I'm quite passionate about the forum as you might of gathered, and I'm only nitpicking so that we can actually come up with a solution rather than proposing some, and not really going into depth about them, and then this type of thread resurfaces again in a few weeks, and we circle around the issue again.
A handful of them are, and so am I. I am all down, for new changes, that might help this forum. Especially because I have learnt so much, the only way I can repay is by helping it out,in its desperate times. Altcoin section literally has only one mod appointed to it. Kudos to mrprep for moderating that board for years, but there won't be another mod in that board, unless one or more users start reporting aggressively. So the problem is both. I know that there's several people who are spending their time reporting in that section. You only have to take a look at the modlog to see that there are hundreds of posts every day getting removed. I've recently considered making a Discord/Telegram account just so I can join their groups, and see if they are offering an incentive to post on their threads, because it seems to be the trend right now. Investigating the thread whether they are offering an incentive to post is time consuming enough, let alone if they aren't, and you have to report each post individually. Yeah, mprep is the only moderator assigned, and he's a Global moderator too. But, it definitely spills over to other moderators from time to time. I received a personal message from cyrus about a specific report so I know that he deals with reports from time to time. That wouldn't be of much use, I really want to know how good the autoreply bot is, tons of alt accounts can be operated from there, without logging in. People just might prefer that. The restriction is a tad too much. For those who don't read the rules/terms of bounties, put them in SMAS/delete their replies and don't pay them. Enforce a new rule/term: If any post is made with twitter and facebook links, that user shall be banned from further bounties/campaigns and he shall not be paid. Getting the bounty managers to enforce this would be difficult. Especially, because the list is subjective. I think it's a good movement personally, but it is subjective. Unless, theymos is willing to specify certain guidelines for campaign managers to follow, and actually enforce it we won't be able to get them to follow certain things that would make the campaign less spammy, because they simply don't care. I have been saying this for months now, theymos should just make a guideline for signature campaigns and an official set of rules. There are just a few stickies here and there(by theymos) saying what is allowed and what isn't, but it would be really helpful, if he compiles one list, with new issues coming by everyday, that list could really help sorting things out. A few lazy managers caused this spam, and now legitimate people shouldn't pay for this. And the likeliness of theymos implementing this is almost zero. He did say that this would be his last resort(banning signatures overall if merit system fails). But he is apparently swamped with things and is currently looking to start a company with the same intent as a forum,and to hire a CEO for that. I agree. I don't like restrictions either as it normally impacts on the legitimate users more than the malicious users. And literally, any suggestions that anyone is coming up is related to restrictions. There should be another possibility without having those restrictions. If there were a way for theymos to limit the number of alt accounts a person can have, that could solve a huge problem. Bots could be controlled and so could be shitposting. I don't see any legitimate reason for a person to have more than 3 alt accounts other than just to shitpost. Accessing hundreds of accounts using TOR would be almost impossible, for TOR takes a few minutes just to bypass recaptcha. So most shitposters won't likely use TOR. It'd take a lot of time. Right, even if we did try, and limit it. Several users use public wifi, and VPNs. Especially, in countries which the government isn't so friendly to Bitcoin. It would be incredibly difficult to find alternate accounts without them exposing themselves or by taking an in depth inestigations per account. Most of which would have to be done by an admin, and considering both theymos' words, and the account recovery issue right now I don't think they'll have the time too. I don't see how governments being unfriendly towards bitcoin, is related to people using a VPN to access bitcointalk. In a few countries where VPN is banned, I have heard stories that random officers started checking people's phones to see if they had VPN installed or not. I don't believe that story, but I can see them doing that. So only the VPN issue exists, blacklist the most common VPN IPs? There's several pieces of software out there which hundreds of new VPNs are coming online, and being used. They could just use them. There would be no way to regulate this AFAIK. The users registering multiple accounts aren't likely using the most common VPNs because these have likely already accumulated too much evil points to make it feasible. The new softwares that come out don't work well, they mostly use the same blacklisted IPs the other VPNs do.
But on the long run (when the merit system will be fine tuned) we can set up the ignore system like this:
- No ignore (can see everyone)
- Small ignore (ignoring users with default merit, who haven't gathered additional merits)
- Medium ignore (ignoring those who gathered less than 10% additional merits for their rank)
- Strong ignore (ignoring those who gathered less than 30% additional merits for their rank)
In this case, ignore lists are not needed, it can be automated (and still not mandatory to use, to let people choose if they really want to read shitposts...)
This needs the merit system to work as expected, so it needs time, but it can be a kind of automated solution.
EDIT:
I've changed my mind.
Why not to implement the second solution immediately, to test it? If it's not mandatory, people can not complain about it.
For newbies, who had no chance to gain merits, there will be the merit sources (with no ignore list activated of course) so they will have the chance to gather some merits to escape the ignore lists.
How does this help with the Spam problem? Its just personal preference. And there are legit users who haven't earned little or any merits, who have more than average level of posts. I don't think this would be that great of an idea. |
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The signed message isn't rock-solid evidence you're the original owner Did anybody manage to verify it? I tried to and it said that it wasn't valid. This was by using Electrum, by the way.
I might be doing something wrong with the whitespace characters (sometimes messages include those accidentally) I tried it too and it failed to verify. https://imgur.com/jxH4wgL |
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How about your main one?  One extra number will do better job. Shush. He is hiding behind a bush in fortnite, desperately waiting for season 5.  Don't reveal his spot. If there are only 3 global moderators left that would explain why the spam problem has got so much worse recently. I've noticed reports staying unhandled a lot longer or indefinitely the last few weeks. The other staff can only moderate the boards they are assigned to and nuke Newbies. The legions of Jr. Member spammers seem to be left to their own devices at the moment.
I have seen grue and SaltySpitoon to be inactive for more than a while now(inactive as in spending less time on the forum, moderating). So the absence hasn't affected the spam to increase. Although, I could argue that with the launch of the new autoreply bot,which might have made the spam problem much worse than it already is. They're not 'fired' per se, but as with most staff if you become inactive after x amount of time you usually have your mod status removed. Grue and Salty haven't really been active moderating for quite some time and both their mod payments have been zero for the past two months and grue's even longer than that, so that means they handled zero reports and probably why they were de-modded.
Please tell me, if I put a local rule on not allowing digaran to say anything in particular threads of mine and if he does, will he be banned? Its sad that grue and Salty have been de-modded, hope they are alright IRL, and just not leave bitcointalk forever. What did I do? Everybody knows I'm never anyone's alt  #1 Joined chipmixer. #2 Busted you know who's alts*. #3 You're here. And you used emojis.  They were pretty inactive from what I can tell. I'm sure theymos would have them back in an instant if they could dedicate their time again. Both were top notch in my opinion. Probably better to promote existing staff than hire new ones to fill in the slot. Thanks for the endorsement though I haven't seen much of grue, but I can say Salty was a great mod. Most of the staff(non global mods) are either inactive themselves or are busy managing their own boards. A few boards need moderators, but that's not gonna happen. But hey there is no harm in self promoting my alts. Myself, Pugman, and yourself used emojis in our replies. 100% confirmed alt accounts.
True story. It would be better if we could have the same system with default trust members, many of them are inactive, IMO they should be excluded from DT system after being inactive for some time. speaking of trusting people to moderate, we could really use some help regarding a few rogue DT1 members. because IMO trust system is more important than moderators, if mods do something wrong people could spot them very quickly but we don't know what is going on with some DT members and their inside deals.
Not true. xetsr was a great DT member, he has hundreds of legit tags, if he is removed, scammers would be free to scam again(not everyone reads untrusted feedback). If you have a problem with DT1 members, make another thread about it, tell your bullshit insights to theymos. I am sure, he will reply to you the first thing he sees such a thread. And trust system is not important than moderators, and if you don't know why, you should leave. That would significantly decrease the weight they've given in their feedback, which is not necessary even if those members are inactive. I would say that as long as it's not suspected that the account has changed hands, no action is necessary. In other words, just because someone hasn't posted here in a while doesn't mean they're not trusted anymore. On the other hand, if an employee fails to do work for X amount of time, it's only logical that they should be let go.
I remember, when Zepher was removed from DT, all his tags became untrusted and I believe Ecuamobi/Lauda/some other DT member had to spend their time re-tagging all those who Z had tagged. Why do you try and derail every thread into an off-topic discussion about DT?
Why else? He is a DT investigator. His bullshit opinions are right on spot and always right. Why do you let him derail the thread?  Its my mistake, didn't put a localrule for not letting digaran reply. I apologize for that. 
* I don't know who you know who is, so conspiracy theories in Reputation section please. |
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Initially yes but persistently? I've reported at least 14 posts that have been deleted. My question is how many it takes?
Sometimes, users are never banned. Thousands of users post ref links every day and they keep posting them, and some of them never get banned. Only the posts get deleted. He's basically trying to take over another service's thread to promote his service.
How is this not advertising?
<...>
That is still unhandled.
I am assuming that it'd only count as advertising if there's any ref links, hyperlinks, or something like that. Maybe, mods don't see it as advertising. |
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I just noticed that grue and saltyspitoon are no longer Global Mods. Why? I see both of them have been offline for around a month, but at times when there is more need for mods, why remove them? Are there gonna be new global mods? If so, I have my alts(Welsh and LoyceV) up for that. I was planning for a infinity war parody dude, and I can't fill the 6 infinity stones(because 2 mods got removed)  . |
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If a user breaks the rules, it doesn't necessarily mean that he should be banned. Spamming, advertising, using ref. links etc won't get users banned(initially) ,but would just get their posts deleted. Hilariousandco and cyrus would probably have a better explanation.
From what I see, this user is comparing freebitco.in with his bot, and is attacking you. Since there's mixture of both, it doesn't explicitly seem to be advertising. Hence, no action is taking place. Or I am totally wrong.
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IIRC there are some rare cases that theymos can change your username without donating or being a vip.
An example was Blazed.
Yes, he did it for me too. But in those days, membership numbers were less than 10% of what they are now. :/ (200K vs 2M+) What from? And theymos did it in about september 2016 with another user also. From Martin Lawrence. And I think you're talking about Lauda. |
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I'm not sure if they are understaffed or whether there just needs to be more users reporting.
Altcoin section literally has only one mod appointed to it. Kudos to mrprep for moderating that board for years, but there won't be another mod in that board, unless one or more users start reporting aggressively. So the problem is both.
About the full member status: The restriction is a tad too much. For those who don't read the rules/terms of bounties, put them in SMAS/delete their replies and don't pay them. Enforce a new rule/term: If any post is made with twitter and facebook links, that user shall be banned from further bounties/campaigns and he shall not be paid.A few lazy managers caused this spam, and now legitimate people shouldn't pay for this. And the likeliness of theymos implementing this is almost zero. He did say that this would be his last resort(banning signatures overall if merit system fails). But he is apparently swamped with things and is currently looking to start a company with the same intent as a forum,and to hire a CEO for that.
About the alt account issue: If there were a way for theymos to limit the number of alt accounts a person can have, that could solve a huge problem. Bots could be controlled and so could be shitposting. I don't see any legitimate reason for a person to have more than 3 alt accounts other than just to shitpost. Accessing hundreds of accounts using TOR would be almost impossible, for TOR takes a few minutes just to bypass recaptcha. So most shitposters won't likely use TOR. It'd take a lot of time. So only the VPN issue exists, blacklist the most common VPN IPs? I have heard that there are numerous websites that have huge lists of common IPs.
Another issue: Autoreply bot. There is a software that has been especially made for users to post in bitcointalk without logging in. This just made things much worse. I really can't think of a solution for this, but if somehow theymos stops the forum from using cloudfare and if he hires someone or if he himself does something to replace cloudfare, he could make a lot of custom restrictions. Allowing only specific type of bots to access the forum(scrappers/crawlers) and not allow posting bots.
If people want to clean the bounty section and the shitposters: Limit any random person from starting bounties. Only like a few managers should host campaigns. This is a hard blow, but it might just work in the long run. And for anybody to be a campaign manager, he should be qualified for that. Qualified as in, he should have knowledge of this forum, know how to select participants, be a trustworthy individual et al. Why I say only qualified personnel should manage campaigns is because: Think like a real life person. People only get jobs after they are qualified for it. Campaign Management is becoming a big business and random kids shouldn't be managing campaigns, when they should be studying in school.
Overall, I don't like above suggestions myself, but something needs to be done. A lot of legit users would be hurt by this, but that's what happens when you leave the fate of the forum at a few lazy ass managers. |
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Mods can't edit posts. Only admins can, even though they have never done such. But why can't you edit posts? Do you see the edit button? Or this button near at the bottom right of your posts? |
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I've posted my ETH Address here. Should I try signing it? Are you sure your account is only locked? If yes, do sign a message, if hilariousandco/some other global mod finds it enough to unlock your account, then do so. Sign a message saying this: "address": "Your eth address",
"msg": "Today's date. I, your username am in control of this wallet and my account has been locked. Please unlock this account",
"sig": "...",
"version": "...",
"signer": "..."
}
And, for the love of god don't fill the above quote just like that. Sign a real message,and post it here. To sign an eth message ,go here: https://www.myetherwallet.com/signmsg.html
For a locked account I guess a Global Moderator can unlock it. Not 100% sure but I guess I have seen somewhere hilary posted it. Excuse in advance if I am wrong for both hilary and Global Moderator  Yeah, hilariousandco can. I don't know about other global mods tho. |
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The previous address that was on my profile was my Ethereum address, I can also prove ownership of that.
You can prove you own the account by signing a message with that address. Admins don't accept signed messages from eth addresses. Only a bitcoin signed message/PGP message might get an account recovered. And addresses on a profile don't count,as they can be changed anytime. |
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Spam and bot problems in the announcement and altcoin sections. Why bother mods and members with that problem? Let the campaign managers handle it by self moderating their topic.(In fact, that's what campaign managers are already doing. They saw every post made on their thread. If they saw spam, report or ban that user from the thread.) Create a subsection, something like 'Spammy ICOs' (shady ICOs, whatever) and If the campaign managers fail to moderate spam, report that thread to mods and mods will remove the topic to that subsection. In that way, if these ICOs are using bot, they have to compete with other bots. What can be the potential problems by doing so?
Why bother mods? Because they are hired for moderating. That's why. Not all campaign managers create a self-mod topic. The ANN thread starters do,in most cases, by using the sentence: "To avoid spam". But they do it to hide the truth. And you can't ban members from posting in a topic, or a board, had that been the case, digaran would have been banned from reputation. There is no-need for a Spammy ICO subsection, people will think that it is a subsection to say shit like : "Marinecoin is better than btc", "shitcoin to the moon", etc. There are 2-3 boards depending upon the case to report these ICOs. If they break the rules, meta section is for that. If its related to members who are not breaking the rules but still are doing shady stuff, Reputation section is for that. If an ICO is a scam or shows its scammy behavior, then there's Scam Accusations board. What else do you actually need? Do you actually think ICOs have to compete each other in terms of bots,out of everything else? Well, the problems of bots right now are: - They are bypassing cloudfare, which even some mods are unable to(the scrapping bot is no longer working(?) and the Autoban bot as well). - They are making every board their victim, by spamming, making things worse for those who report the bots and for the mods.
And why was the first paragraph even required? You're talking about rank/merit/activity and all of a sudden you're talking about bots? And their potential problems? Bots are not posting here because they are hurt by the ranking system, they are posting here to earn money. That is why. |
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Feel bad for Zlatan for losing the bet against Beckham, for he was betting on the losing side. It was super clear that England were gonna beat Sweden, because Sweden's defense tactics weren't the best,everyone knows that. Now that Zlatan lost the bet, he is going to watch England's game with Beckham wearing an England jersey,lol. #Its Coming Home Semifinals are gonna be super-competitive and exciting. Keep your beers stacked in the fridge, you are gonna need it. Never knew Croatia was this damn powerful, they played fantastically this World Cup. Let's see how things workout. The finals prediction: England vs France. |
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I have 2 questions: 1. How do they bypass cloudfare? And 2. What do they get from this? Got my answer: Last think my "informant" told me was bumping rates are around $1000 per week. Spam is big business, and most ICOs are shady money grabbers anyway, so they don't care.
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Have a FUCKING GOOD CUSTOMER SUPPORT. DON'T BE A DICK TO YOUR USERS. Hire hundreds of employees just to manage customer support.
Don't block your user's accounts without valid reasons and give a notice before blocking.
Don't take millions for dollars for each and every coin to get listed.
Find an alternative to hot wallets because they suck big time homie.
Keep the exchange updated with the latest changes. Eg: segwit.
Give access to private keys for users.
Don't give a fuck about governments. Go to a country which would avoid the exchange and its users from any KYC obligation. If it doesn't exist, buy a private island and do so, for all I care.
Keep the UI neat and simple, but convenient at the same time.
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Theymos! He should be in the list. He wrote the first ever blockexplorer if I am not mistaken. He also has a bitcoin expert badge. And he is a freaking genius. Include him in the list!
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Possibly. The link seems sketchy. Report the PM to Admin/mods and he shall be banned,if the case is justified enough.
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what should I do to unlock the account?
In order for your account to get unbanned, you need to appeal in the given link. But it will take some time before you get your account back. I don't know if it's a temporary or permanently ban but if this is the first time your account get banned, then I think it's just temporary. Edit. By looking at your post history, the reason why your account get banned is too obvious No one has ever been heard back from that mail if I am not mistaken. The appeal thread is much better.
OP, you're permabanned/ banned indefinitely. No coming back, no creating alt accounts, none whatsoever. And the fault is all yours, you didn't read/comply with the rules, you pay the price. Sorry OP, but bid goodbye to this forum and to bounties. And stop ban evading. You're still breaking the rules. |
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Yeah binance is the one. For trading cryptos, it is now become the best exchange. They have managed to pull it off and are still doing a great job. Don't know when they will bring in the KYC nonsense, but if they do, well all of us are fucked. But just in case, if you want to buy bitcoins with dollars/your native currency, localbitcoins.com should be the one. Be careful, people are scamming there too. And for the love of god, don't use PayPal over there.
Another exchange that I would recommend would be shapeshift. Even though you may be getting around 2-3% worse than market spot prices for your coins, I think that amount is worth the convenience and the peace of mind.
I love shapeshift, haven't traded there in a while but I was told that it got fucked up after the whole GDPR thing. Is bittrex still blocking accounts, I still have some money there. |
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