I am not entirely sure, but it is possible that theymos does not have the resources to test for security flaws, meaning he does not know who he can ask to test the forum software for security issues.

There is (or at least was) a lot of business conducted via the forum, and as such, the forum is a big security target, if there are available exploits, they will be tried on the forum, while a forum in which people talk about football might have multiple glaring security flaws, and no one will care to exploit them as there wouldn't be anything to gain from doing so.

The forum uses SMF software. Satoshi likely did little more than install the SMF software on the forum server, and possibly changed some configurations. Satoshi did not create SMF (most likely), and there are thousands of other forums that also run on SMF software.

The majority of modifications to the forum software were done by theymos, or someone hired by theymos.

Theymos wants the new forum software tested for security flaws. I think this is the primary hold up. There are a bunch of PRs that have sat idle for months+ so I don’t know that it is being actively worked on, although there may be hidden branches that are being used.

I don’t think the new forum software is going to be implemented anytime soon.

would personally prefer that source sMerit allocation is distributed every month instead of 30 days after you spend it. I think this would be especially beneficial for those sources that spend a decent amount of the month without any source sMerit. If I run out of source and personal sMerit, I am not going to necessarily know when some of my source sMerit is replenished without looking, so I may end up sitting on source sMerit for a number of days, even if I see posts I want to merit.

The above means that source merit is effectively replenished less frequently than once every 30 days because source sMerit will not necessarily get spent the day it is replenished. Different sources could have their source sMerit replenished on different days, and the amount of source sMerit available to the merit source could be changed to their monthly allocation on whatever day of the month. That way sources who have run out of sMerit to give out will know they have sMerit to give on whatever day their allocation is replenished.

For those that received an increased sMerit allocation, they also received their entire monthly allowance at the time of the increase. It is possible that some sources had zero or close to zero source sMerit prior to the increase. This means someone who had their sMerit allocation increased to 1000/month, would have received an additional 1000 sMerit to give out immediately

This is somewhat similar to what happened when the merit system was introduced (although on a smaller scale).

Yes, Theymos hand picks the merit sources, likely with input from the community. I applied to be a merit source and was accepted once Vod was removed from being a source (IIRC, a few others were appointed as a merit source at the same time). I was initially given an allocation of 50 sMerit per month, but this was increased to 100 when Theymos recalculated source sMerit based on how much merit each source had recently sent.

My source sMerit is often empty but I am not active as much as I was in the past, so sometimes my source sMerit will refill and it might be some number of days before I can find posts to spend it on.

Yea, cable TV news shows were only bringing him on because of what he was saying, not his expertise in anything.

When he was making his daily news appearances, he was likely already in trouble with the law, it just hadn't been public yet.

I think it would have been hilarious if he actually made it to any of the Democratic debates. He was really aggressive when he talked, and would have made the debates even more of a train wreck.

Avenatti was apparently just sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for his extortion scheme and according to some reports was crying when he heard the sentence.

Some people might change their habits and go from a shitposter one day to writing thoughtful posts the next. If someone makes their way onto your ignore list, you can always remove them if you see something insightful quoted by someone else.

I hope you are never in this situation, however if you were ever charged with manufacturing illegal drugs in your basement, you will not be obligated to take the stand to testify if you did what you were charged with doing. You can make statements (often through your lawyer) that poke holes in the evidence presented against you, and present alternate theories to explain the evidence. When you plead 'not guilty' to a crime, you are saying that the government (the accuser) must prove their accusations per the standard as required by the constitution, you are not saying that you are innocent.

In the above example, I very specifically did not say if you were actually a Pharmacist of illegal drugs in your basement.

There are also often times in which there is outsized pressure to make statements on an issue when you do not wish to make a confirmation or denial.

Well that is why I did it. Those people were doing similar things out in the open, and no one batted an eye. There was no movie about similar behavior, there were real people who did it, and no one cared. It was no secret that other people were doing similar things. People seemed to be more upset that I lied about what I did, more than what I actually did, and I have not made excuses for that. This is why I don't like responding to these types of accusations, and generally will not do so. Based on your posts, I don't think anything I say will change your mind on the matter, so asking me to confirm something like this is asking me to submit to you, considering it is clear you will reject any denial that I might make.  

Neither the QS account, nor the PN7 account is accused of any kind of wrongdoing, so I don't see any need to respond to any kind of theories.

I think it is probably fair to say that inactive merit sources were removed. There really isn't any point in keeping an inactive user as a merit source, as they are not giving out any merit, and there is always the risk that an account will get hacked or sold.

I am not sure what you mean by "excuse my past behavior"? I have stayed out of drama for years, even when others were trying to bait me into drama. It has been even longer since I offered any kind of escrow services, and I hardly ever trade here anymore.

I agree that merit should be given out based on the content of their posts, not based on who is writing the post. This is a principal that I follow when giving out merit, and I would like to think that most other merit sources follow a similar principal. If you review my merit history, you will see me occasionally giving merit to people who I dislike, and who I strongly disagree with, even when I disagree with the specific post (in these cases, the post will receive merit because I believe it makes a well rounded argument, or a lot of effort was put into the post).

With that being said, If you are sufficiently annoying, or are making enough low quality posts to get on my ignore list, chances are you are not going to make many (or any) posts that are worthy of merit. My ignore list is pretty short, and it has been years since I added anyone to my ignore list (intentionally), and the threshhold for me to add you to my ignore list is pretty high.

I didn't receive any increase in my source sMerit allocation, and I almost always am out of or nearly out of sMerit to give away.

Is that how you judge if something someone says about someone is true? They didn't deny it, therefore it must be true. That is an interesting way of judging people. Normally, it is up to the accuser to prove their point, not the accused to prove their innocence.

Anyway, I am happy to see PN7 reach the rank of legendary. I would drop some merit on the OP, but I don't want to have drama involving allegedly giving merit to myself, so I will find other people with good posts to give my merit away to.

You are correct, based on my reading of the relevant code, what actually happened, and the relevant wiki articles, the correct way of explaining maximum changes in the difficulty is that the difficulty can be no less than 25% of the previous difficulty, not that it can change downwards by no more than 25%.

The difference is a single word but it makes a big difference.

With the difficulty adjusting downward by so much, it will appear that miners will yield more than what they would if some percentage of the miners being taken offline are brought back online. A higher yield means that the miners would appear to be worth more.

If you think much of the miners will be brought back online, it would be a time to sell existing miners. If you think the miners will mostly stay offline, it would be advantageous to keep existing hardware.

I don’t think an excess supply of miners will affect their prices compared to their potential for revenue once the market is cleared of excess supply.

The one line can be of unlimited length, so the only real restriction is that reports can’t have line breaks.

I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to create a user script that could create predefined report messages.

That is a lot of source merit going unused. I reviewed your merit history and you have given out 110 merit in the past 120 days. Depending on what your source allocation is, there is a minimum of 1900 source merit going unused in the past four months, if not over 2000.

I think Theymos should review how much each merit source is actually spending and reallocate merit accordingly.

You have to know who is a merit source. There are a couple of threads that keep track of who at one point is a merit source- they know because they keep track of how many merit they had when the merit system was introduced, how many merit they received and how many merit they spent. If they spend more sMerit than they should have if they didn’t have source merit, they are a merit source.

TMAN was a merit source that had a high allocation and I don’t think this has changed despite him being inactive for a year+. The same is true for Flying Helfish, although I don’t think he has been inactive for as long. I’m sure other merit sources have gone inactive over time.

Also, although I have a source merit allocation of 100 merit per month, and I often have zero available source merit, I don’t spend 100 source merit per month. Source merit is replenished 30 days after it is spent, but I may not spend replenished source merit as soon as it is available, it may take a few days for me to spend it, so I might spend 100 source merit every 32 or so days. If this is true for all merit sources, the actual amount of source merit is actually lower than the published amount available.

I don't see theymos changing the frequency at which source sMerit is refilled, however it would probably be appropriate to evaluate how many source sMerit each source has considering how many merit sources have gone inactive and how much source sMerit has effectively become unavailable.