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881  Other / New forum software / Re: What is wrong with the development of new software ? on: February 26, 2019, 12:28:23 AM
The software is substantially complete. The main period of development was a while ago; the current work is mainly just maintenance & relatively minor improvements. Try running it yourself and you'll find that it's working, fast, and nearly feature-complete.

The things blocking a transition from the current software to the new software are:
 - There hasn't been enough testing. I think that immediately after transition, a variety of small missed features, bugs, and performance issues would crop up. As a result, if the transition happened now (which is technically possible!), I'd expect the post-transition user experience to be poor for months while these things are fixed, which I don't want.
 - I am the only bitcointalk.org sysadmin and on-demand programmer, and I'm used to the current software. Furthermore, I need to frequently make changes to the current software, but each change I make might require alterations to Epochtalk, which is problematic.
 - The current PHP software, while ugly and sub-optimal in many ways, performs well, especially since I have extensively modified the backend to add features and improve performance. So I don't feel much urgency.
 - The data-transition procedure still has a few known minor bugs.
 
We continue to work on these issues. I think that ultimately I may need to hire one or more full-time people, since a big problem is that the full transition is likely to create a ton of work which I won't be able to effectively handle alone.

The software is not vaporware (it's long existed in a runnable state, and is currently basically feature-complete), and is not abandoned (look at the git commit log). If anyone is unhappy with the progress, I invite them to take the Epochtalk code and create a competing forum with it; since they won't have to worry about the transition issues, they'd have a much easier time, and their testing will also end up helping us.

In short: If you want the software quicker, go run your own forum with it, and work to get any problems or missing features you find resolved via bug reports, etc. This would increase public interest, provide much-needed testing, and I might even hire you to work on bitcointalk.org when we're ready to do the final transition here.
882  Other / Meta / Re: The profile page should be changed. No one uses ICQ, AIM, MSN or YIM. on: February 25, 2019, 10:01:01 PM
What similar things do people use now?

Those fields are actually built a bit deeply into SMF for some reason, so it's not completely trivial to change, but it can be done. Low on my to-do list, though, as hugeblack mentioned.

I’ve long thought there should be a spot for PGP fingerprint.

PGP fingerprints are SHA-1, which is insecure. The OpenPGP standard really needs a complete new revision...
883  Economy / Auctions / Advertise on this forum - Round 270 on: February 25, 2019, 06:14:38 PM
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, 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], banks, funds, or anything else 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 0.02.
- The bidding starts at 0.02.
- 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:

Code:
This:
Slots  BTC/Slot  Person
    6      0.20       A
    1      0.16       B
    1      0.08       C
    1      0.08       D

Becomes:
Slots  BTC/Slot  Person
    6      0.12       A [step 4: reduced to 0.10+0.02=0.12]
    1      0.10       B [step 3: reduced to 0.08+0.02=0.10]
    1      0.08       C [step 2: same as the next-lowest, unchanged]
    1      0.08       D [step 1: the lowest bid is always unchanged]

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.
884  Economy / Auctions / Re: Advertise on this forum - Round 269 on: February 25, 2019, 06:10:38 PM
Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 0.24 SwC_Poker [flattened from 0.26]
1 0.22 BoXXoB
2 0.22 Cryptex.net
2 0.22 bizzyb
2 0.22 tsk0101
1 0.20 Stunna
885  Other / Meta / Re: Stop animated images in FireFox / Tor browser on: February 25, 2019, 04:09:04 PM
Animated avatars aren't supposed to be allowed, but I never got around to adding detection for the APNG ones. I'll look into it.
886  Other / Meta / Re: New? on: February 24, 2019, 03:57:17 PM
There's been no policy change. redsn0w wasn't permanently banned due to several factors which made me think that permabanning him would be a net negative for the forum. Nobody is banned strictly because of "the rules"; it's always handled case-by-case, but almost always, plagiarists deserve to be permabanned.

If you think that a ban should be ended, make your case in a new topic from a "good for the forum as a whole" perspective.
887  Other / Meta / Re: New? on: February 24, 2019, 12:06:19 PM
Everything is case-by-case.
888  Other / Politics & Society / Re: 2020 Democrats on: February 21, 2019, 02:19:52 PM
it seems impossible that a non Christian is elected.

Trump is only nominally Christian, and he has a lot of evangelical support. If people like the candidate, most of them don't care much.

Quote from: Trump
When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed.
889  Other / Meta / Re: Prevent banned users from changing profile data on: February 21, 2019, 02:02:21 PM
Banned users are still able to use the read-only functions of the forum. This is intentional. Changing their email addresses is a necessary part of being able to secure their accounts.
890  Other / Meta / Re: How can we protect Newbies from getting scammed? on: February 20, 2019, 11:06:13 PM
Honestly, I think that someone that naïve can't be protected. Even if every inch of the page had been full of warnings, he still might've fallen for it, since he wasn't even thinking about the possibility of being given evil instructions. The scammer was a Jr Member, not some Legendary.

People like him (ie. the majority of the world population) are why we'll someday want an optional sidechain or something on top of Bitcoin which has reversible transactions (via some sort of automatic 2-of-3 escrow which expires after a while, maybe).

He should have the police contact me and I'll give them the scammer's IP logs.
891  Other / Meta / Re: "Show All" on long topics on: February 20, 2019, 10:57:20 PM
"Show all" is so convenient to CTRL-F something.

It is nice to be able to do that, though note that if you use the search box in the upper right while in a topic, it searches only that topic.
892  Economy / Invites & Accounts / MOVED: 🔶MALWAREBYTES LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION 1PC (Coupon: 50OFF - $1.9)🔶 on: February 20, 2019, 09:56:08 PM
This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Trademark complaint.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2296796.0
893  Other / Meta / Re: Self-moderated thread deletion count not updating. on: February 20, 2019, 09:34:21 PM
 - Only deletions by the topic starter are counted. Not deletions by the poster or by forum moderators.
 - The stat takes up to an hour to update.
894  Other / Politics & Society / Re: 2020 Democrats on: February 20, 2019, 05:29:04 PM
Trump is not in your poll Huh (To win the presidency). 

This thread focuses on the Democrats. Imagine that a Democrat is certain to win, and pick your favorite(s). I worded the poll that way because I didn't want people to pick the person who they thought Trump would most easily defeat.

Harris was too hard on crime during her time as CA AG which will make her struggle with those who might have voted for her because of identity politics.

Agreed, her record is terrible from any leftist perspective, and is totally at odds with her current rhetoric. But she's clearly being railroaded into winning by the media and the establishment in the same way as Clinton in 2016. I suppose they have her as their "far-left" option and Biden as their centrist option, and one of them will drop out & clear the way for the other near the end.
895  Other / Politics & Society / Re: 2020 Democrats on: February 20, 2019, 05:01:52 PM
Would you mind explaining yourself on Tulsi Gabbard? How can you consider so low on winning primary and so high on ending president?
And I don't see how a not evel 40 years old not truly American (as in not born on US mainland ground) female can win the presidency but that would be fun ^^

She's very unlikely to win the primary because:
 - Democrats like to believe the Russia conspiracy theories against Trump, which has put them into an especially anti-Russia, pro-war mindset. The Democratic party is more pro-war than the Republican party nowadays, and all but ~3 of the notable candidates I listed are pro-war.
 - There are candidates further to the left of Gabbard economically, and her far-left economic "lane" is already packed.
 - The mainstream media is controlled by pro-war interests, so they mostly ignore Gabbard, and they attack her when they're not ignoring her. Especially in such a packed field, you need tons of media exposure to have a chance. Democratic voters are especially likely to trust the mainstream media; while Trump was able to convince Republicans that the media can't be trusted, this'd be a lot more difficult with Democrats.
 - Even moreso than the Republican party, the Democratic party is heavily influenced by an elite establishment group, and this group is pro-war. The nominee is chosen in part by a group of "superdelegates" who are not chosen by popular vote, the debates will be structured to disadvantage Gabbard, etc.

But if she somehow won the primary, and it was a race between her and Trump, I think that she'd have an excellent chance of winning because her anti-war and economic messages are generally popular, and people will like her style more than Trump's.

Some people won't vote for a woman, but some will vote for a candidate just because she's a woman; it's a wash IMO. I also don't think that her age or race are significant net factors. Her Hindu religion would definitely harm her in the general election, but against Trump (who everyone knows only pays lip service to religion) it's maybe not a huge deal.

Not from the US either so this might be a stupid question but: no Michelle Obama ?

She'd be a strong candidate, but she's ruled it out.
896  Other / Politics & Society / 2020 Democrats on: February 20, 2019, 03:06:18 PM
It's quite early, but it looks like the 2020 Democratic lineup has become pretty solidified now. Biden is expected to announce any day now, and then all of the expected big names will be in except maybe Bloomberg.

I follow politics like many people follow sports, and this is going to be a fun one to watch, similar to the 2016 Republican primary. (Though nobody can beat Trump's entertainment factor.) My current opinions (note that I don't actually support or like any of them):

CandidateRanked likelihood to win the primaryRanked likelihood to win the presidency
assuming they win the primary
My preference
Joe Biden149
Michael Bloomberg3610
Cory Booker7107
Pete Buttigieg141411
Julian Castro623
John Delaney11124
Tulsi Gabbard1211
Kirsten Gillibrand9118
Kamala Harris2812
Amy Klobuchar8713
Beto O'Rourke496
Bernie Sanders532
Elizabeth Warren101314
Andrew Yang1355

Additional thoughts:
 - Biden: He has amazing name recognition and a strong association with Obama, who people love. But people remember him with rose-tinted glasses. He's kind of outside of the Democratic mainstream at this point; he reminds me more of Bush than eg. Sanders.
 - Bloomberg: His money could push him way up.
 - Gabbard: The strongest anti-war candidate. Due to this, the media and establishment hate her, and she's probably doomed in the primary.
 - Harris: Hillary Clinton 2.0, almost pre-selected to win by the media and establishment.
 - O'Rourke: Also a media darling, though that's worn off somewhat.
 - Sanders: The establishment still hates him and will try to crush him, and the far-left vote will be substantially split this time around. But he also has more name recognition now.

Who do you want to win, and who do you think will win?
897  Other / New forum software / Re: Merit isn’t enough, tipping using LN on: February 20, 2019, 01:30:41 PM
The forum will never hold users’ money.

Right, I was just about to post that.

People are free to open LN channels and send tips if they so choose.

LN is probably unsuitable for tips since the recipient has to be online. That's why these LN tipbots all hold your money, which I'm not a fan of. If you're using LN through a trusted third party, then you're better off not using it at all.
898  Other / Meta / Re: This Is NOT A New Problem... A Walk Down Memory Lane on: February 18, 2019, 10:10:14 PM
The majority of ratings seem to be warning people about red flags, not punishing provable scams. IMO this isn't a bad thing, since once someone has scammed, it's kind of too late.

What do you think about splitting the scam rating, with a "warning" rating for scammed previously OR you strongly believe that they will scam in the future, and a "scammer" rating for scammed previously AND you strongly believe that they will scam in the future? And then if you only have warning ratings, the indication displayed next to posts will be softer.

I think that you and I have a fundamental disagreement on this stuff, though:

Predictability and guidelines are often good. I wrote some Trust guidelines recently, and I may write more. But I don't believe in having a set of hard rules which is to be applied to all cases. Whenever an argument starts looking like it was written by a lawyer, or relying overmuch on precedent, you've stopped thinking about the real case and have started using rules to retreat into moral and intellectual laziness, divorcing yourself from the decision you're about to make. If you're making a decision about a case, then you're responsible for that case, and you can't say, "I don't agree with it, but I was just enforcing the rules." Every case needs to be handled individually.
899  Other / Meta / Re: How can we take Bitcoin Talk back into the Bitcoin community? on: February 17, 2019, 05:50:44 PM
I agree, even though AFAIK there's sub-reddit option to remove downvote option.

There isn't, some subreddits just use CSS to hide the downvote button, which is stupid because it advantages the people who "break the rules" by turning off custom CSS so that they can downvote people.

Reddit, like all popular social media, sucks for real discussion. It strongly promotes a groupthink/bubble mentality, and furthermore people/organizations are constantly manipulating the system in order to fabricate a "groupthink". But people find it easy and satisfying to use, so they use it.

Using Machine Learning to detect spam sounds good even though it's expensive

Current machine learning tech is OK at answering questions like "does this <specific thing> contain <specific something>". So it's OK at detecting clear-cut things like spam and obscenity (though dealing with an intelligent adversary makes the task much more difficult), but it's nowhere near being able to answer more abstract questions like "is this post off-topic?". This is why Twitter & friends keep failing to reliably detect things like "hate speech", since that's too abstract a concept for current ML tech.

I don't think that the hardware costs would be particularly expensive for any plausible bitcointalk.org usage of ML, but I don't think that it's worthwhile currently. Maybe if there was a massive influx of blatant spam. When you hear about big companies pouring tons of money into machine learning, I think that's almost entirely them trying to make the tech less terrible by hiring either ML experts or people who help produce training data.
900  Other / Meta / Re: Black screen when loading forum pages in chrome. on: February 17, 2019, 04:26:32 PM
I can't reproduce this on any of my devices, so I can't effectively investigate it. But I suspect that it's a recently-introduced bug in Chrome's hardware-accelerated rendering. Disabling hardware acceleration might fix it; maybe chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-2d-canvas ? (NeuroticFish reports this isn't it)

If anyone can figure out exactly what causes it or whether I can change anything on my end to fix it, let me know.
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