What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion? Also, people should not be required to post in order to get paid; that's already against the rules.

An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
 - "I want to discuss things"
     = Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
 - "I want to make money"
     = Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
     = You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc. (Quizzes are pointless to stop dedicated spammers, since an answer key will quickly be compiled, but it may help in cases where clueless people are ending up here.)

http://www.politiscales.net/en_US/results/?b1=33&b0=50&t1=24&t0=60&c0=24&c1=48&p1=88&p0=7&s0=48&s1=29&femi=10&m1=93&e1=67&e0=14&j0=60&j1=29&anar=100

This quiz seems better than the shorter one. I wonder how they generate those flags.

North Korea's land is largely unexploited. They have large untapped reserves of oil, industrial metals, etc. They could probably be very prosperous if they had a working, global economy. Though I've heard some speculate that one of the reasons the US has been so consistently hostile to North Korea (eg. violating the terms of the nuclear agreement from a few decades ago; though not to say that NK isn't an insane, dictatorial regime) is that they want to either have significant control over these resources, or they want nobody to have these resources.

These are very useful analyses, great job!

I am particularly interested in identifying people who should be made merit sources, or existing merit sources who should be given a higher monthly limit. When I originally created the system, I thought it'd be fairly easy to look through the stats and figure out who would make good sources, but it's been more difficult than I expected. Is there any additional data I can provide that would be useful?

Thanks for trying.

I think that if one was persistent enough, the blacklisting could probably be overturned. But I don't have time for that.


Greg was (maybe still is) a Wikipedia admin. He has good relations with them.

This is the first I've heard of it. It seems inappropriate, since bitcointalk.org is the best source for several important things. hilariousandco's theory sounds plausible.

I'd appreciate it if someone would appeal it. Wikipedia is the ultimate bureaucracy, with arcane rules and endless layers of appeals for everything. There's probably some "Request for unblacklisting" process, and if that fails, there will be appeals above that.

Please do not use any "mirror" sites (other than general mirror sites like archive.is), since there are no official mirrors, and the existing ones are likely to be phishing sites in disguise.

It's been suggested many times, and it's not a bad idea in principle, but in practice it would create a perverse incentive where people would want more reportable posts so that they could get more rewards. Almost certainly, some people would start spamming on alts just so that they could report the spam on another account and get rewarded. There are a few things that could be done to impede this sort of behavior, but on the whole it'd be too difficult to detect abuse and not worthwhile. So there will almost certainly never be any real reward for reporting, though some purely cosmetic things are not impossible.

9.4% is IPv6.

Send an appropriate Expires or Cache-Control header.

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
1 0.14 walleting.services
2 0.14 FortuneJack
2 0.14 Stunna
4 0.12 phun.io

As iluvbitcoins said, I think that it's mainly due to some weird ideas of the quiz-author regarding progress vs tradition. In most of the questions related to this I gave neutral or weak answers because most of that stuff should be personal choice, not political. If you want to follow particularly stupid traditions that were invented centuries ago, then I think that this is stupid, but it's not any of my business. So for example in the question like "should children be taught traditions", IIRC I said "agree" to this because they should be taught whatever traditions their parents see fit.

In reality, the best and quickest way to achieve progress is through the unrestricted free market. So I should be 100% progress and maybe 65% tradition, but that doesn't work due to the way that they set up their quiz.

BTW, although all libertarians should be opposed to governments getting into individuals' personal business, different libertarians can have very different cultures. I've noticed that the sort of libertarians who made up the early Bitcoin community, including myself, are usually a more socially-conservative type of libertarian. Eg. while I think that people should be able to do what they want with themselves, I don't use and recommend against using euphoric drugs, I don't advocate completely discarding traditional values on a personal level, etc.

It's not inherently bad for someone to merit announcement threads, since you might legitimately view them as particularly interesting and noteworthy. But some of those do look like a conflict of interest...

---

The Japanese section is in a very poor state, so I ended up selecting merit sources in that section who were all less than ideal according to my usual metrics, due to a lack of better alternatives. My idea was that if the quality of the Japanese section is currently 0 out of 10, and these merit sources are generally ~4 out of 10, then at least some increase in quality may be achieved. I just looked through the merit histories, and I did see a few good posts there getting merit, at least.

I'm starting to regret creating the Japanese section at all, since there are many posts there, but incredibly few that actually deserve merit. (It's especially frustrating for me because I can kinda-sorta speak Japanese, but not fluently enough that I could actually be an effective moderator or merit source there.)

このスレッドは長すぎるようになりたから、ロックします。

このスレッドはNewbieにとってよくなくなりたし、長すぎるようになりたし、ロックします。

新いスレッドを作るのは大丈夫ですが、もっと特定とか多様のスレッドのほうがいいです。

I mostly agree with hilarious's posts. The plagiarism was exactly the same offense as any member of the typical spammer flood, with exactly the same mindset: "I want money -> I need to make x posts with y words to make money -> the easiest way to do that is to copy/paste something from elsewhere", with complete disregard for your own integrity, the health of the forum, the ongoing discussion, or fairness in crediting the actual author. If someone copy/pasted something that was amazingly high-quality and on-topic, I'd understand more (though you'd still get banned), but almost always people copy the first thing that they find on Google. To be so lazy that you won't even make up your own low-quality post, but instead save a few minutes by importing some garbage from the wider Internet, is a massive insult to this forum's community, and is proof that at least in that moment the only thing you cared about was money-making.

I don't believe in a "strict rule of law"; even if it's written somewhere that "copy/paste = permaban", I'm willing to relax that on occasion. If you're going to be a net positive to the forum going forward, then I probably want you here, even if you've made past mistakes. But someone who at any point copy/pastes garbage like this has proven that they have an utterly broken mindset when it comes to the forum, and I have a really hard time believing that such a person will be a net positive going forward.

https://www.quora.com/Should-I-sell-my-house-and-invest-in-bitcoin-as-I-can-only-buy-4-bitcoins-as-of-now-after-selling-my-home/answer/Apurva-Patel-28


 

Mainly I do these date-limitation things just because it's always a massive pain to add pagination to things...

For the data dumps, I've been thinking that I might provide historical data (across multiple files), though.

Well, I'm an anarcho-capitalist (The Machinery of Freedom describes my particular ancap flavor). So I really should've gotten 100% capitalism, and I consider this a bug in the quiz.

The quiz doesn't seem that great. It seems impossible to be sane and then get very high numbers in most pairs of categories, which strikes me as a flaw in their whole methodology. I think that I should've gotten a higher score in "liberty", for example, but probably the questions which would've caused this were also pro-government, pro-egalitarian, or anti-market.


Not directly, so much. The biggest value in this stuff is that it creates a territory of freedom where governments have little or no power. People will just naturally exploit this where they can, and as they increasingly rely on it, that's what might change minds, and it also reduces the power of governments in itself.

The community has become less libertarian as it has expanded, which is disappointing, but not really unexpected. IMO Bitcoin is still a force for freedom regardless, though.