That limit is unrelated to your membergroup. It adjusts only according to your activity.

Please report insubstantial and off-topic posts as well as very insubstantial topics. They should be deleted or moved.

Are you using the most recent version of Bitcoin-Qt? Older versions are much slower.

There's apparently a bug preventing Newbies from being promoted. I'll look into it when I have time. I don't think that there's any major disadvantage to being a Newbie now.

Edit: Fixed.

What instructions?

Maybe, but the fee increases every time you're banned, and you lose your original account. If I actually see anyone evading bans, I might take additional measures to stop them.


No.

New users can now immediately start posting unless they are using suspicious IPs. Suspicious IPs are ones that have been banned previously, or are known proxies, or are near many banned/proxy IPs. If you register using a suspicious IP, you can use most forum features (watchlist, etc.), but you can't post or send PMs until you pay a small fee. In almost all cases, the fee is less than $1. People proxybanned in this way can also be whitelisted by the usual people who can do whitelisting. These IP bans apply only to registration: you can no longer get caught by random IP bans if you're using an established account.

The Newbies section is now an archived section. You can move posts from it, but nothing else can be posted there.

The patrol page acts kind of like a "virtual newbies section". It shows only posts by newbies, no matter where the posts are located. It also keeps track of which posts are new since the last time you've visited the patrol page. If you want to help out, please look for spam on the patrol page. There's an option in your settings to put a "Patrol" link near "Watchlist".

Additionally, membergroup limits are changed:

Group	Requirement
Brand New	0 posts
Newbie	(none)
Jr. Member	activity: 30
Member	activity: 60
Full Member	activity: 120
Sr. Member	activity: 240
Hero Member	activity: 480

In round 109 and future ad rounds, I'm going to change the ad area from this:

to something like this:

I believe that all past ads should still work. Also, ads will be able to be a little wider.

If you've already bid and you don't like the changes, you can cancel your bid.

Fixed it.

Thanks.

Clearly they don't care about breaking things for their users if it means "keeping ads at bay"...

I will figure out some way of bypassing this block.

I recently won a bet there and successfully withdrew ~0.6 BTC.

Specifically, the proxy times out in the middle of displaying the image if any of the following are true:
- More than 3 seconds have elapsed since the image data first started being downloaded.
- No response is received for 3 seconds.
- Your server sends a total of more than 20 packets containing no image data.

I believe that that can only happen if:
- Your server is taking too long to return the entire image.
- Your server gives an incorrect Content-Length.
- Your server gives no Content-Length and your image is above the 2.5 MB size limit.

Otherwise, the proxy will detect errors before it starts returning the image.

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. Ads will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". 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.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Seven 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 frequently get 1-2 extra days, 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 seven slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 7 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 7 slots. If the two highest bids are 7 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 6 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. I also post periodic status updates which should help make things clear.

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
3 1.20 BITMAIN
4 1.15 BOOKMAKER

Updated. Old:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Each person is listed with his PGP public key or Bitcoin address.

Trustees
theymos 5E6B3F3BA961193C5C9B4435C6555693DAB591E7
Stefan Thomas D16E7B0442B9F02E0660C094C9473700A4B08BF3
Martti Malmi E526A9B27841593BC2439EB2E904B7FE1BBA4244

Community council members
psy 7FB4272D4D2285DCEA2503EC8957CE7E0ECB3344
John 42B6DC513D9DFDEC4C287CD78353E637B3AAEEB0
hazek 0475D4C3B9C988B8B396BB6D4FD343B39E8803E7
FreeMoney 1Kwbu2Am9L2zbpUTUQ4c6PzhT6bD5CYqC4
BCB D8249B78EB762933E1402A477ABE99DB1179678E
Maged F7F974C4D111E276FF243A8D59A6076B32733620
nanotube D8B11AAC59A873B0F38D475CE7F938BEC95594B2
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iF4EAREIAAYFAlFIrfwACgkQxlVWk9q1keclPQEAhhkipOVmunTGyz5fr2ZYwttr
JBYdR7zy3402zLyERXYBAL79LWKzXcb/7TzW4f5pTcNNPj9GygNV+mbJkdnw24h5
=Uanr
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

New:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Each person is listed with his PGP public key or Bitcoin address.

Trustees
theymos 5E6B3F3BA961193C5C9B4435C6555693DAB591E7
Martti Malmi E526A9B27841593BC2439EB2E904B7FE1BBA4244
Stefan Thomas D16E7B0442B9F02E0660C094C9473700A4B08BF3

Community council members
nanotube D8B11AAC59A873B0F38D475CE7F938BEC95594B2
psy 7FB4272D4D2285DCEA2503EC8957CE7E0ECB3344
casascius 25AD1933B0D3FE72113595CC5A2EE8F1F1175A23
John 42B6DC513D9DFDEC4C287CD78353E637B3AAEEB0
Maged F7F974C4D111E276FF243A8D59A6076B32733620
SaltySpitoon 83F47CC601C25A3C85C0141990F7A516600E0ADD
hazek 0475D4C3B9C988B8B396BB6D4FD343B39E8803E7
FreeMoney 1Kwbu2Am9L2zbpUTUQ4c6PzhT6bD5CYqC4
Meni Rosenfeld 71A3B6A007510238CEE8A2C2AF79F1252A608F15
BCB D8249B78EB762933E1402A477ABE99DB1179678E

Updated Jan. 12 2014
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iF4EAREIAAYFAlLTgOwACgkQxlVWk9q1kefODQEAofdaS2gl3rCle2ZiqHYpF1se
yLqTt4dX1rSsmciIMtEA/3jaIM2FeC0gBRgc08T8SiS6pKrgFxEWlrOm5AkTVZLw
=PgZn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The community council changes take effect after 30 days. The trustee reordering takes effect after 60 days.

Newbie restrictions can actually be done without any modifications using board permissions if you don't mind promoting users based only on post count. I don't recommend this, though. For promoting users using special conditions, I just disabled the native SMF auto-promote, and I have a cron job that does the promotions.

Did anyone complain to EasyList about this yet? They'll probably fix it if enough people complain.

The "image" you posted was http://&t=535&c=edeblvlxZswpAg, which is obviously invalid.