Bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.5.

That may (or may not) work legally, but any domain name registrar or host will shut down your site without a second thought.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, the forum is selling ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page.

Ads this week will be 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 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. Eight of the slots are for sale here.

The ad lasts 7 days starting from when I put it up.

Stats: On the 20^th of November, 2011, there were about 120,000 views of topics. So one slot would have appeared around 12,000 times per day. The ad doesn't appear on topic pages with only one post, though, and it only appears for people using the default theme. Total views per day on more recent days (in March):
- 11^th: 147354
- 12^th: 181281
- 13^th: 178721
- 14^th: 149139
- 15^th: 153757
- 16^th: 136847

Efficacy stats:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54182.0

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

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.

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.

- When you bid, all of your previous bids are automatically canceled.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.5.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- The auction end time is 02:00:00 on March 27, UTC. Countdown. (The end time may be extended -- see below.)
- 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 any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the auction end time, then the auction will be extended by 30 minutes. If any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the new end time, then the auction will be extended again, etc. The time will not extend beyond 6 hours total.

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

Less than 10 minutes left.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
8 4.5 aurumxchange

It's not possible to run a centralized board completely without moderation, since no service provider will support a board that contains text very likely to lead to trouble (specific threats of violence, etc.). And even a decentralized board without moderation requires some sort of web-of-trust system so that it doesn't become useless due to spam.

Is your clock correct?

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 4 DBordello
1 3.5 Goat
2 3.5 fizzisist
4 3.5 wm-center.com

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 Goat
2 3.5 fizzisist
5 3.5 wm-center.com

There's a tiny one-time cost to including a transaction into the block you're mining, since you need to recalculate the Merkle tree. There's absolutely no extra cost once you've added the transaction to the block; hashing 10,000 transactions isn't any slower than hashing 1 transaction once you've built the Merkle tree.

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 Goat
2 3.5 fizzisist
2 3 Goat
3 3 wm-center.com

Current state:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 Goat
2 3 Goat
5 3 wm-center.com

My guess is that they just don't want to deal with processing transactions for some reason. There's normally almost no cost to adding transactions to blocks, though their setup might somehow increase the costs for them. Miners will stop doing this once people start including more transaction fees, and especially once the subsidy decreases.

I'm not concerned about it. Even just one transaction-containing block every few hours would be enough for the network to operate reasonably well.

I lean toward enforcing the free-speech principle as purely as possible and allowing such posts, though I'm willing to enforce new policy on this matter if the community wants it.


It'd also make moderation much more difficult, since mods would have to make decisions on issues like those. Probably the rule would need to be less inclusive and more specific than just "violates a site's ToS".

I'll replace that whenever someone directs my attention to a better version.

I agree that it's 11131.

Right. I was assuming that the max random number would be chosen to be the smallest power of two larger than the largest ticket.

The results of this aren't evenly distributed in most cases.

Say the random number is between 0 and 7, and there are 5 tickets from 0-4. Then the possible results are:
0 mod 5 = 0 (0 is the winner)
1 mod 5 = 1
2 mod 5 = 2
3 mod 5 = 3
4 mod 5 = 4
5 mod 5 = 0
6 mod 5 = 1
7 mod 5 = 2
As you can see, tickets 0-2 have a better chance than 3-4

For proper randomness, you actually need to re-roll when the random number is greater than your range of winners. This could be done by hashing the block hash again or choosing a different block. (There are probably other algorithms for properly distributing the randomness, but AFAIK they're always less efficient when generating random numbers and I don't know any such algorithms off-hand.)

Probably your block database is getting corrupted for some reason. Maybe due to an antivirus or a bad disk.

These two are the same account. He just used his donator status to change his name.

I'm very annoyed by them, but I feel bad about deleting them because the people who post them are just trying to get some extra functionality out of the board. I do delete them on the most serious of threads, and you can ban them with local rules.