This month 132 users were eligible.

Old:
New:

I'm not going to enter into a cat-and-mouse game fighting adblockers via HTML changes, redirections, etc.

Several years ago I added per-user classes on signatures, like sig35 for my signature. I had hoped that adblockers would list all of the users wearing annoying sigs, and do the adblocking that way. I guess the way they did it here was a lot easier, even if it has some false-positives and false-negatives. Though it'd probably be better if they detected signatures containing <span>s instead of external links: that'd allow for users to link to their private sites, etc., but would (I think) eliminate any flashy ads.

I edited it, though actually I didn't really change the content that much:

I left in the link to this board. I'll try to check from time to time to see if there are any whitelisting requests. Though I don't want to grant any of the recent requests in the old thread because they look to me highly likely to be people who just want to add spammy links to their services. I added to the page that you should explain what edits you want to actually make.

I don't use IRC anymore. Is #bitcoin-wiki totally dead on both servers, such that it shouldn't even be mentioned?

I could add more Permittors, if any veterans here want to do it.

Also, we may in the near future try changing the whole way this works: Anyone will be able to "edit" pages, but these edits will actually be held-back pending review by a moderator. So you won't need to seek out preemptive approval. But it's possible that moderator bandwidth will not be high enough to deal with the volume of automated spam, so maybe this actually won't work out.


For the past ~8 years I've mostly been ignoring the wiki, and I would tell people who contacted me about wiki stuff to talk to one of the other wiki admins. But now all of the wiki admins have gone almost entirely inactive. So I plan to pick up the slack and be a little more active as a wiki bureaucrat for the next couple of years, until hopefully some other good bureaucrats can be found and I can start ignoring it again.

It looks to me like it's working as usual. (Which is to say, not great.)

I use the forum search a lot, but you really need to know how it works and how to deal with its quirks. Some tips:

• If you search for candy corn, it will return posts with both "candy" and "corn" in their bodies or subjects. The two words are keywords that can be separated, so it would match the phrase "I like candy, but I don't like corn". If you instead search for "candy corn", with the quotes, then the two words have to appear right next to each other as a single phrase.
• With the default settings, it will only return the last post in a topic that matches, even if more posts in that topic match. To change this, enable the option "Show results as messages".
• If more than about 5 pages of topics would be returned, then only an arbitrary subset of all results will be returned. To avoid this, setting a message-age restriction is often a good approach.
• If you use the search box in the upper right while in a topic or board, then it only searches that topic or board (& sub-boards).
• If one of the words in your search is incredibly common on the forum, like "the", then search will return bad, weird results, or may time-out after hanging for a long time. This applies even if the common word is in a quoted phrase, like "the president". Some decent-looking results may be returned, but posts which should be returned will not be.

This month 127 users were eligible.

Old:
New:

You're thinking of knightmb.

Create a better one, and then ask a moderator with jurisdiction over that board to switch the pinned thread. There's no need for any big debate about it: if there's a thread which hasn't been updated in several years, and somebody is asking me to pin a different thread which seems better after a few minutes of skimming, I'm probably just going to do it. (But please try asking other mods first, rather than me.) If somebody ends up having a problem with something-or-other regarding the new thread, then they can make a better thread, and we can at that time have a public debate in Meta about which up-to-date thread is better.


Mods are not supposed to edit the content of a post, even if it's a sticky. Mod edits should be limited to non-content things like fixing broken bbcode, merging posts, etc., so that nobody ever has reason to complain that a mod "put words in their mouth". Even if a post is violating the rules, and editing out a word/sentence/paragraph would make it no longer in violation of the rules, this kind of content-edit should not be done; the post should just be deleted.

This month 130 users were eligible.

Old:
New:

It's happened a few times, though not usually, and I would of course ignore such threats.

There's a very large DDoS attack going on. I mitigated it for now, but it's too large and sophisticated to be cleanly mitigated; until this stops, the forum will be on-and-off slow and people will have to endure Cloudflare challenges. Such large DDoS attacks are expensive, though.

That's a "newbie warning / type-1" flag, which requires only 1 net supporter. But TheUltraElite is not currently in DT, so the flag is not active by default. It's active for you because you have a non-default trust list.

No, he never used any avatar, at least while I was here.

This month 133 users were eligible.

Old:
New:

No, but as a one-time exception I'll leave that thread, since I don't like deleting so many posts over a borderline case like this which wasn't otherwise acted upon for over a month. If somebody does the exact same thing in the future, it should be deleted.

If somebody doesn't have to look up the URL to visit the site after reading your post, using Google or some other such resource, then you're posting the URL in a disallowed way. This includes things like posting "examplemixer dot com", using a URL shortener, using a simple "click here to continue" landing page, etc. If there are two mixers which can't be disambiguated except by posting their full domain name, or if their official name is a full domain name, then that's an annoying situation, but it would not excuse posting their full domains.

But there seems to be some confusion around promotion. It would be allowed to post even a positive review thread for ExampleMixer, just as long as you don't post the URL and you don't violate the other rules. Promotion is only disallowed in signatures, avatars, and profile-bios; not posts.

Tough competition this year! Thanks for organizing this!

You're right that a maximally-performant implementation would definitely omit the query entirely. Even a query like "SELECT 1;" is slower than just about anything done within PHP, since a network request introduces a (relative) ton of latency.

However, I would consider it a slightly worse patch if it fixed this because it would increase the code complexity a fair bit, and the only benefit would be saving a few milliseconds on a page that will probably only be accessed a handful of times each day. In fact, if I'd been writing this, I probably would've left the query as-is, since that would've only used a couple of additional miliseconds.

PowerGlove sent me a nice patch for this which I just added:

Previously, if you didn't check the "Show others your online status" option, it would still be pretty obvious when you were online because your "Last Active" time would still constantly update to be ~now. This has now been changed so that if you were last active within the last 72 hours and you have the show-online option disabled, then the exact time will not be displayed, and it will instead just say "(Recently)".

If you would like people to be able to more exactly tell when you were online, then you can of course just enable the "show others your online status" option in your profile settings.

Nice! It's a pretty self-contained patch, so I was able to add it fairly easily. I left a warning on the post page, though, since I don't think it was otherwise obvious enough what was going on.

That's not valid at all.


For other data, it will not be considered as part of that bounty, but I may award some amount, depending on the details.

This month 127 users were eligible.

Old:
New: