The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, custom fonts, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine 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.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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/Legendary 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 stats 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.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 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 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- 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 reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
7 0.10 sportsbet.io
1 0.10 HatuSS
1 0.09 FortuneJack

Some other candidates would be able to continue after this, but since the media hates Sanders, they'll constantly portray him as near death. Probably it will hurt his support enough to kill his inertia and force him to drop out after he performs poorly in the first few states.

According to the latest Morning Consult polling, Sanders supporters say that their second choice is:
 - 30% Biden
 - 28% Warren
 - 6% Harris

If you assume that Sanders drops out now, go based on the above numbers along with the current RCP average, and give one-tenth of Sanders' remaining support to candidates not listed in the Morning Consult poll, you get adjusted numbers of:
 - Biden 26.1 -> 31.1
 - Warren 24.4 -> 29.1
 - Buttigieg 5.6 -> 6.2
 - Harris 4.7 -> 5.7
 - Yang 3.3 -> 3.9

This (incredibly rough/unscientific analysis) makes it look good for Biden and to a slightly lesser extent Warren, but it really solidifies it into a 2-person race.

---

I would've really liked Sanders vs Trump because it's win-win in some ways: compared to previous presidents Trump is above average in most areas, while Sanders is excellent on foreign policy and civil liberties and terrible on policies that a president is more limited in affecting. Now I probably have to hope for Trump beating Biden or Warren.

In Trump vs Biden, I think Trump would probably win, but it wouldn't be a sure thing. President Biden would be like a mix between Obama and Bush. Biden himself is very authoritarian and pro-intervention, but he would probably appoint some Obama people to his administration, which might improve things somewhat on average. On the plus side, he is definitely not anti-capitalist.

In Trump vs Warren, Warren would have a very low chance of winning, but it'd be high stakes because Warren is really terrible. Warren is a horrible fusion of authoritarianism, interventionism, anti-capitalism, and corporatism, and her victory would embolden progressives while also giving them an opportunity to say, "Warren is destroying the country only because she's not progressive enough: she's no Bernie!". On the plus side, if she loses (which is the most likely outcome), it might diminish AOC-type progressivism in the Democratic party for a while.

All posts you can see should be listed there, though due to database concurrency limitations, ones made in the last few seconds might not show up, even if others before/after them do.

Note that if you don't need to get posts ASAP, it may be more easy and efficient for you to use https://bitcointalk.org/sitemap.php. All of the last-modification times are accurate to within a couple of hours.

I love the idea of space travel/colonization, but I'm skeptical about the economics of it currently.

Imagine it's the 17th century and Europeans learned of America, but America was a completely barren landmass with no plants or animals, just a ton of untouched minerals in the rocks. Maybe they could've imported some soil and plants in order to try living there, but there's no way that anyone would've taken the long and dangerous journey and invested so much in order to live on a barren rock. I'm not so sure that it'd even now have much population: consider that there's still low population density in difficult regions like Antarctica, northern Canada, and mid-ocean.

Space is that rich-but-barren separate content in the 17th century, but hundreds of times worse. Sure, we could move all kinds of stuff over there to make it theoretically livable, but it's not economically worthwhile, and the colonists are basically marooning themselves on a desert island.

Rather than trying to get people there ASAP, it'd be better to focus on technology which would boost the economic practicality of it, like:
 - AI & robotics which can independently do everything on Mars that a human might want to do, especially mining and construction.
 - Technology for passively & efficiently turning CO₂ + energy + water + trace elements into food.
 - A space elevator, mass driver, or incredibly cheap & safe rocketry systems. (But the above things are also useful on Earth, so I'd do those first.)
 
By the time a human arrives for colonization, you want to make it so that they don't have to do any work at all or rely on any imports in order to stay alive. Then they can focus on fulfilling & possibly-economically-useful activities like research, instead of on scraping out a meager existence on a barren rock with no real hope of ever being able to live comfortably.

They could impeach him over real things, like:
 - Waging wars without a declaration from congress.
 - Supporting the Saudi genocide in Yemen.
 - Emoluments issues with Trump's hotels, etc.
 - Wiretapping and other executive overreach.

But they don't want to impeach him for this sort of stuff because Democratic presidents have done the same things (even emoluments), and furthermore they like having an all-powerful presidency which they can exploit when they get into power and use as a scapegoat when they're out of power. So instead of pushing a powerful impeachment case which the public could actually get behind like, "bombs made in the US are as we speak being used to blow up children, at Trump's order and without congressional approval," the Dems instead search for these little "gotcha!" things which are totally Trump-specific and meaningless in any wider context, and which nobody actually cares about.

One of the most harmful trends has been the centralization of power into the presidency. Donald Trump is the ultimate head of an organization with ~4 million employees, and congress has in the past and present basically given him free reign to do whatever he wants with this insane amount of power. I'd love it if outrage over Trump leads to removal of executive powers and more skepticism of the status quo, but so far I'm not seeing any effective move in this direction.

IMO there's some chance (not a high chance, but some) that the loser of the next election will attack the legitimacy of the election, which will result in some serious chaos not seen in our lifetimes. And this will just be ridiculous bickering over who the next emperor will be, rather than actually trying to fix the problem at its source by making the presidency less powerful or otherwise fixing things fundamentally.

Those stats are supposed to count the section itself and all subsections, but it's a cached value which drifts from the true value over time. It gets corrected in the recounts which I do periodically (several times per year).

As of this second, the true per-board stats are:

So since the displayed stats count subsections, the top-level message count should be 230270, but it's about 20k off due to drift, and this will get worse over time until I do a recount.

I've never heard of that before. I can see in the access logs that you were talking to bitcointalk.org, though.

My first thought is some sort of browser glitch or extension.

My second thought is that it's Cloudflare. Normally Cloudflare doesn't do anything like that, but it reminds me of a case several months ago where they introduced some new feature which worked by injected Javascript into the page for mobile users only, and I had to go turn that off once I learned of it. (I forget exactly what the feature did.) At a guess, maybe they added this as a way to improve the accuracy of their IPCountry header: since bitcointalk.org doesn't use that, I just now turned that off.

If you visit the same page in a private tab, does it request your location still? (This isn't a sure-fire way to test it, but if it's a problem on my end which I didn't fix, this might trigger it.) Does anyone else see it?

If it's some change in Cloudflare, you'd see it on a lot of sites, since CF is very widely used.

It'll be another thing like the Mueller report: Democrats will claim that it proves that Trump is basically a dictator, while Republicans will say that Trump was only doing his job in pushing for the investigation of a credible case of corruption. (IMO the truth is somewhere in the middle here, but the truth doesn't matter in politics.) If no other facts appear making this a bigger deal, then I think that Trump will come out even cleaner from this than he did from the Mueller report, while Biden will be substantially hurt.

Trump would have to literally strangle a baby on live TV in order for him to be convicted of anything in the Senate. Even if he'd said in the transcript, "Biden is a political threat to me. If and only if you fabricate & publish official Ukrainian reports making him look bad, I promise to use my authority as president to give you military aid and provide other favors," he'd still probably be acquitted. (Though in that case it might end up being a political win for the Democrats.)

Super interesting events...

When I first saw the headline about initiating an impeachment inquiry, I thought that it was just something Pelosi did to appease the more extreme Dems and get a few positive headlines, but it'd go nowhere. "Impeachment inquiry" sounds like a vague non-thing. But when I watched her speech, I got the sense that she's actually serious about this. Taken on its own, Pelosi's speech was very good. It projected a message of, "we all need to come together to take care of this one bad apple president," which is what you need if you want the impeachment process to be positive for the Democrats. But this is only going to work if they're actually able to put enough of a smoking gun forward to get substantial cross-party support, and I certainly haven't seen enough to satisfy that requirement.

Pelosi is a smooth political operator, she has more deep state connections than just about anyone, and the whisleblower report came from "the intelligence community" (~= the deep state). Maybe she has more dirt on Trump than we know? It'd have to be far beyond what's already known in the Ukraine hubub, but I wouldn't put it past her.

Due to living in a bubble, maybe they actually think that this Ukraine thing is a big deal? A huge strategic error in that case, then. Everything I've seen makes me think that this is even less big than all of the Mueller stuff. The investigation will drag Biden through the mud while Teflon Don gets away mostly unscathed, and by Nov 2020 it'll just be another example of the "Democratic witch hunt which prevents anything from getting done".

Usually I think that this is not an accurate way of looking at things, but maybe this was actually 4D chess by Trump? Maybe he set up the Dems to freak out about this, and now he's slowly, painfully going to release info proving his innocence and making the Dems look like fools and Biden look like a crook. If he thinks that Biden's defeat = a Warren victory in the primary, then it may make electoral sense, even, since Warren will be the easiest person for Trump to defeat.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, custom fonts, or animation. Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 900px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^[1], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine 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.

Duration

- Your ads are guaranteed to be up for at least 7 days.
- I usually try to keep ads up for no more than 8 or 9 days.
- Sometimes ads might be up for longer, but hopefully no longer than 12 days. Even if past rounds sometimes lasted for long periods of time, you should not rely on this for your ads.

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/Legendary 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 stats 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.

Designing ads

Make sure that your ads look good when you download and edit this test page:
https://bitcointalk.org/ad_test.html
Also read the comments in that file.

Images are not allowed no matter how they are created (CSS, SVG, or data URI). Occasionally I will make an exception for small logos and such, but you must get pre-approval from me first.

The maximum size of any one ad is 51200 bytes.

I will send you more detailed styling rules if you win slots in this auction (or upon request).

Auction rules

You must be at least a Jr Member to bid. If you are not a Jr Member and you really want to bid, you should PM me first. Tell me in the PM what you're going to advertise. You might be required to pay some amount in advance. Everyone else: Please quickly PM newbies who try to bid here to warn them against impersonation scammers.

If you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 8 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 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time. Unless I say otherwise, I typically try to end auctions within a few days of 10 days from the time of this post, but unexpected circumstances may sometimes force me to end the auction anytime between 4 and 22 days from the start. I have a small bias toward ending auctions on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays.
- 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 reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
9 0.08 sportsbet.io

You sent over 100 PMs with the same format: clear unsolicited bulk PMs. 4 people reported it, making it unwanted & unsolicited bulk PMs = spam. Most others would've been banned much longer.

trust.txt.xz only includes relationships where both the truster and trustee have non-zero post counts.

If someone has your session key, they can try CSRF attacks against you until the key expires. You should keep it secret.

Setting aside the arguments regarding MemoryDealers' character, the scammer flag is not a correct use of the system, and should not be active. Supporters of the flag affirmed that this statement was true:

Where is the written contract? Who are the victims? Hypothetically, how could MemoryDealers make the victims of the act whole or receive their forgiveness?

The strongest case for a scammer flag AFAICT is when bitcoin.com (MemoryDealers' responsibility) was set up in a way which could've confused people into thinking that they were buying BTC when they were actually buying BCH. But you need to identify specific victims so that MemoryDealers could hypothetically say, "Oh damn, you're right. Here's some compensation for the mixup." If you just throw out a vague statement of, "Confusing information existed, so someone could've been scammed into buying BCH," then reconciliation is impossible. Scammer flags are for extremely clear cases with obvious victims, not cases which are impossible to definitively resolve due to political divisions and vague claims.

Oftentimes MemoryDealers expresses the opinion that BCH more accurately follows the original vision of Bitcoin than BTC. This is just an opinion, no matter how wrong it is, and it should not enter into the trust system at all. On several occasions, I think that he's crossed a line where he's implied that when people say/think "Bitcoin", they mean BCH, even in contexts where this is not actually the probable meaning; this perhaps reasonably contributes to a type-1 flag, as do many of the other things mentioned in this thread such as the MtGox incident, the bc.i doxxing, the spreading of misinformation, supporting CSW, etc.

I haven't yet decided what I think really happened. It's hard to tell. I can never help but think that these things might be false flag attacks, but in this case it really could've been Iran and/or Yemeni groups (who the Saudis have been massacring) as US intelligence claims.

So far, I was impressed by Trump's moderate response: "The Saudis want very much for us to protect them, but I say, well, [...] that was an attack on Saudi Arabia, that wasn't an attack on us," "I'm not looking to get into new conflict," & "I don't want war with anyone." Sometimes he becomes super hawkish overnight, though, so we'll see how it goes.

The way this has been playing out has been surprising.

Primary voting starts in February, so it seems likely that nobody new is going to successfully jump in at this point. (Though you never know.) These candidates seem to have no chance at this point: O'Rourke, Booker, Gabbard (sadly), Klobuchar, Castro, Steyer, Bennet, Williamson, Ryan, de Blasio, Delaney, and Bullock.

I'm shocked at how poorly Biden has been performing/campaigning. He looks like a senile old man. I would've thought that his campaign would've been able to prep him enough and pump him full of enough stimulants to at least make him look like some boring Mitt-Romney-esque politician-man, which is really all he needs to probably win. Even doing as poorly as he is, he might still win the primary because the competition is so far-left, but it's hard to imagine him winning against Trump in this state.

The actual voters are more centrist than most of the candidates seem to think, especially when you consider that many states allow independants to vote in the Democratic primaries. Maybe they're not as far right as Biden (who could pass as a Republican), but stuff like forced gun confiscation, abolishing ICE, and giving illegal aliens free healthcare will seem quite extreme to even the average Democratic voter.

I'm also surprised that Harris has been doing so poorly, since she clearly was (and still is) a media/establishment favorite. But she comes off as so fake/pandering/shapeshifting, to the point where even the average Joe notices it, and the pro-Harris propaganda hasn't seemed to stick much.

I still can't help but think that one of those two will end up winning regardless of anything else, since the establishment favors them so much. Maybe Biden will end up dropping out before or during a brokered convention, and will assign his delegates to Harris. Maybe this is already the plan. (Also, note that in a brokered convention, which is almost certain, superdelegates matter, and the vast majority of superdelegates will support the establishment favorite.)

Buttigieg seems to be positioning himself as a power broker / compromise candidate in a brokered convention. He's a possible VP for whoever wins.

Warren is pro-war, so the establishment doesn't hate her as much as Sanders. She'd be uniquely weak against Trump, though. Sanders has performed very well in all of the debates and in his campaigning, but the media/establishment hates him quite a bit, which is hurting him.

Andrew Yang is doing well. The UBI raffle thing is a great campaign idea. Him winning is a crazy longshot still, though.

My current ratings:

Candidate	% to win the primary	% to win the presidency assuming they win the primary - no recession	% to win - recession	My preference
Joe Biden	70%	15%	65%	4
Bernie Sanders	4%	50%	90%	1
Elizabeth Warren	7%	5%	25%	6
Kamala Harris	15%	35%	75%	5
Pete Buttigieg	3%	75%	95%	3
Andrew Yang	1%	70%	80%	2

(And I give a 40% chance of a recession being well underway by the general election, so this implies a 61% chance of Trump winning.)

Preference-wise:
 - I hate Sanders' economic policies, but he's anti-war and pro-civil-liberties, which are the two areas that a president has the most control over anyway. Also, if it's Trump vs Sanders and Sanders loses, this'd be a great blow to socialism. Trump vs Sanders would be win-win in some ways.
 - Elizabeth Warren is both openly very hostile to capitalism and generally supportive of wars and the establishment. A worst-case scenario.
 - Biden and Harris are authoritarian neocons. Note that everything Harris says on the campaign trail is a total lie: she doesn't actually believe in anything but personal power.
 - Andrew Yang is a bit of a wildcard, but he seems kind of libertarian-leaning, I guess.
 - Buttigieg went to Harvard, which ties him deeply to the establishment. But he might also have some real beliefs. He might be similar to Obama.

Bounties (Altcoins) is added to the targeted boards. For other busy marketplace boards such as Digital goods, I'd like to wait a while and see how this goes, but they are possible later additions. For local boards, local mods can PM me to request that the boards be added to the list if the first page of the board is always full of topics with a last-posted-in of today.


You're right. I think that the auto-stabilization property I described actually is desirable, though, so I changed the system to provide it. Now your super-bump power is: b*(1-0.15*^s/_b), where b is your base power and s is the total bump score you've contributed via superbumps over the last 30 days. This gives the same result as the previous algorithm except when any 30-day period overlaps with another.


I don't see this as being inherently a problem. Maybe the old thread is still relevant and deserves to be bumped. This is why mods are instructed to not lock old threads or otherwise try to stop necro-bumping unless specific cases are somehow disruptive.

If this does seem to become a major annoyance, things could be changed.


That's because at that time only 4 topics had any bump score.


Definitely not boards like Dev&Tech because a newbie bump has a high chance of being interesting/substantive, and there isn't that much traffic. Last-post ordering is not ideal in those sections, and some reform there could be useful, but this system would be worse.

In order for boards to be eligible for this bump treatment: 1) The first page of the board must always be full of topics with a last-post date within the last 24 hours, and 2) there must be a clear incentive for abusive bumping.


Yes, it'd be fairly easy, but I'm thinking/hoping that mini-bumps will have a low enough effect in most cases that it won't be necessary.


I don't expect anyone to have a perfect understanding of these things. Exactly how eg. merit translates into forum rank is supposed to naturally support good forum operation, and it's not important that people know exactly how it works. I provide the technical details because some people will be interested, and I welcome suggestions for improvements.

Probably no single individual understands how eg. the YouTube recommendation system works...


It does not. Also, when a user receives their first merit, they may not see the "bump" link for up to an hour due to caching.


Correct, though I wish people just wouldn't worry about it... Note that due to caching it may take up to 15 minutes for any post deletion to affect the bump score.


It uses floats, so there will be some error. You won't be allowed to superbump if you would contribute less than 0.001 bump score.


Correct, neither affects the other.


Maybe, but let's see how the new system works.

It was a terrible decision to hire him in the first place. Bolton is a merciless warmonger who's never heard of an intervention he didn't like.

I like that Trump has lately been particularly anti-war, apparently actively seeking to reduce war risk in Afghanistan and Iran. He's probably more anti-war than all but a couple of the Democratic candidates would be, surprisingly. The neocon establishment still has a lot of influence over him, though: just look at the fact that Pompeo is secretary of state.