Do you guys think the highlighting is the best way of expressing this in the UI? My goals were to:
- Make it pretty subtle so annoying people don't become more prominent. It's just a little hint.
- Not show exact numbers so that people can't usually tell when someone's ignore counter has increased.
- Not show anything for most users.
So I probably wouldn't like exact numbers or meters.

Shades of goldenrod was the first thing that came to mind. I'm not a web designer -- it could be sub-optimal.


Thanks! Not many people use the ignore feature, it seems. The highlighting might increase it.


All must be true.

There's already a section mostly for discussion of scammers: "trading discussion". People are usually given scammer tags only after a topic about the person has been in Trading Discussion for a while.

The forum doesn't arbitrate disputes or handle justice. These are messy, complicated issues unrelated to forum moderation. Other people should independently handle these things. The scammer tag is designed to be the least-severe reasonable response to scamming. If I could do less in this area, I would.


Scammer IPs are banned from registering new accounts. When scammers provably bypass this ban, their IP info can be released.


As far as I can recall, there are no cases where someone incorrectly received a scammer tag. I'd like to keep it that way.

That's intentional. If you've ignored them then their posts should be as unobtrusive as possible, with no highlight.

This feature was really easy to implement. Other features are not so easy, and I hate messing around with SMF code; I always feel like I'm going to break something in a non-obvious way and introduce a security flaw.

Current rules are:
- 0.35% of very-established users ignore you: no public highlight, but a range on your posts that only you can see
- 0.5% of very-established users ignore you: light highlight
- 1% of very-established users ignore you: medium highlight
- 1.5% of very-established users ignore you: dark highlight

You're very established if:
- You have 100+ hours of online time
- You have 100+ posts
- You registered 30+ days ago

There are ~1414 very-established users right now.

The change only shows up in the default theme.

OK, I added an indication of how ignored someone is (by very-established users) without revealing the exact count. We'll see how it goes. I might remove it later.

Is the highlighting a good way to indicate it?

Final:
Slots BTC Person
1 3.5 DBordello
5 3 wm-center.com
2 3 aurumxchange

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):
- 3^rd: 482004
- 4^th: 330954
- 5^th: 445300
- 6^th: 180474
- 7^th: 194129
- 8^th: 185072
- 9^th: 178545
- 10^th: 158818

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 19, 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.

Yeah, you're right. If we just use SQL and bypass all of the SMF stuff then it's actually easy and pretty fast. (I was thinking it would be really slow, but all of the necessary data is in one table and MySQL handles lists-in-strings surprisingly well.)

I suppose it wouldn't be the worst kind of rating system (it's pretty resistant to abuse), but I still don't think it's a good idea. Any "global" reputation system like this encourages groupthink and discourages people from posting controversial ideas. As I mentioned in the other thread, it would also cause hurt feelings and drama.

Added.

Implementation of that feature is unlikely while we use SMF. A lot of code would need to be added to prevent the count from being easily exploitable.

Please report them whenever you see them. This is very helpful.

Why not give the wallet and data to someone who can handle it and is trustworthy? Like genjix or phantomcircuit? I'd also handle it for you (though I'm busy and it may take me a while to deal with it, so someone else would be better).

He did eventually pay to the correct address, so maybe this was somehow not intentional. I can't imagine how it could have happened, though.


The forum doesn't support that now. It's not a bad idea, though I don't want to code it.

Not a perfect solution, but you can create a "deleted" label, label your deleted posts with "deleted', and then remove the "Inbox" label on them.

I keep all of my PMs in my inbox and label the unhandled ones to distinguish them from the others. (I have 107 pages in my inbox. )

I think someone just tried to scam me like this:

My PM to them:

Their response:

Notice that the address they said I sent to is different than the real address. If I wasn't saving all of my sent PMs and they deleted the message I sent to them, my PM with the real address wouldn't exist in the database and I wouldn't be able to prove that they changed the address.

It's a good idea to save all of your sent PMs. There's an option in your profile to do this by default.

That's the whole point of the tag. Originally I didn't respond to scammers at all, letting traders handle it themselves. But since every other forum bans scammers, not dealing with scammers caused too much surprise among traders (and therefore easy scamming). So I created the scammer tag, which is intended to be the mildest possible reaction to scammers that will still prevent traders from being surprised by forum policy. I want to avoid all other anti-scammer activity.

At this point I don't feel that shakaru deliberately scammed anyone. Since I want to avoid anti-scammer activity other than the minimum required, another tag isn't necessary. The forum should just get out of the way as much as possible. (This is why I removed shakaru's donator title: it was "in the way".)


You're still listed on the donation page. It's only your perks that have been removed. You can have them back once this issue is resolved.

Donations are not refunded.

Leave to where? I don't know of anywhere better.

Yeah, this is the most likely explanation.

Have your bank reverse the payment to PayPal. (PayPal will ban you forever if you do this, though.)

I considered that (I thought about this issue for a long time, actually), but I believe it's beyond the scope of the forum to deal in any way with cases that aren't totally clear. The scammer tag exists only because everyone expects that the forum will do something in response to scamming, but I don't want to do more than the bare minimum. The forum doesn't handle justice.

This case is very different than terrytibbs' case because shakaru admits that he is in the wrong and he's trying to repay (or at least pretending to try). If a concrete repayment arrangement isn't worked out and begun after a month or two, I'll look at things differently.