How do you determine if a Hero has reached the activity points needed to rank up?
If I understand well, it's not possible to determine if a Hero is not ranking up only because of the lack of Merits or because of the lack of both activity and the Merits, if the Hero has already reached the 775 activity points.

EDIT:
just checked the other topic, and saw that you use the 775 activity point to calculate with for every Hero

Is it possible to check somewhere that a Hero has reached his/her personal limit of the activity points? (and ony waiting for the Merits to come?)

You can be 100% sure that there are automated spam/bump bots on the forum...
If you mean about the removing of the pumping power that if a newbie posts in a thread it won't jump on the top of the list (if it's sorted by latest post), this can be a solution.

Unfortunately, this would impact the 'normal' newbie accounts too, and they won't get help (or it will be real hard to ask for help) if they can't get the topic to the top of the list with an important question posted in the topic.
A kind of solution could be not to implement this feature on the beginner's board, to let newbies ask for help, but restrict newbies (even jr.members also) on the other boards from bumping...

+1 for the newbie jail, but I think it won't come back (neither as a merit jail)
If the newbie jail would come back, it could raise the prices of the jr. accounts (with or without merits) so the 5 merit seems fine to escape the jail, because in this situation, the thousands of jr. member account without merits would become worthless...
In order to be able to handle the situation that this change can cause, the beginner's board (or any board which will be dedicate to let the newbies spam post there) should have more mods in the beginning and more merit sources. If we concentrate the newbies into one place, mods of the other boards will have less work, so they can help in the beginner section also.
Also, mods of the beginner board should give no mercy to those who copypaste or spam, because account farmers would still try to raise their activity in the beginning...
I know there's no solution that will be good for everyone, but something should be done, the sooner the better...

As mentioned above, report the posts, even one by one and let the mods decide.
You can tell the mods in the report to have a look at the user's post history, if the mods see that the user is a spammer and adds no value to the topics, they can also ban the spammer, so report it and let the mods take the actions needed.
I advice now to lock the thread, before the newbies and the jr.members find it to add their 2 cents to this topic too and it becomes a spam megathred...

Seems similar to the idea that simply won't let newbies and juniors to open a topic, only in selected threads (kind of newbie jail for topic opening)
Allowing only 100+ merited members to open topics would make the price of these accounts higher.
Also, imagine that there's a really good ICO that wants to advertise on the forum, but without an account with 100+ merits they have no chance to open their thread... (I know there are really a few of these kind of ICOs that are not scam/spam, etc...)

Maybe it would be enough to somehow get the Services section less 'messy'... Somehow we should clean up the scam topics and get rid of the auto-bump services for some topics (if there's any), in that case all the newbies and all the members could easily find what they're looking for.
(But using the 'search' function could help even more...)

as the saying goes: the more the merrier

Just don't offer merit for that, because all the bounty hunters would register new account for spam and they will report them with their 'old' account to get promoted....
Not an easy question...

Today I was curious how a spam megathread looks like nowdays so I've opened a 'classical' one:
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
On the last page I've found a copypaste immediately, a Jr. member just copied a part of the previous post... Archive
I know that this 'Who is Satoshi' is a classical one, but I would propose to lock it at least (I don't really want this to get deleted).

Also, I propose to
- auto-lock a thread if it reaches 500 post (or less, let's say a 100) or,
- the topic has no new post in 1 or 2 weeks time
from now on.

The idea behind these proposals is the following:
We can have a look easily at the new topics opened in a thread, like in Bitcoin Discussion, using this link:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.0;sort=first_post;desc
But, we cannot check every spam megathread to catch all the spamming newbies and juniors, because spam megathread have a lots of posts, and it's not easy to spot the copypasters too.
If we auto-lock the above mentioned topics, spammers have to open new topics to spam.
New topics can be checked periodically for copypaste and spam more easily, so it can help to clean the thread on the long run...
I know it won't help to fight those copypasters who copy from a topic to another one, but if there's no universal solution, we can do it step by step at least....

User: BrindHexta Banned

Original:

Copy:

Archive

Some of the regulations are good for the average people, they will fall for less scammy ICO-s, hopefully.
Some countries have not banned bitcoin because they were fine with the regulations, so somehow it seems that the regulations have saved bitcoin from the worldwide ban.
People have to understand that majority of the average people won't be an ICO expert, so they need to have something they can rely on. If the regulation help the average joe to adopt bitcoin as a form of payment, this can be helpful for the mass adoption too.
Of course, if I write regulation, I don't mean the restrictive regulations but the supportive ones, e.g. in Germany in the EU, etc...

Try to select which topic you post in, don't post in possible spam megathreads (use search to understand how the forum works, and read a lot, that will help understanding why your posts are gone).
Also, your question has been answered, please lock the topic, don't to let the spammers post here to increase their post count...

I got used to report the trash topics to the moderator of the board and the mod can decide if the topic can be deleted because of various reasons (FUD, spam, scam, duplicate topic, spam megathread, etc...)
If every member would just report 10-15 trash topics per day, the forum will be much cleaner...
And also, spammers would realize there's  no need to open trash topics to post in it, because sooner or later these topics will get deleted and their post count won't increase...

Exchanges in Japan looks like banks, they applied KYC and AML regulations, so using a loan in BTC seems very similar when you use a normal bank's loan. The difference is that if you don't have incomes in BTC, you can have a problem with the exchange rate (e.g. if the BTC price goes to the moon, you have to pay back much more in fiat compared to the amount you have received in the beginning)

You can still have a look at the old stats if you ask LoyceV in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4444830.0
It won't help the deleted posts, of course
If I remember well, only admins can read deleted posts (to gather evidence), and not mods, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong

Nice stats, thanks.
One thing to mention: You calculate 1 post per day for the users, but it's not the usual/average posting habit for the most of the users here.
The title is a bit misleading with the free merit mentioned in, I agree.
I'm curious, why bounty spammers haven't found this thread yet to start complaining against the merit system ...

The problem you describe exists and known. Several ideas were already mentioned and the merit system was implemented. There's no 'holy grail' for this situation, the forum needs to find the balance between strict rules and the freedom of speech, and this is not easy...
Read back a bit (in Meta) if you want to see possible solutions already mentioned here.

Well, it's good that it's not New York or London or any other giant city wants to become a bitcoin city yet.
Fees are fine now, but as it was mentioned earlier here, you need to have a decent transaction speed too, if you want to be able to handle the needed tx count as well.
This will be done by the Lightning Network hopefully, so it's a good start now, but bitcoin needs time before the real mass adoption, to be a success story in the end...

Just an idea:
nowdays you can choose if you want to open a topic or a poll.
a third thing would be handy like asking a question for specific answers.
If someone opens a new 'question', people will answer and the OP can mark the best answer in a checkbox next to the post. As soon as he mark a post as satisfactory answer for the question, the 'question topic' is automatically locked.
After this, the system can also open a new tab in the browser (if the OP has spendable merits), in order to help OP to give merit easily for the member who answered the question.

Criminals would prefer using cash if they can meet somehow in person, so bitcoin can be helpful only in a situation where the parties are far away. But I guess criminals (who want to use a crypto to transfer money) would prefer the real private coins like monero, etc... instead of bitcoin, so it's possible that mixers has less coins from criminals than you think at first glance...

Nice catch, seems strange
You can't be sure what happened unless you know who the adresses belong to.
It's also possible that someone has paid Antpool to accelerate this transaction, this is the reason why they had not choosen the other transactions with higher fees because they had their profit from elsewhere already...
So it's possible that someone has consolidated the dust into one address, to be cheaper to use it later on, but anyway it looks weird...