I like the idea. All proposed styles seem OK to me, though some alternative styling ideas which come to mind are:
 - Change the color of the entire post <tr>, using a different color than the usual alternating blue and grey (but not too different).
 - Add a little red(?) asterisk or something in the lower-right corner of the post icon (ie. td.td_headerandpost table tbody tr td a img).


Those are decoy posts meant to confuse adblockers. This is also why a lot of the CSS classes randomize on each pageload. Now that there are no ads, I could remove both of these things. Would doing so break anyone's parsers?

No.


Yes.


Probably only for the listed security bounties.


IPs are only banned for making too many requests, not for suspicious behavior. So just don't make more than one request per second.

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A lot of people try to run "website security scanners", and then report the "bugs" that these software packages find. Please don't do that. These scanners only ever report little configuration things which some people consider less than ideal, like allowing certain TLS ciphers, or sending/not-sending certain HTTP headers, and stuff like that. It's not useful.

April fools! I feel like more people were legitimately fooled by this one than normal.

In hindsight, I made the new titles too difficult to get. But it's shocking that so many veteran members were finally revealed as Certified Shitposters. (They were Cyrus, fillippone, LoyceV, xhomerx10, goldkingcoiner, and DdmrDdmr.)

Thanks to PowerGlove for suggesting the idea!

This month 140 users were eligible.

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Edit: April fools!

In recent years, it seems that a lot of people have been making low-value posts just to get paid. To address this, I've added a merit "cost" to posting: from this point forward, for every 15 characters you post, you will lose one Merit point. This should eliminate any incentive to make low-value posts.

Any halfway-decent poster should be able to earn much more merit than they lose due to the penalty. But I recognize that some good posts are occasionally overlooked. So to counterbalance the penalty, I also added a system whereby you will earn a bit of merit just by reading posts. If you want to write a lot, you'd better do some reading as well!

For both the penalty and the bonus, this applies only to your merit score, and does not affect sendable merit (sMerit).

Let me know what you think of these adjustments.

Bitcointalk Account: theymos
My vote goes to: Mame89, acroman08, Despairo, Bd officer

Mame89's was the best IMO due to the large amount of variety and detail. Acroman08's is also good-looking and thematic. Despairo's dragonfruit pie is vibrant and interesting; I wonder how it'd taste. A lot of people used pomegranate "drawings" to good effect, and I think that Bd officer's was the best of these.

Thanks for running the contest, RickDeckard!

That's unrelated to the issue DdmrDdmr brought up.

Search has a number of quirks, and I'm not going to fix them all right now. In this case, your search didn't work as expected because words appearing in a large percentage of posts are not indexed within posts at all. Currently, there are 181 unindexed words, and "bitcoin" is one of them. So if you search for "bitcoin", it will not even look for posts containing "bitcoin" in their bodies, though it will search topic subjects, and it will highlight "bitcoin" in any posts found via subject-search. As another example, if you search for "bitcoin candy", it will search for messages with [both bitcoin AND candy in their subject] OR [candy in their body], even though it will highlight both "bitcoin" and "candy" in message-bodies in the results. (Furthermore, this will exceed the result limit, so you will actually only get an arbitrary subset of the possible results.)

Next time I reindex posts, probably it would be a good idea to not have any nouns in the list of unindexed words.

Thanks for reporting it, I think I fixed it now.

This month 134 users were eligible.

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Skimming through those makes me so nostalgic...

Next time somebody complains about the version of SMF on bitcointalk.org, I have a great excuse!

I thought people would quickly figure out on their own from the new email address what happened, but maybe it's not as clear as I thought. Maybe later I'll put a big red notice about it on the Account Settings page if you've been affected, especially if more people keep coming to Meta and asking about it.


You weren't receiving email before because your email got banned/disabled, and now you'll still not be receiving email. Nothing is lost. The forum account isn't banned or anything.


If it's temporarily down, then it won't give a bounce message of "No such mailbox" (or similar), so the email won't be affected. Gmail for example responds via SMTP, "550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser". We're detecting several variations on that "no such user" SMTP response.

Longer-term, I would also like to do something about emails where the domain times-out or returns a "temporary" error in like 3 of the last 12 months or something like that. If you register with an email like asdfwerwe@werwetwerwer.com, then somebody could register werwetwerwer.com and steal the account that way. But this issue isn't on my short-term to-do list at all.

This is something we recently started doing. If email sent to your email address bounces with an error message like, "This email address doesn't exist", then your email may eventually be changed to u...@bounces.invalid. (It's not possible for users to change their email address to something ending in .invalid, so this can only be an administrative change.) Because your old email didn't exist, somebody could've registered your non-existent email address and used that to steal your account.

I didn't particularly intend for the trust warning to appear for these automatic changes, but it's a niche situation and a bit difficult to fix, so I probably won't fix this unless several other people complain. It only lasts 30 days, after all.

This month 140 users were eligible.

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Thank you for spending so much time with us; your absence will be a major loss to this community.

Even though I didn't know you well, you've been around so long and contributed so much that I feel a real sense of loss, and I'm sure you've created these sorts of connections with a lot of people, far more than will reply in this topic. You'll be in my thoughts. I hope that as much as possible and for as long as possible, you are happy and healthy.

The clearnet site was seized, so there's no need to wordfilter it.


That's fine. And you can say the names of mixers in posts, unless their name is a URL.

This month 142 users were eligible.

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Happy new year!

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I locked all of the mixer ANN threads I saw, and I put in a number of wordfilters. If I missed any threads, please use "report to moderator".

Also see my previous post:

Any promotion in the signature is disallowed.


That is an unintended loophole. I edited the OP:

Thanks to PowerGlove, who did 90% of the work on this, the much-requested 2-factor authentication feature has finally been added. You can enable it in your Account Settings, and then you have to give the code when logging in. If you don't have 2FA enabled, you have to leave the OTP field blank when logging in.

If you use the forgotten-password function, then there's an option to remove the 2FA. So 2FA does not provide any protection in case of a compromised email. Make sure that your email address is secure. If you don't want to set an email address, use something like yourUserName@invalid.bitcointalk.org; don't use a random nonsense email like y@x.com, since somebody might create that domain/email.

Let me know if there are any bugs.

No. They're definitely not allowed after Jan 1. But I might not bother to remove old ones.