It's a generic SMF error for certain things, I just screwed something up. Fixed now.

This month 103 users were eligible.

Old:

New:

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, custom fonts, 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], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything 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 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- 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.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

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.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

Sorry, I won't accept your bids at this time for reasons I explained via PM.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
9 0.10 sportsbet.io

What really happened was that in 2012 he posted his Bitcoinica topic twice: once mistakenly in the Russian section, and once in the proper section. Then recently a Russian user happened to stumble across the Russian duplicate for some reason, reported it as non-Russian-language, and a Russian mod archived it. The real topic with replies was never touched. You can verify all of this with archive.org if you want.

I wonder if he's actually paranoid enough to believe that I'm secretly editing this kind of ancient history for some arcane reason (while also sending out notifications about it), or if it's pure propaganda. I've always found it amusing how Roger Ver, who styles himself some "high-powered CEO", seems to get so worked up about little old me, a 4chan troll at heart who admits to having essentially zero personal ambition.

I excluded TMAN and Vod on separate occasions for having overall Trust styles of being too trigger-happy/unforgiving/vindictive. Excluding someone from your trust list does not mean that you distrust them, just that you disagree with their ratings/trust-list. All three of TMAN, Vod, and OgNasty are forum veterans with good trade histories, and I would tend to trust all three of them (to varying degrees).

This drama is highly counterproductive. Nobody has a real trade complaint AFAICT, so the underlying facts hardly matter. For example, in this case TMAN/Vod made this fairly meaningless argument because OgNasty brought up the fairly meaningless claim about the exclusions because TMAN/Vod ... It's an endless cycle of pointless feuding. Nobody actually cares about the underlying facts -- the arguments are being made purely as a "gotcha" --, so there's no way to ever "win" this type of feud. OgNasty will want to say that I called TMAN/Vod vindictive, and TMAN/Vod will want to say that OgNasty was mischaracterizing my exclusions, but I challenge all of you to just knock it off. If you can't work together, then ignore each other, even if you're being prodded.

If there's a recession, any of them would at least have a chance.

Even absent a recession, I think Buttigieg or Sanders would have pretty high probabilities of winning. Buttigieg is really good at coming across as stable, which a ton of people have been missing with Trump, but he also comes across as honest, and he doesn't have much baggage. Sanders has a lot of credibility and passion, and he eats into a big chunk of Trump's base, though his policies may be too far left for the wider electorate.

No matter what you want to accomplish, overconfidence is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. That's how Hillary Clinton lost. Paths exist for anyone in the race to win against Trump, or for Trump to win against anyone, even if some paths are pretty unlikely.

Every time someone wins slots in an ad auction, I send them a PM with all the details. They should be aware.

There are two separate set of requirements for ad designers:

First, there are design requirements that you must meet for your ad to be accepted at all. This is stuff like not using any JavaScript, not having your ad just be one big image, not affecting things outside of the ad area, etc.

Second, there's a much stricter set of requirements that you must follow if you want your ad not to be blockable by (typical) adblockers. This includes: making your ad only out of one <a> and a minimal number of <span>s, using very few distinct CSS classes, and opting into my server-side link redirection. If advertisers choose not to follow this second set of requirements, then their ads could be blocked by adblockers, and it's not my responsibility to deal with this.

No, I wasn't involved in whatever happened with @Bitcoin.

Apparently it's owned by instagibbs now, who I have a generally positive perception of as being trustworthy and pro-Bitcoin. (Though I don't know him well.)

There are several good things about this:
 - When BCH pretends to be Bitcoin, it's annoying and could cause confusion.
 - It's nice that @Bitcoin is controlled by someone who is more technical and lighthearted rather than some finance person who doesn't know what they're talking about and is just trying to collect suckers. I like the bio.
 - It was funny to see @Bitcoin trolling BCHers.

But I think that some Bitcoiners are still unconstructively vindictive about the whole BTC vs. BCH thing. It was settled years ago, and I'm content to let them thrive or (more likely) fail on their own. Expending any effort on it now is a waste of time, and could alienate some of them who are not totally lost. If it was me who'd gotten control of @Bitcoin, I probably also wouldn't be able to resist trolling the BCHers a bit, but after a while I'd ignore them near-completely and try to use the position to elevate the overall Twitter dialogue on Bitcoin. I hope that this is the direction instagibbs takes it.

Also, if there was any top-down meddling from Twitter here, then it leaves something of a stain on the whole thing. (I don't know why people subject themselves to Twitter, which has proven time and time again to be a terrible platform...)

Right. And in case of equal activity, member ID is the tiebreaker.

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, custom fonts, 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], loggable mixers^[2], banks, funds, or anything 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 0.01.
- The bidding starts at 0.01.
- 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.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

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.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

The trust feedback against you is too negative overall, so I won't accept your bids at this time.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.15 nyancatio
5 0.14 sportsbet.io

Paying the fee only affects your account, not the IP. Evil on IPs only decays with time.

OK, I reduced the maximum to the same price as copper membership, since it doesn't really make sense for copper membership to be cheaper when it includes whitelisting.

In the last 30 days:
 - 16441 users registered.
 - 4040 required a fee, and the average required fee among them was 0.00127297 BTC.
 - 99 paid the fee, and the average fee paid was 0.00116449 BTC.

I'm not necessarily bothered by the number of accounts abandoned due to fees, since many of those will probably be spammers searching for a no-fee IP. The fees actually paid (by people who are presumably not spammers) may be a bit high, though: I feel like it should be about a tenth of that.

There is a maximum: it's that value currently. Without the maximum, that much evil would result in a fee of 0.06491724 BTC at current rates.

You can login via Tor. I just tried it and it worked on the first attempt, though it took a couple of minutes to solve the captcha. You login once, get the captcha code, and then never have to deal with a captcha again: all via Tor.

Enable limited retention in your settings.


The main issue with Tor Browser here is that it doesn't save cookies between restarts, so Cloudflare and Recaptcha treat you as a completely unknown person each time. I think that it's sufficient to use Tor Browser but in its settings disable "always use private browsing mode". This definitely does impact your privacy, though. You'd ideally want a different browser instance (or profile, if Tor Browser supports it) for each site where you want this disabled.

I've pre-approved nyancatio. I consider the specific thing they're going to advertise to be a game, not an ICO-type-thing.

I changed the name of the cookie. Does that fix it?

If Brave is blocking PHPSESSID cookies, then that's definitely broken behavior on their end. PHPSESSID is not some sort of tracking cookie; it's used for PHP's session management feature.