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.

And this shouldn't be acceptable or the way it is expected to be. If someone lost the key to their house and their landlord said "forget about it, you shouldn't have lost it, go be homeless", do you think that would be acceptable? Absolutely not. Maybe they might have to wait a day or two at most to get a copy of their key cut but not weeks/months/years and it should be a priority. If their landlord doesn't have time to get keys cut and deal with these things then employ someone who can do it for you.


I've almost clicked on phishing and dodgy links before when deleting posts. Anyone can fall victim to them in numerous ways and that shouldn't mean the end of your account here. If there was better security measures in place here most people wouldn't lose their accounts or they could be prevented from being lost.


Is he? He barely responds to me at all. I don't want him to get annoyed at me for constantly messaging him either. I managed to get a list of the top reporters for Bitcoin Discussion from him last week so we can give that board a dedicated mod, but no response after that. How long does it take to implement a mod? A few clicks probably. I've been suggesting there needs to be at least one there for years and still nothing. Simple things just don't get done and the forum becomes exponentially more spammy and less usable/readable as time goes on.

That's probably what 50% of the userbase looks like here right now. The other half are probably families with their 2.3 kids posting away:



Look kids, all you do is just copy and paste a post from earlier on in a spam mega thread and get paid for it! Can you believe it? Do this with your 12 alt accounts each and we'll be able to afford a Lamborghini by Christmas!

Few hours later:





Why was I banned? I didn't do nuffing. What about my daily needs? Merit ruins Lamborghinis!

Welcome to bitcointalk. The majority of the people posting here are just bot and spammer accounts being farmed to abuse bounties. Until something changes then this will never stop. Put a merit requirement on Junior Members or preferably get rid of signatures up until Member level or even higher. These bot accounts can join a signature campaign at Junior which merely requires 30 activity that bots and spammers can get in 2-4 weeks. Good luck them ever getting ten merits to become a Member then. As long as you can farm Junior accounts by doing nothing but making 30 spam posts or copy and pastes then bots will continue to do this in their thousands. You can earn a decent living from bounties alone if you have enough Junior accounts and this just encourages the creation of many more. Make signatures a reward for those who have contributed something here. Getting ten merit isn't outrageous and should be fairly easy for even a half decent poster but spammers will get no where.

1) Why do you need one? Something tells me you just wouldn't give up on this account if it was lost somehow. Put your self in his and everyone else's shoes when they're seemingly never going to get their account back. In fact, why don't you abandon this account now and start over from a new one if it's not a big issue? I mean, you don't need a high ranked account, right?

2) Who's fault was it that the forum got hacked? That's how most of these accounts are getting hacked. Anyone can have their account hacked or stolen regardless of how security conscious you are, but that doesn't mean they don't have a right to get their account back at all.

3) I don't think he's saying he should be given priority, but there are hundreds of accounts that aren't getting restored at all and this is just another one added to the pile whilst users are left without even a response from admins. Simply not restoring them at all isn't acceptable and looks terrible on the forum.


Google's system is probably all automatic, unless you contacted customer support and got help from them but they will have hundreds if not thousands of employees restoring accounts. Bitcointalk has two, neither of which seem to be restoring accounts at all.

I guess we don't need it, but we don't need Politics  or Alt Coin section either. I don't think we should get rid of it though as it's good as a board for threads that don't fit any where else. If someone wants to discuss movies or music then they can in Off Topic. What I think we should do is restrict that board to higher ranks only and/or posts/activity aren't counted in there because it is the go-to board for account farmers and spammers. When you can't speak English very well if at all or know little to nothing about bitcoin you can just spend your entire forum life posting in there about your top five movies etc and many farmers do post exclusively in Off Ropic and create shit thread after shit thread despite there being a sticky in there telling them not to do that. There's no good reason why someone would sign up here and head straight to Off Topic. This is a bitcoin discussion forum, not a child's play pen to farm their account easily in the process, so that's why I think that board should be off limits to Newbies and Juniors at least because they just abuse it. I've also suggested in the past that you have to be a certain rank to create threads in there which would also help, but I would prefer locking it out completely to all lower ranks or posts not counting towards activity etc.

You could do this I guess (and Newbies already can't post images). To remove the restriction newbies could purchased a copper rank. I've also suggested implementing a landing page/redirect notice that urges users to double check the url once clicked for phishing etc. Sometimes you almost click dodgy links by accident so this would be double protection and some of the phishing urls look legit on first glance which I'm sure gets many.

IF you want to lock the thread you can do so at the bottom left.

theyoungmillionaire007 was caught copy and pasting with this post:


Then saw this one directly after it which is also a copy and paste:


Both users registered the same day:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2236185     theyoungmillionaire007     June 25, 2018
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2236457     BitCoinDream247 June 25, 2018

And both have names that are probably based off other users:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1180530 theyoungmillionaire
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=181001 BitCoinDream

Then saw this in theyoungmillionaire007's feedback:



Alt accounts: LesyaMoryana, Milonsa, tacanban, thienngabh3 and there are more.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4681128.msg42422361#msg42422361
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3056099.msg31836419#msg31836419
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4461801.msg41178604#msg41178604
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4862219.msg43888763#msg43888763
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4769379.msg43260498#msg43260498

Probably should be looked into as I'm sure there's many more.

Meriting those sorts of threads is more likely people just using the merit as a 'like' button. Ass licking isn't against the rules either, but I don't think meriting a post is a guarantee to get you into a campaign anyway, but maybe they are trying to ass-lick in the hope that they will. Something tells me that DarkStar isn't going to accept you into Chipmixer for merely meriting their Ann thread. If people request that their post is merited to join then that would be a different matter but I don't think 'ass kissing' is a huge issue right now.

Why would they use bump bots in their own sub board? It defeats the purpose. People use bump bots to bump their thread to the top for publicity over all the other ICOs.


I like the idea but they won't do it, nor will they know how to moderate effectively here or by our standards (that's something you learn over time by reporting etc).


ICOs should have to compensate the forum in some capacity. Not only does the forum likely lose out hundreds of thousands if not millions in potential advertising revenue as those ICOs would advertise here via banners (and many do try but theymos has blocked them from adverting now), but they also cause 95% of the spam and destruction of the forum via signature campaigns and doing nothing at all about the spam they cause. In fact, spam is good for them. The more people spamming their signature the more adverting they get for free and this is why they accept anyone and everyone. This can't be acceptable and needs to change. The longer we ignore it the more people exploit it and the worse things get. We can't let ICOs and the get rich quick schemesters behind them drive the forum into the ground. This place is an absolute paradise for them and we let them do whatever they want and this needs to change.


Well I initially only suggested it for the Ann board and anywhere else where people are using paid bumping bot services to keep their thread at the top, but you could extend it to other boards where potential abuse may happen. I see a lot of idiots using shills in Digital Goods etc to ask a stupid fake question or post a fake vouch to keep the thread on top and it could certainly be used there. The thread could still show up in your 'show new replies' but it's just not bumped publicly on the board which is what they're after. If this can be implemented then I think it will render bump bots useless.

As for manually whitelisting, I think it would help clean up the forum immensely and it would stop 99% of bots from becoming an eyesore and a nuisance, but I know it will be a lot of extra work for staff (but nuking bots and also  idiots who write exclusively 'good project' is also very time-consuming). I'm also not sure whether it's something theymos would do, but it certainly should be considered and plenty of other forums already use this sort of mechanism.  

I'll be behind Liverpool this season. I think the title will be between them and City, but who knows what will happen.


There's usually always some shockers on the first round as teams are shaky coming back from the break and gelling with new players etc and you've got no recent for to judge either team on, and so making correct predictions is often difficult, but I guess this year it's the anomaly. 0-0 games are where you can gain a lot of points. People seem to rarely choose them (or even draws). I tend to pick them when I think there's two poor teams that will cancel each other out and it worked on the Southampton vs Burnley game but not on a couple of others.

That's entirely up to you. You can give them all your details if you trust them but remember that user could do what he wants with them. I wouldn't personally have anything sent to my home address from here even if I thought they were very trusted, nor would I ever give out my real name or address because I'm sure there's a fair few people who would like to be a nuisance with it. If you want to remain private then you're going to have to find a way to have something shipped to you without them knowing who you are and there are likely several options. The most popular one would be to invest in a PO box but these aren't cheap and you will almost certainly need ID and proof of address to open one but this wouldn't be available to the person you were giving the PO box address out to. Usually you would have to purchase them for a minimum term too (which would probably be at least a month so probably not cost effective just for one item). You could have the item sent to someone else as a proxy but this of course then opens them up to possible abuse. If you're in the UK I worked out a way that you can essentially get a temporary one use'drop location for free anytime you want it and you don't need to use your real name or use ID. All you need is a pick up code and they give your package to anyone as long as they have that. You're essentially using a loop hole in some of the 'pick up points' that retailers use so you can go pick up your purchases from a store for convenience. It could be used as a way to sell bitcoins for cash or anything else anonymously as well.

And this thread is probably more for trading discussion, but maybe Meta is ok too.

Good work. All missing the periods on the end of their posts as well:






jacaf01 and thepo1m are also banned.

Noticed this user because his posts were terrible:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=373847 Pab September 03, 2014

He has received merit from this user (who is banned and has negative feedback):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=918100     housebtc November 10, 2016

Then I noticed the similarities between their posts:



No periods at the end of their sentences.

housebtc has also received two merit from someone but there's no history of it. Anyone know how to get that data? I wouldn't normally care about such a small potential abuse but it's likely ban evasion and he's crap posting.