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
4 2.35 Inaba
3 2.35 betcointm

Current policy is to release IPs only in response to a court order or a reasonable police request. (I don't guarantee that I won't release IPs in other cases, though.)

Feel free. No need to pay the forum anything.

Here are the deleted posts of HashFast-related accounts. Some of these may have been deleted by moderators.

Why should I care whether you do?

AdBlock Plus filters are limited to the language of CSS selectors, which aren't powerful enough to do that. I've arranged things so that it's impossible to isolate the forum ad area using CSS selectors without also grabbing useful content as well. This is the second time that EasyList maintainers carelessly tried to block forum ads without checking whether it can be done safely...

I don't know his identity, and it was clear that he didn't want his identity to be known.

All browsers suck. I actually use Firefox (mostly) because it sucks a little less AFAICT, but I'm frustrated with it daily.

It's a bug in EasyList for Adblock Plus. All links (including "anchor" links) are blocked when immediately inside of a post <td>:

Complain to EasyList.

It's impossible for an Adblock Plus filter to block all of the forum's ads. Some ads can be individually blocked, but not all forum ads in general. They should stop trying or they're going to keep breaking things for their users.

Why are you using Firefox, then?

I think that Firefox 26 is broken somehow. I'll investigate it when I can.

Nothing changed on the forum's end. This is probably a Firefox bug unless there's something invalid about the forum's XHTML.

I received the domains from an anonymous person who claimed to have worked with Satoshi in the early days. He claimed that Satoshi split up his assets before leaving in order to prevent too much centralization: The SourceForge project to Gavin, bitcoin.org to Sirius, and the two other domains to this anonymous person.

I go through the ban list and remove them every week or two.

There's a Tor option to change exit nodes less frequently. Then when you find one that works, it doesn't stop working in 10 minutes.

Add those boards to your ignore boards list if you don't want to see them in your unread posts. I actually manually adjusted settings for people who ignored Alt Cryptocurrencies so they would ignore the new subsections. There were only three such people...

That's basically how it works because the ignore mod (which I didn't write) stupidly stores ignore info in a single column per user like "35,3,...". So each ignore button needs to scan through all established users. The cost of this used to be very little, but it has increased substantially as the number of users has increased. I added a lot of caching long ago to offset this, but the cost is too high now even for that. I need to mostly rewrite the ignore mod so it stores data more sanely. No too difficult, but it requires a somewhat large uninterrupted block of time, which I don't have right now.

I've had to totally disable this feature. I will fix it in a few days.

His account was indeed compromised.

It likely won't.

I think that the long-term solution will have to be allowing transactions to be cancelled and resent with a higher fee. Hardcoded fees fall out of date (and aren't free-market), but I think that it'll always be possible for miners to trick automatic fee calculators into paying more than necessary. So it should be left mostly up to the users to figure out an appropriate fee with trial and error. Transaction cancellation is extremely difficult to add to Bitcoin-Qt, though, so this probably won't happen in 0.9. I don't think that Gavin's fee calculator will be included, either. Fees will probably remain hardcoded for now.

When Bitcoin was kicked off of Freenode, laszlo allowed us to use LFnet, which is run by him and his associates. It was actually good that Freenode kicked us off: it turns out that IRC is not very good for bootstrapping, and changes to the LFnet server were necessary to prevent nodes from being overwhelmed.