Greetings!

So I had two things to say, but since I didn't want to spam the board, I decided to put them both in the same thread.
Here they are.

1 - Copper Membership Requires some tweaking (Suggested here as well by Vod)
After the recent changes/restrictions in lower ranks, people have started to buy Copper Membership in order to be able to wear signature and take part in Bounty/Signature campaigns. Since the user with Copper Membership can wear the signature assigned to him/her, he is not subjected to acquire the rank required to join some Bounties/Signature Campaigns. Therefore, they simply buy the membership in a few bucks to spam the shit out of the forum and earn way more than what they spent on it.

The basic reason for introducing the Copper Membership was to allow lower ranks to post images and reduce some other restrictions, like the time interval between PMs or such, but the usage of it today is totally abusive. Look at this user, who doesn't even know how to reply to a quote properly, but he has bought a Copper Membership and is now a participate of a Bounty Campaign named Apollox (whose manager is also a Newbie with Copper Membership and zero Merits). I, and everyone else as well, I'm sure, would definitely not like to see this happening. That is why I wanted to suggest a little tweaking with it.

Since a Newbie cannot wear a signature after the recent changes, I suggest that a Newbie should not be able to wear it even after buying Copper Membership. A Newbie who buys Copper Membership should only be able to post images and it should remove the other restrictions associated with it, but their signature space should still be restricted for as long as they don't earn a Merit and rank up to Jr. member. This way, they won't be able to buy a Copper Membership and use that as a way of participating in those Bounties/Signature Campaigns again which is what the changes have been implemented to stop.

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2 - Posting restriction for Newbies in "Meta"
Every time when there is a change, we see the amount of spam increasing for a few days in almost every section, but mostly in "Meta". There are numerous reasons behind that, and we know them all. But, the recent changes have given everyone a new reasoning to post in "Meta", that is: they think posting in "Meta" would undoubtedly earn them Merits, which is a misconception, but they believe so. This thinking has almost turned "Meta" into a new "Bitcoin Discussion" because of the amount of spam every threads posted here is receiving, and the useless threads that are being made every hour. I know these things mostly calm down after some time, but this wouldn't, because the new changes have demoted all the Jr. members to Newbie, and now they all, plus every other Newbie, require at least one Merit to rank up, and they would keep trying to get it, even in this section.

I think restricting Newbies from posting in "Meta" would reduce this from happening to a large extent. A Newbie should only be able to read everything in "Meta" but should not be allowed to post in here. Once they earn 1 Merit, they would have no such restrictions put on them. If someone says, "This would be injustice to genuine users" then I would simply answer it with: A genuine user should have no problems earning at least one Merit outside "Meta", which would lift the restriction.
In addition, Copper Membership should also lift this restriction, since "Meta" is also used for hacked accounts and stuff. So if a user's account gets hacked, they should simply buy Copper Membership with the account (Since the accounts used for recovery requests are mostly Newbies, and they would not wait to earn a Merit to post their request) they want to request a recovery with, and then post that in "Meta".
I don't think that anyone would not be able to afford buying a $10 (or even $20, or more, if the price of Bitcoin increases) membership in order to recover their precious accounts. And such cases anyways are a rarity, so that should not be a problem.

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I would love to know the viewpoints of people on these two issues.
Questions and arguments are welcome too.

Thank you. I got them, by the way. I'm at 95 right now, hoping to reach Full member as soon as possible.



I don't press hard, nor I've ever did. I believe in myself, and I know that I will get what I deserve today or tomorrow. I'm not in a hurry to rank up, because I know I will, eventually.


Totally. I usually get motivated by what I have achieved, to be honest. I'm among The Top 400 Most Merited Users in the forum, which is quite an achievement for an ordinary user like Me, who has no much technical knowledge or stuff like that.

The poor guy is simply trying his luck into the highest paying signature campaigns as a support to his bounty hunting job. Maybe the bucks he earns from there are not completely paying the bills, and he needs a part-time job (I assume these people are full-time bounty hunters). Maybe he doesn't know a thing about anything that happens within this forum except for bounties and tokens, but he deserves to earn a living out of it (that's what he thinks  ).


(The part that is colored is not what DarkStar_ said, but that is what he wanted to see. And I just gave him the happiness of seeing it, though he is not having it.  )

P.S: I went a little too far at the end there, maybe. That's not how DarkStar_ would ever behave.

So, 1637 promotions in less than a week, huh? Aren't we, as a community, becoming too generous, too soon? I mean, the changes are still too new, but the promotions are going in a very high speed. The people, that have never even thought about the concept (Merit system) itself, are being promoted right after the demotions only because they have started to "show" they care about it all, while they don't from the inside (at least most of them don't). And I'm not only talking about the ones who are farmers and are promoting their own accounts, but some other accounts are also getting into the crowd by such actions, which is not good for the community.

Maybe we should wait for some time before starting to do all this. Even if we see a new user posting something decent, we should take our time in taking the responsibility of promoting them to the next tier where they might start abusing the system again.


P.S: I don't intend to hurt anyone's feelings by saying any of this. My statements are general, and are not against any single user. Anyone reading this should not take any of it personally, please.

Arguments are welcome.

Good points!
I just wanted to improvise a couple of points that you mentioned.



Actually, someone should never see the quantity of the pages a thread has got and consider it to be a spam thread. Some useful discussions take way more than that so they might cross that limit. Or threads like the announcements, where theymos announces something and others start discussing it in there, are threads never to be avoided, specially by new users. So a person should only avoid reading a thread which starts with a spammy and useless question and is carried on in that manner for the first two or three pages.



A quote should only contain the part of the text that you are replying to. So no matter how big or small it is, you need to cut out the parts which has no relation to what you are writing. Even if the opening post is in two sentences, you need to quote only one of those sentence if you are not talking about the second sentence too. Even if you want to talk about the second sentence as well, make a separate quote for it and write the content related to that in there for more clarity. That would make your post look more clear, and people would enjoy reading it (as long as it has some logic).

LoyceV's analysis show that there has been a 23.3% decrement in total posts within 24 hours after the new changes. And that number decreased to 18.6% within the next 24 hours, making it 18.6% for 48 hours. The thing is, that number should be increasing, but instead, its decreasing. The changes have worked, I agree, but for those changes to work more, people need to be careful when handing out Merits to Newbies to promote them to Jr. member. That is the reason why the posts are increasing again, because of the useless promotions shitposters are getting from generous sMerit holders.



And I'm totally surprised to see how some people are Meriting their posts by saying, "The effort deserves appreciation" or "It is at least better than other posts from shitposters" without even having a look at their post histories which would clear every doubt in your mind about what they are here for. You can't just promote a user who has done nothing else than hunting bounties until now but has just posted something that is only a decent post, and by decent I mean it is not a totally useless post. People should at least do it once they find someone constantly trying to improve themselves, but not only on the bases of a single post.

Bitcointalk Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=945923
Post Count: 459+this one
Merit Count: 94
BTC Address: 1Crz8BeQ8CUybt29H22sgMAbNDv4v4bqSJ
Telegram Username: @Alone055

I'm switching to BQT as well. Also confirming that I have received the payment for week 6.
Thank you Zapo.

Simply searching " how to get profile link? "bitcointalk.org" " on Google (I tried searching on the forum Search as well, but it was taking too much time to load) would fetch you this:

Where to find complete profile LINK of bitcointalk

Where the same question has been asked and correctly answered by other members.

You didn't need to create a thread for writing something that already exists. Maybe (I'm actually sure, but I just don't want to be judgemental) you wanted to earn Merits through this, which you may even get if someone becomes too generous, but it is not really the way of doing it. Try finding something that community needs to know but doesn't already have it. Then I will be the first one to Merit you, that's a promise.


Edit: Just checked your post history, and it seems you have been a Bounty spammer before but got demoted by the new restrictions as there are a lot of one liners in there. You need to work more if you want to continue using the forum as a genuine user. People would help you but only if you help yourself.

I think URLs are okay, as long as they are used correctly, on-topic and on right occasions. And if someone doesn't follow that, then as @LoyceV said, reporting them would easily do the work. Restricting every single thing for lower ranks would seem to be a little too harsh, for me.


Can't higher rank members do that too? Should we completely restrict URLs on the forum because of that? I don't think so.
I don't understand why we always treat new members as scammers or bad people by nature. It is not important for all of them to be of the same mindset. If a link posted by a new member looks suspicious to anyone, they should simply not open it and report it to moderators. I don't even trust URLs from higher ranks sometimes if they are not familiar to me, but I know how to deal with them.

I never said that. What I said was that the reason behind the quality posts being missed is not because people are only Meriting the posts that they agree with, but the reason is the spam.
What you have interpreted here and what I said are totally different in meaning.


I think the posts that are Merited are mostly deserving, unless it is a case of abuse where a person is Meriting one of his alts or a friend only for the sake of pushing them forward in the ranking pipeline. Besides, everyone has a different view for quality posts. Some of us may look for only exceptional posts to Merit them, while others may even Merit the posts that are mildly constructive. I don't think I can blame them for doing that since that is not what I call abusing the system.


I just said what I had in mind. You have your reasons to think my reasons are worthless and I respect that.
And, saying the system has flaws is indirectly blaming it, IMO. The flaws are not carried out by the system itself but have been created later on by its users. That's what I think.

The system doesn't have flaws since its creation, but the flaws have been created after the implementation of the system, IMO.

I don't feel that the reason for quality posts to be missed is that people mostly Merit the posts that they agree with, but the reason behind that is the excessive spam that is posted after them, and no one with the right mind would dig deep in that shit only in the hope of finding a quality post to Merit it. I don't see any reason to blame the system for that.

On the other hand, those abusers would not leave any system to be flawless at all. They will play their part in ruining it completely, but fortunately, they only partly succeed in that. Have a look at the trust system. Even though it makes no sense for them to leave a trust on a profile since it doesn't make a difference, but they do abuse it by spamming people's profiles only because the system hits them hard in the face. But I think it is serving its purpose, as well as the Merit system, no matter how people try to turn them negative and use them the other way, they would still keep doing their work, to some extent.

You should probably be in no rush because even after having thousands of spammers, it would still take some time to convince theymos to take a step ahead   Be patient, and let the spammers do their convincing work.  



It is already tough for the ones who have no support to push them ahead, and the excessive amount of posts regarding this and the efforts of getting a Merit by creating threads in Meta has already proved that.
It would be too much to ask the genuine users to wait too long to rank up just one step. So it is much better to just keep demoting the one's who don't deserve to rank up and let the ones who deserve it keep going ahead.

I like this idea as well.
And, maybe you could open a thread somewhere (Once your application is approved) where people can contribute their part in this by posting proofs about users who are abusing the system and deserve to be deMerited. I would probably report anyone receiving Merits without any efforts and then you may take back the Merits and send them back to where they should be.

Anyway, good luck convincing theymos for this.  That seems not to be an easy task in such cases.

I totally understand that anyone can get mistaken and Merit plagiarized posts and then later may find out it was not originally written by the OP, but I'm really surprised after seeing this:


Xandry had Merited almost every single post of this guy that got deleted later on. And, the time-frame between those Merits is even more surprising. I don't mean to blame him either, but people should probably be careful for these things if they are doing them by mistake.

Or, he should simply modify it a little bit.

Since it is required to earn 1 Merit to rank up to Jr. member now, and then only you will be able to wear signatures, so maybe he could make it like, if a user buys Copper Membership when he is a Newbie, he would still not be able to wear a signature unless he manages to earn 1 Merit and rank up to Jr. member, but he would only have the ability to post images by buying Copper Membership. Once reaches Jr. member, he would have the same abilities of a Member in his signature as well just like how Copper Membership offers it.

This way, the users that are Newbies and are buying Copper Membership only to be able to wear signatures won't be able to do it anymore, and the Copper Membership would still serve its purpose.

Campaign managers should avoid accepting users who can wear their signature only because they have bought Copper Membership but are not in the actual rank that should make them able to wear it. If a Campaign (Signature/Bounty) starts to accept users with Copper Membership only because they can wear the signature then the recent Newbie and Jr. member restrictions are going to be useless.

I would have given you the Merit required to rank up, but I didn't really see you making any efforts for it in your post history, except for the fact that you are agreeing with the system. It is sad that you had to spend your money for it, but I wish you had spent some of your time instead in trying to understand what is going on around and improve your habits in the forum, but you are committing yourself that you are a hunter and that is what you are here for.

And I think, Copper Membership can only lift a few account related restrictions but doesn't make you able to join Signature Campaigns that do not accept users of your rank.



I did, but unfortunately, I found nothing else than Bounty reports and one/two liners in different Alternative Cryptocurrencies boards. None of these make you worthy for what I wish I could give you. But, it's still not over. Better late than never, you know? You should start reading around and learn a few things, like the rules first of all, and then the stickies that carry almost everything you need to know about posting, improvements, the questions you might have in mind and everything. Once you do that, you will definitely face no problems.
Remember, you can still be a part of Bounties if you are a good user. A bounty participant doesn't always have to be a bad/spammy user, nor a good user always have to stay out of them. They are just bonuses that you can have once you are worthy of them.

No, it doesn't.

A user needs 30 activity points, which is 42 days of posting (since activity points are added after every 2 weeks. So 14+14=28 but the requirement is 30 so the user needs to wait for 14 more days to reach it, so 28+14=42) and 1 Merit to rank up to Jr. member. So, if a user, who is so honest that he hasn't even heard about the bounties and stuff and has joined the forum to only learn about cryptocurrencies and their ecosystems and all, and take part in serious discussions without his involvement in anything that happens in Bounties (Altcoins) section, he should probably be able to make at least a few posts that would show his abilities and that he is honest to the forum and its cause. If he does that, he won't face any discrimination and will simply keep growing up without any hurdles. But, if a user who joins the forum, with the only intention to hunt tokens and earn money for doing nothing else than being a crap, he doesn't deserve to rank up and keep doing that.

Besides, it is not a really big deal to not wear a signature for only a month or so if you know that you have the ability to earn a Merit and rank up after that. Honest users would/should understand the reason behind this restriction, and don't feel discriminated.

No matter how much you provide for the needy around you, but you cannot finish their poverty as long as the government is not doing something for that. If the government is not doing anything to provide them an opportunity to work (unless they are handicaps) and earn for themselves, it deserves to be blamed for it.


Not everyone get their wealth out of luck. Maybe a few get lucky enough to earn a lot of money in a very short period of time, or some may get it as an inheritance from their ancestors, but the majority of the people having a lot of wealth are the ones who have seen hardships in their lives as well but they came out the other side with a better lifestyle, and that's because they worked hard. And to be honest, the ones who get their wealth by luck, would rarely understand the situation of a person in need while if someone's wealth is hard-earned, he would definitely understand that without even saying.


Though giving money to the homeless and needy people is a good deed, but that would absolutely not eradicate poverty, not at all. Passing by such people and giving them money, food, supplies or anything every day would simply give them enough for the day, but that wouldn't finish their poverty. As long as they don't get a source of income for themselves, they won't be stable, and that is what people or the governments should be looking forward to do. Only distributing wealth won't make the world a better place for the less privileged unless you provide them with a source of earning it of their own.