The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation (no marquee or blinking). Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 700px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Eight of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 10, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression counts for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Auction rules

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the max number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all eight slots are filled.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made. In particular, bids from people with less than 15 activity points are likely to be rejected. I recommend not getting into a bidding war with someone who has less than 15 activity points, as their bids might not be accepted, but your latest bids will still stand. If you need to know right away whether someone's bids will be accepted, PM me.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time no more than 12 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else.

Auction ended. Final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 5.50 Zoomhash_michael
4 5.05 BITMAIN
3 5.00 FXO

You can click the "insert quote" links when composing a reply.

Here are the edits. (The numbers in <>s are timestamps. They separate each edit.) Looks like you were right.

If both sender and recipient of a PM deletes it, then it's deleted from the database completely and I can't access it except through the daily database backups. (This is a massive pain, so don't expect me to do it for you...)

Deleted/edited posts are always saved forever.

OK.

I was not the owner of GLBSE. GLBSE was clearly owned by Nefario, as he was able to shut down the site without the approval of BitcoinGlobal, and despite my own vehement protests. However, I do have some knowledge of the GLBSE market situation at the time, so I'll be happy to advise in this case.

The contract is nonsensical and should be thrown away, but Gurrty deserves the value of his principal back. After some research, I've determined that the GLBSE market price of TYGRR.BOT was between 0.75 BTC and 1.04 BTC per share around June 5, 2012, but only for much smaller volumes. Since the contract's specified price of 1 BTC per share is within this range, I believe that it is best to take this price to be the actual value of the shares at the time of the contract. Therefore, the principal was worth 5762 BTC, or 30,999.56 USD at the time. Adding a reasonable 12% interest rate compounded daily for 1.97 years results in 39,265.02 USD. I judge that this is the amount owed to Gurrty by Goat.

Thankfully, I don't have to give out scammer tags anymore, so you can take this judgement or leave it...

The contract clearly establishes debt:

However, because the contract says "best effort" (and is vague in general), I don't believe that Goat should be required to follow the exact terms of the contract, especially since he clearly had difficulties at the time. But he should pay at least the USD value of the principal (= the market value of the shares) at the time, and probably more because he defaulted on the contract and the BTC is worth much more now.

Yeah, I agree, though maybe we disagree about the appropriate percentage that should be repaid. Looks like this won't be settled here, though.


If either of you want me to publish a complete list of the PMs between you, I can do that.


If I did that, then I'd have to hold all donated funds forever just in case the donator scammed someone, and the donations would be useless. The forum is not an insurance company.


Here they are:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623429.msg6915010#msg6915010

Ref links are allowed if they're on-topic, which this is.

A court would also interpret the principal in terms of fiat value at the time.

It's not reasonable to expect Goat to pay millions of dollars because he stupidly lost a few thousand dollars years ago. At the same time, Gurrty was denied the chance to maybe make lots of money by holding onto the BTC, so he deserves more than just the principal IMO. But not the full BTC amount. (What are the chances that Gurrty would have held onto this BTC until now if he was so careless as to loan it to Goat?)

Personally, I think that a partial repayment would be reasonable even if Goat can afford the whole thing. The contract says "best effort", and the money probably was really lost and not just pocketed by Goat. Goat was apparently investing almost entirely in Pirate or other funds investing in Pirate at the time.

Maybe it would be reasonable to take the USD value of that BTC at the time of the contract and then apply the contract's compounding interest to this amount.

These PMs are real:

OK.

Use the "report to admin" feature on the PMs. Report them only to me.

Yes.

Yeah, that's not allowed. Any signature must be in the signature area. (Except that a traditional valediction or just your name is allowed, though this is discouraged.)

I removed the existing ones. Anyone who continues posting them will be banned.

I just noticed this DMCA takedown notice that Blizzard sent to Google which resulted in a forum topic being delisted:
http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1700018

Looks like Blizzard did a Google search for "diablo download" or something and blindly sent a takedown for every result. Pretty ridiculous...

- You will get a PM if one of your replies is individually deleted (even in self-moderated topics).
- None of your posts have been individually deleted since 2012.
- The post you're talking about is gone because the topic was deleted.

There's no global trust rating, so that isn't really possible. I can recover deleted and edited posts in any case, though.

TradeFortress already has a hidden scammer tag.