In about 10 minutes the forum will be down for 10-30 minutes for maintenance.

They should email acctcomp15@theymos.e4ward.com if they haven't already. (Their "account locked for security" message should have said this...) If I take longer than ~4 days to respond, they should resend their mail. It might not be necessary for them to sign using that address in particular.

It's not useful AFAICT to create a separate user like that. Anyone listed there and not in your main account won't be in the trust networks of people using the default settings. It'll have different effects for people who have non-default settings, but these effects will vary in ways that you can't predict/affect, and not usually do anything useful.

I recommend just listing everyone who:
- Gives only accurate ratings.
- Has a mostly good trust list. (You can/should fix any problems in their trust list using exclusions in your trust list.)
- Is unlikely to suddenly change the above two things for the worse, especially not maliciously or in cooperation with other users. This is the only point that requires some trust, and it doesn't require that much since you can quickly remove someone from your trust list if necessary. Listing someone in your trust list does not require that you have tons of trust in them.

Removing people from your trust list because they're already in DefaultTrust is not a good idea because some people might trust you and not DefaultTrust.


That's not how it works.

The trust system is composed of two independent parts. The first part is the trust network calculation. From your trust list and depth, it generates a list of users (your trust network) whose ratings you will trust. The second part is trust score/ratings. All ratings from people in the trust network calculated in the first part are weighted equally.

Very few people seem to understand the trust system... Maybe it'd help if I just posted the code...


Your trust network is trust_sources(<your user ID>, <your configured max depth>). You see ratings as "trusted" if they're posted by anyone in your trust network. All trusted ratings are considered equally in the trust score algorithm (posted elsewhere), and all untrusted ratings are ignored.

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

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. 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. Eight 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.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 10, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

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.

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.

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 eight slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 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 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time no more than 12 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- 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.

All of those people except Blazedout419 and Bees Brothers have basically-empty trust lists, so adding them to the default trust list would be pointless. Good candidates for addition to the default trust list will bring several additional good, trustworthy people into the default trust network.

Whitelisted.

Registration fees are currently disabled. Proxybanned people need to get manually whitelisted until I fix it.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. DMCA takedown.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1013136.0

The mail certainly came from bitcointalk.org due to the forum's SPF policy, and users have been receiving legitimate mail from bitcointalk.org for years, so any mail provider that bounces forum mail is outright broken IMO. It's ridiculous that 500,000 users can receive consistent legitimate mail from the forum for years, but then when I want to send them all one mail some of the big providers freak out.

You're loading pages too fast and hit the rate limiter.

- Logged IPs are kept forever. However, not all IPs that you use to access the forum end up getting logged.
- There are no per-user access logs (aside from what you're doing now, the last-read post in topics, etc.). There are normal web server access logs, but these can't be reliably tied to specific users; these logs tend to be deleted after a month, but no guarantees.
- Deleted posts are kept forever. Edit logs are kept forever. But if I ever start running low on space, I reserve the right to delete some of this.
- PMs are deleted from the database when everyone who can read the PM deletes it, except for certain users who for legal reasons have additional retention. These users are warned of this condition (except where required by law), though there's no warning when communicating with such users.
- Changes/deletions to trust ratings and settings are currently not saved.

Note also that data deleted from the database may still exist in backups, potentially forever.

They are getting mailed out, your mail provider is just rejecting them. Maybe I will get a new IP address in the future to stop this from happening, but IMO this is a problem on hotmail's end.

bitcointalkで日本語が人気になったら、日本語のボードが作られて、ほかのコインについて話してもいい。でも今のところは小さいスレッドしかないので、ほかのコインについて話しすぎないで下さい。例えば訳したコインの発表はだめだと思う。

（下手な日本語でごめんなさい。）

It means that some people in your trust network say that the person is trustworthy, some say that he's a scammer, and the trust score algorithm is unwilling to guess at which one is true. You'll have to read the ratings and decide for yourself.

You have a negative trust score for me, so I won't accept your bids.

Auction ended. Final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.60 SwC_Poker
1 2.60 victorhing
3 2.60 FortuneJack
1 2.50 bitcoinaliens
1 2.45 eric@haobtc
1 2.35 BuyBitcoin.US

If the forum sent you an email, then the email address was associated with a forum account. Maybe you didn't create the account, since the forum doesn't verify email addresses. You can use the forgotten password feature to take over whichever account it's attached to if you want.

Nothing was taken from the compromised server except the database. Backups were used for the code and configuration. Some moderators and I checked (partly manually and partly automatically) the differences between the backed up database and the live database and found no backdoors or anything obvious wrong. It is possible that the content of some posts and things were modified, though I don't think so.

Try it again.

I just sent half a million "change your password" emails, so a lot of email providers aren't too happy with me. Emails might be delayed for a few days, and when they finally do get delivered they'll probably end up in your spam folder.

I'm still working on getting everything settled in. If it's still slow in a week then maybe better hardware will be needed.

That's a bug. The categories keep moving around, I'd guess because SMF is relying on undefined MySQL behavior that I messed up by switching to a different version of MySQL. I will fix it in the near future.