don't think spammers will pay $1000 for it or whatever. You could also give it as a reward for the 'very high merited' user rank or Legendaries or whatnot.


Maybe, this post has been reported by x amount of users, though maybe people would get annoyed if they see this on their own posts, especially if the reports remain unhanded. The more people that report it though will get the attention of the mods quicker and if it's something multiple users are reporting then it's likely urgent.

I've suggested tweaking the feedback algo a bit before. Tiny trades with a smallish value probably shouldn't count for much or turn you 'green' after a while. Some people are obviously just doing trades for the feedback and to essentially buy a feedback as cheaply as possible.


Would be abused if you give out monetary rewards. Some people are already obviously going crazy reporting things after theymos merely mentioned the possibility of reporter badges and that's just for a worthless badge. Imagine what will happen if we monetise the system. The report queue will become a mess like the forum already has. I wouldn't be against issuing some other sort of rewards but probably best not for cash prizes.

Then don't engage yourself in the forum if you think it's unfair. Or even just buy a Legendary account yourself (not recommended). Why are you so concerned with other people and their rank? If you don't like this practise then don't partake in it or ignore it. Why don't you even just aim to achieve Legendary rank via your own merit so you can say achieved it without having to cheat your way through ranks? Just because others may cheat and bypass the system doesn't take away from your own achievements or contributions here.

Also, I wouldn't be against disallowing account sales here either, but the logic is that they would still happen just off site. However, I have suggested that people are able to purchase new donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member which would give you the benefits of a Full and Hero-member account respectively. That would pretty much kill account farming and sales in the process so it's win win in my opinion.

That was a waste of time and they're useless when they're not being enforced. We need theymos to start blacklisting signatures for it to be effective which he agreed to do but never did despite several requests. I don't know whether he changed his mind or just doesn't have time but I'm really not sure why he isn't actively pursuing repercussions for those who are directly causing the deterioration of the forum. If there were rules for ICO campaigns and punishments for those who didn't follow them then they would start playing by the rules because this forum is too valuable to them. If you want to be able to advertise for free here then do so in an acceptable fashion. The forum would be a much better place if it wasn't for ICO campaigns and their users crapping all over it.


These are all basically things I've suggested in the past.

I created a thread to make suggestions to the forum here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4893744.new#new

Once people have made their suggestions I'll open a new thread to beginning voting on them.  

What I propose is that everyone gets to suggest improvements to the forum. Please make them in this thread and I will add them to the list. After a couple of weeks or so I will compile them all into a new thread and let users vote for which ones they think are a good idea and I will gradually arrange them in order of votes so the most popular ones will be pushed to the top. Hopefully theymos can use it as a sort of 'to do' checklist, but at least he can see what is popular amongst the community. Please keep your suggestions as concise as possible and try to stick to one or two sentences if you can. Here are the various suggestions I've made in the past (in no particular order):

• A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.

• A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).

• Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).

• Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).

• Remove signatures completely from lower ranks (at least Juniors). Purchasing a Copper Membership (or higher) could still get you one.

• More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).

• Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).

• Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).

• More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.

• Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).

• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.

• A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.

• Two report buttons/queues: one for sig spam and low quality posts and one everything else that is more urgent (hundreds of reports on spam posts are currently burying more important reports).

• A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.

• A sub board for highly merited users to encourage constructive topics only by users who have proven their worth here over time (or make the Ivory Tower merit requirement much higher [OMG ITS LIKE SOVIET RUSSIA GULAG]).

• A new member rank after Legendary as it is becoming far too common now and will only become more so as time passes. I would suggest fixing Legendary at 960 activity and the new rank is double that at 1920. You could also make the merit requirement very high for this rank so it's only for the crème de la crème of users [OMG NAZI RANK ITS LIKE THE RICH KEEP GETTING RICHER].

• Additional perks for Legendary accounts or a higher rank if added (for example: custom title, image banner in signature, clickable link in personal text, access to exclusive sub board etc).

• Charging ICOs a fee to make their ANN here. You could even get rid of the ANN board completely and give them their own sub once they've paid the fee. If there's no Ann board then there will probably be no paid bumping because it will be useless, but let them spam away in their own slum and squalor.

• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.

• A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).

• A captcha added to deleting a post.

• Require email verification for new accounts.

• Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.

• A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).

• A dedicated Marketplace for the Alt Coin board that would be used for currency sales/exchanges and advertising/requesting services etc (the current one has no description and is being used as catch all for anything and everyting and not what it was intended for).

• Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.

• More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).

• Requiring manually whitelisting of all new accounts before they can post. All new users will essentially be shadowbanned until they've been verified by a mod. This will eliminate 99% of bots and spammers before they even start. Spam threads can be trashed on sight before they even become spam megathreads.

• Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.

• Press board locked/archived as it's served its purpose and now is mostly just used to get away with legalised copy and pasting or blog spam, or:
B) Sticky some guidelines that only notable bitcoin Press hits are allowed from non-bitcoin related websites (IE articles from cointelegraph and cryptocrapnewsdaily.net aren't allowed).

• Some local boards have Press and Off topic subs. They should be removed as they're hotbeds for account farmers/spammers and are not necessary here.

• Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).

• Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

• Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying.

• More advertisement slots. This forum is badly under-monetised in my opinion and we likely lose hundreds of thousands in lost revenue to signatures and lack of ad slots and visibility. Many people don't even seem to know we have adverts or assume they're just another sig ad. What I've suggested before is that there are a few 'premium slots' that are displayed at the top of certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion, Gambling, Services etc. Companies would pay a lot for these as you could target your audience and you could run them for a month or even longer for a fixed price rather than having to bother running auctions every week.

• Warnings in red displayed to lower ranked users when they go to post alerting them to the most commonly ignored/broken rules. They should be specific to the sub board that they are going to post in as well. Ie  Press: Alt Coin articles do not belong here. Alt coin Anns: Please don't post generic posts like "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?" etc as they are not permitted. Maybe in the Marketplace we can have a warning to Only bump once per day and remove old bumps etc. Bitcoin Discussion: Do not post topics on the value of bitcoin - they belong in Speculation etc. A lot of people break the rules because they're just not aware of them so they would then have no excuses.

• KYC for all new users. Just kidding.

• Lamborghinis for all staff as a Christmas bonus (will also accept an Audi R8). Not kidding.

Not really. I think it's more that he doesn't have time, which he has stated as such a couple of times. Cyrus also either doesn't have time or just can't be bothered. I honestly don't think there's a better person to run the board than theymos. He's far smarter than I am and I trust his judgement, but you can't run a ship from the shore with your head buried in the sand and the longer you don't act on things the worse they become. I really don't understand why some things are just ignored, especially when they take away the workload from him and people annoying him about things incessantly. I've been saying for years workload needs to be distributed better. Adding mods to certain sub boards should be a no-brainer and would likely take a few minutes and a couple of clicks for him to do. We even lose more staff then we gain and the forum continues to grow day by day so things get much worse. Punishing signature campaigns would cut down on the spam drastically. Requiring merit to move to Junior would also stop bots from ranking up. All simple things.


There isn't anything better, nor as profitable as here so it's still the best place. There are several other boards you could use but they're pretty dead. Things need to change though before the only people posting here are bots and barely legible spammers churning out their generic one liners re-worded slightly over their 12 accounts each just to claim enough bounties for their 'daily needs'.


This is silly. I merited your post before I read the last bit. I understand your frustrations but this isn't the way to go.


I don't use IRC. The last time I did nothing much was getting discussed in there either so I don't bother with it. Using the Staff board is far more efficient. I don't see why the cost of paying more mods would be an issue. Theymos has said a couple of times the forum has enough in reserves. We've also lost several mods over the past year or so. There are also numerous ways this forum could likely bring in hundreds of thousands in revenue: more ad slots, offer more donator ranks, charge ICOs to list here to name a few.



Already have. krishnapramod is the highest reporter in Bitcoin Discussion so I think he would make a good board mod for there and a patroller. Seeing how he's apparently Indian I think it would be wise to assign him to the local board as well if he was chosen.

Threads are locked for a variety of reasons: duplicates, served their purpose, turning into spam megathreads etc, but staff can't win. We leave threads open and people complain asking why they're still allowed to be spammed in and haven't been locked or trashed yet. We lock them and people still complain. Can't have it both ways.

If you want to get an answer as to why a specific thread was locked then contact your local mods. If you make your case they might reopen them but at least you can get an answer as to why they were locked in the first place. They're usually done so for one of the reasons listed above though.