Not a bad suggestion at all, but the pessimist ghost that lives between my ears is telling me that our chronic shitposting/spamming/plagiarizing population is just going to ignore it, just like they fail to read everything else that might keep them from getting banned or put on ignore lists.

The rules need to be updated IMO, particularly with respect to plagiarism--what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn't, and I suggested this in another thread.  There also needs to be more enforcement of certain rules, like not making zero-value posts, not making consecutive posts, and not necrobumping threads.  I think if those improvements would require more staff members, Theymos ought to hire some.  Flying Hellfish is doing a bangup job in P&S, and I think we need more mods like him in sections like Bitcoin Discussion and Economics.  I'm not disparaging the current mods of those sections, because I know it's got to be a crazy job, but I think some help is required.

But back to what OP suggested, making the rules more visible would certainly be a good thing.  It might help at least a small number of new members who will actually take the time to read the rules.

I would be inclined to agree with you on that if I fully trusted the mods to do their job 100%, but I don't.  We've even got staff like hilariousandco telling permabanned members to start over with new accounts because enforcement is so lax (and I've pleaded with him to not do this).  The shitposting and plagiarism problem is so bad because of either lack of clear rules or enforcement of the rules that are clear.  That's where DT members who are active in tagging scammers and other miscreants have always come in handy.

In Rambotnic's case, it was not clear at all where he was sourcing his information from, and cryptohunter can argue the observable facts until his fingertips bleed, but my opinion on the matter is that Rambotnic is both a plagiarist and a chronic shitposter--exactly what this forum doesn't need.  A permaban would be a much better solution, but red trust will have to suffice here.

Yeah well, I'm sure you're used to this sort of shit since you got added to DT.  My PM inbox is full of tales of how my feedback is causing members to starve to death, and that I abuse animals, etc., etc. 

At least you're doing research into the feedbacks Lauda left, which is something I don't have the time or (sometimes specialized) detective skills to do.  That's why I was against just duplicating Lauda's negs en masse and why I didn't step up to help.  Props to you and the others who did it the right way.

I propose a toast to starvation and family destruction.  Cheers.

How anyone can do that and still keep their sanity is beyond me, and since I value my own mental health I have to have quite a few sections on ignore.

I agree that would probably work as a solution, but I get the feeling Theymos doesn't want the mods to do it--and the reason I have that feeling in the first place is that he hasn't acted on any proposed solutions like this, and I'm pretty sure he knows what options are available.

Exactly.  My personal solution is to put the whole damn altcoin section buffet on ignore, which I hate to do.  There have been some topics that were at least interesting in Altcoin Discussion, but even that section is a complete mess now. 

I'm damn honored to accept this here no-prize and would in fact make a long babbling acceptance speech, but my cat knocked over my internet so I have to use my dumbass smartphone and my thumbz is too big.  Took me damn near 2 hours just to write what I just wrote.  

Then the screen window fell out where the internet lives and my cat is now missing.  Ought to be out there looking for her, but I felt compelled to express my gratitude up in this bitch first.  Oh wait,  cat just jumped back in, looks spooked out of her mind.  

Anyone know how to fix screen windows or should I call a plumber?

Edit:
Are they expensive, and can cats escape easily out of them?

Forgot to add:  I'll take the mystery box, and I'm almost done doing my victory lap around the internet about the award.  Foxpup, you are the man-pup.

It's totally "normal" even though I don't think that such treatment is right.  Vod's response was a little bit harsh, but this has been the fate of everyone I've seen trying to recover their hacked accounts (not the thread-locking but the ignoring part).  Vod has even volunteered to help with account restoration if I'm not mistaken, but his offer was met with silence.

You're damn right this forum is a real mess, and this is only a part of it.

Congrats, and it seems you ranked up the right way and showed that it can be done--we all know damn well that there are 1000s of noobs who think they have no chance in hell of ever reaching a rank higher than Jr. Member (and for many of them, that's probably true).

This is how the merit system is supposed to function:  it's Darwinian, and only the best and most worthy members are going to increase in rank, while the rest will linger as the kind of chimps who are so low on the social ladder that all they do is groom the alpha monkeys to avoid getting their food stolen and their ass kicked.

Word.  Everyone should be learning that lesson around here.

Jesus Christ, that sounds like some of the worst techno-business-gobbledegook I've ever read in my life, and I checked the mirror for signs of complete stupidity just now and found nothing.  Shit like that could only have come out of Silicon Valley and the only purpose of such is to baffle potential investors with bullshit instead of dazzling them with brilliance.

But hey, I could be wrong.  I did not have my spectacles on when looking in the mirror just now.  Also, this is making me desperately crave a tiny sample of whatever they're smoking.

What is this "golden mean" of which you speak? 

I'm also finding this thread to be extremely entertaining, though I'm sure it will end, probably resolved to no one's satisfaction, at some point.  Where will I go and what will I do with myself at that point?  Where have all the silly troll personalities gone?

If a member is asking a specific question and gets the answer he's looking for, I think he ought to lock the topic just out of courtesy, but that's just my opinion and I'm sure there are good reasons for keeping a thread like that alive.

What I think should be standard is that a topic should get locked automatically after a certain period of time of inactivity.  Since necrobumping isn't allowed, dead threads ought to be locked to prevent people from bumping them.

Yep, there's always going to be that.

That's true, and there are a lot of threads that should remain unlocked IF members are still actively posting in them.

Yeah, I just caught him plagiarizing another one:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5066518.0;topicseen, which is straight from this article.

Amazes me that people think this is OK and that they're not going to get caught.  It's unfortunate because the one I found had some pretty interesting info in it, and Mister99 could have done what Hydrogen does, which is to quote the article with a citation and then provide a little discussion-opener on it.  

Thank you for that link--I'd never seen it because I have B&H on ignore.  But I think the forum needs actual rules and not just suggestions (regardless of how good those suggestions are).

I'll trust you on that one.  Bitcoin personalities are among the things I'm extremely ignorant about, just like politics.  I suppose I should care more, but I just don't.

Ah, rumors.  Those are the only things I know of besides actual news that affects the price of bitcoin.  Also, a link for this particular rumor would have been a good thing for you to provide, but people don't seem to have that much courtesy these days.

In addition, anyone who holds that much bitcoin would be insane to dump it all onto the market at once--unless they're hellbent on not maximizing their potential profit.  Mutual fund managers who sell big blocks of shares in a particular stock don't usually sell it all at once; they sell it in smaller blocks over a period of time so as not to overwhelm the buy orders and thereby drive the price down. 

I tend to think this is a load of horse hooey.  I'll believe it when I see it.

Well that's exactly how I'd summarize the info given in this article--and it sounds very strange and very, very ambitious.  It almost sounds as though he's planning on building a cult compound or something of the sort.

But hey, people with grand ideas built Las Vegas in Nevada, and that state does have a bit of a reputation of having a maverick mentality.  If I'm not mistaken, it's one of, if not the only, states in the US where prostitution is legal and one of only a few where organized gambling is legal.  Makes sense that this guy Berns chose Nevada as the state in which to do what he's planning.

Yeah, but I'm just wondering what exactly "a private city with a blockchain system" really means and what it would actually look and function like.  Nevada still has laws, as does the federal government. 

In addition, this statement is the absolute truth:
I get the feeling that this project is either way ahead of its time or might be doomed to failure at any point in the future.  But that sure was an interesting article, and I'll keep this on my radar.

Thanks for checking it out, and that was my opinion on it from the beginning.  I'm not surprised at all that I came across something copy/pasted (that's happened many times before), but I'm disappointed that had that been the bitcointalk member's original work, it would have been worthy of merit and it would have been a pleasure to give merit to a Newbie.  As I've said before, it's really sad that you have to check for plagiarism before giving merits to lower-ranked members.

Eh, I don't completely agree with that.  If you're copying words from another site, you should cite the source and ideally should provide a link for the reader to verify it.

Bitcointalk really, really needs some sort of style guide, like an MLA Handbook specifically for bitcointalk--not necessarily as a standard of how to write posts, but at least a set of guidelines for citing sources when quoting material that's not your own.  Right now it's a hellish mixture of opinions as far as what constitutes proper citation and what constitutes plagiarism.

I found this thread in which the OP was pretty interesting, and I was going to give him some merit--then I checked and found that part of it was copy/pasted from https://u.today/10-bitcoin-friendly-countries-that-legalized-cryptocurrency.

OP wrote this as the only indication that anything he wrote was taken from another source:

I reported the post as plagiarism.  Since this is similar to the situation with Rambotnic, who keeps pleading with me to remove my neg on him, I'd like to hear opinions on whether frozen2017's post in the linked thread above would be considered plagiarism.  It certainly isn't cited properly, and I'm convinced it should be enough to get him banned.

Indeed, and I think a lot of newcomers to crypto latch onto this "decentralized" word as some sort of holy grail to be achieved in every one of the world's problems/systems/structures, and it's just not feasible.  To give an example, the prison system in my state used to operate pharmacies at each prison and jail and did this for years...until they figured out that it is much more cost-effective to have all the medications get dispensed out of a centralized location.  That cut down on the staffing needed and improved communications.  Almost the same situation happened with long-term care pharmacy, i.e., nursing homes and other residential care facilities.  Sure, they all have Pyxis machines on premises, but all the scheduled meds come from pharmacies that resemble warehouses, with orders getting faxed in, technicians packacking meds up into blister packs, and pharmacists making IVs and checking the prescriptions before they go out the door.

Bitcoin is decentralized, and it's a unique concept for a currency.  Bitcointalk is not decentralized, and it's not a unique discussion forum. 

A lot of the top merit-givers happen to be older members, and many of them are also very good contributors and receive a lot of merits themselves.  That isn't surprising to me, but I get the feeling (well, actually he outright stated it) that OP thinks there's a "good 'ol boys" club of members passing merits between themselves for some undefined yet nefarious purpose.

OP, if you want to take a minute and look at the members I've given merit to, you'll definitely see a lot of recognized accounts, some of them merit sources, some of them on DT, but there are a lot of members below Hero rank that I've given merits to as well.  In my case, I actually try to avoid giving merits to Legendary accounts or Hero members who already have enough merits to rank up to Legendary and are just waiting to get enough activity.  Sometimes I can't help myself, sure, because there are a few Legendary members who make excellent posts that I feel compelled to merit, but overall I'm at least trying to target lower ranked members for merit.

Jet Cash is exceptionally generous and has that type A personality that makes him want to be a doer, and he's doing a great job being a merit source and trying to help the forum in general. 

There may be members who only trade merits back and forth between their buddies, but I don't think that's the norm for merit sources.  The sad fact is that it is extremely difficult to find posts made by lower-ranking members (especially Newbie & Jr. Member ranks) that would fit the criteria of being "just good".  There are so many members of those two ranks nowadays that certain sections are flooded with posts by them, and they all tend to be generic, uninteresting, usually poorly-written, and sometimes even plagiarized.  I'm sure a lot of merit sources have a hard time sustaining the motivation to keep searching for worthy, lower-ranked members to give merits to.

I have Jet Cash's "Snow Eagles" site bookmarked, but so far there are only a few members on there, and the site needs some serious improvement before it becomes useful.  I'm speaking for myself only here, but I'm more than happy to reward a Newbie, Jr. Member, or any rank below Hero with merits IF the post deserves it and IF I can find the post.  I have fairly high standards, but not impossibly high.

LoyceV is correct here:
and here:

Plus Tomatocage hasn't been active in months and, as was pointed out, his escrow service has been suspended per the message in his signature.  Even if it was the real Tomatocage account, there's been some suspicion that whoever is controlling it now may not be the original owner who earned all that postitive trust.  Glad OP backed out before he got scammed, which I have zero doubt is what would have happened.

Again, when you post things like this it's common courtesy to provide a link so people can read what exactly it is you heard about.  I'm interested in this topic, as I've had dealings with TD Ameritrade and would like to know the extent to which they're getting involved in crypto--and it's a bit rude for people to start threads like this only to have people required to search out information in order to give an opinion.

TD Ameritrade already provides the ability to buy and sell stocks and options.  I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "Bitcoin mine".  Again, a link would be very helpful here.

This is a problem I think a lot of bitcoin/altcoin investors (at least the ones around here) run into, because for whatever reason they think crypto is a get-rich-quick scheme, and it's not--especially if HODLing is your strategy.  Thus they end up buying crypto with money that should have been put away for rent/utilities/daily living expenses/whatever.  That's when what OP describes as "lethargy" sets in, which I interpret to mean impatience that the price of the crypto you bought isn't increasing in value fast enough.

Anybody who's new to trading would do well to follow OP's points, because they're valid--and it doesn't matter if you plan on holding for the long term or are just short term trading.  Be careful about acting on what you read on websites (including this one) and those idiotic trollboxes they have on some exchanges. 

I don't quite understand the "chasing someone else's dream" thing.  I think everyone's dream here is to make a profit.  The problem is that there are too many very slick-looking scams out there that really look like they have great ideas and an organized business structure....and then the forum scam-busters expose them as frauds.  I wouldn't hold any ICO token for the long-term.  Hell, I wouldn't hold any of those shit tokens for a nanosecond.

They way he did it was very clearly not enough.  If you were writing a paper for school and used information from an academic journal, for instance, do you think it'd be sufficient to say "I found this in a journal, here you go"?  Nope, and even though bitcointalk doesn't have guidelines on source citation, it should be obvious that you need to (at the very least) reference where you're quoting material from.  The best way to do it IMO is provide a link and put the quoted text inside a quote box just as if you were quoting a bitcointalk post. 

I think your estimation of the helpfulness of his posts and your definition of "a long period" are vastly inflated.  He registered in March of this year and most of his posts are straight-up gibberish.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I'd like to hear from staff.