Thanks, I linked it in the adinfo page.

If glitch text like that intrudes on other posts, report it. If it stays within the post's area, then it's not a problem.

OK, the 24-hour limit is now in place in the sections that people mentioned.

I think how I'd prefer to handle it is to prevent deleting posts within 24 hours of posting them, in the problematic sections only. Which sections are problematic?

Recently, a few different people emailed me asking about how forum advertising works, including sig advertising. I tell them about the inhouse forum ads, of course, but I get the sense that they are very interested in running sig-ad campaigns. However, they are not familiar enough with the forum to actually do this themselves, and many seem to not even be willing to jump through the hoop of creating a forum account and figuring out how to hire a sig-ad campaign manager in the normal bitcointalk.org way.

Therefore, I recommend:
 - More people should post in Services advertising their willingness to be a sig-ad campaign manager. Post an email address so that advertisers don't need a forum account in order to contact you, and try to provide some concrete stats (clicks, etc.) of your past campaigns.
 - Someone should compile a list of responsible, anti-spam sig managers along with their email addresses and some explanatory info. If a good one is created, I'll link to it on the adinfo page and point advertisers to it when they contact me directly about this.

The clone site gets wordfiltered to bitcointalk.org in URLs. So the OP wrote the intended URL, but it got wordfiltered.

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.

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.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.22 ChipMixer
2 0.22 phun.io
2 0.20 ColorlessK
1 0.20 Colin D

Only admins can merge threads, and it's only done for technical reasons such as an accidentally-split post. Merging similar threads together just makes a big mess; if too many topics about the same thing are posted, the extras should just be locked or deleted.

It doesn't make sense to show Trust to guests, since Trust is relative.

For merit, it was just an implementation shortcut. If people care, I can (at some point) make the user summaries public.

I did this back in 2015, but I wanted to update it. I used exactly the same mapping code as last time.

When someone is banned, their IP and some of their neighboring IPs receive evil points. Here I've created a map of the IPv4 Internet according to evil points. Currently, IPv6 is mapped into the 240.0.0/4 range, which is the large square taking up the top-right sixteenth of the chart. (I'm not sure yet whether IPv6 is actually disproportionately evil, or if I'm just cramming too many people into that address-space. Probably the latter is at least something of a factor, since 9% of traffic is IPv6 but 6% of this address-space is IPv6.)

Here's the image (zoom in):
https://bitcointalk.org/banmap201805.png

For comparison, here's the one from 2015:
https://bitcointalk.org/banmap201510.png

Each pixel is a /24 address block (ie. each pixel represents 256 IP addresses). The colors are:
█ Zero or nearly zero evil
█ A small amount of evil
█ More
█ More
█ At this point you actually have to pay if you register an account in this block
█ More
█ More
█ More
█ Pretty high
█ A ton of evil, more than anyone is likely to pay

This is per block, so a single IP address could have an evil score requiring payment while its block still shows up as black here. A colored pixel indicates the evil score of a typical IP in that block.

Addresses are laid out in the standard way. So you can for example cross-reference with these maps: https://ant.isi.edu/address/

A /24 should almost never uniquely identify someone, but to be safe I randomly added, removed, and modified some of this data for plausible deniability.

Does someone have a table of these characters? I can automatically convert non-standard characters to ASCII.

ItsZeroLimit designed these excellent signatures:

Reserved.

This isn't a good example of me being a "rebel", since there's ~no legal risk in refusing to help police who don't have a court order, and there's even less risk when they're not even trying to enforce a law which exists in the forum's jurisdiction. Anyone in the US who would help foreign police with a Bitcoin ban is seriously misguided, at the very least.

Your mental model should always be that the forum logs everything, especially since it is behind Cloudflare, which is almost certainly an NSA-backed operation. But here is some more detail. Currently there are four classes of IP logs:
 - Every time your session refreshes (about every 10 minutes while you are browsing the site), your current IP is momentarily logged. This is only kept until a new such entry replaces it, except that whenever the daily database backup happens, the current value will be captured and then possibly kept for a long time.
 - A tuple (time, userID, ip) is logged whenever you view a forum ad in order to produce ad stats. These are kept for only a few weeks, and are not backed up.
 - Every HTTP request creates an access log, but while these contain IPs, they do not contain user IDs, and so on the whole they probably cannot be provably associated with users. These are usually deleted after a few months, and are not backed up.
 - Certain actions trigger a long-term IP log. This includes posts (but not PMs), security-log entries, certain errors, and registration. Long-term logs are currently kept indefinitely.

I don't like that IPs are sometimes kept indefinitely. To prevent abuse, it would probably be sufficient to keep them for ~6 months. But keeping these logs long-term is extremely useful for account recoveries. I've been thinking about this issue, and I think that in the future I might let users opt out of long-term IP logging if they have a public key registered in a (currently-not-existing) public-key-registration system. Though, again, even then you should model this site and all sites as keeping complete logs.

Unless I am somehow required to do so by law (though I can't see how in this case), I will not assist police who are seeking to enforce any Bitcoin ban.


Try it and see how many IPs you get...

The MO of this particular attacker seems to be that they get your password through phishing links, they don't change your password/email so that you don't get any forum security notifications, and then they send spam and more phishing links in PMs from your account.

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.

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.

Sorry, no ICOs.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.24 ColorlessK
5 0.22 BitcoinVideoPoker
1 0.22 phun.io