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.

Sorry, your site looks too risky.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 3.00 kaprosuchus
2 2.55 CEX
1 2.55 AmberCoinDev
2 2.50 victorhing
2 2.50 247exchange

No. It's an issue of fairness, not a technical limitation.

I can manually make threads self-moderated (only I can do this), but I only do this if the thread is extremely long/entrenched and the OP is trustworthy, since you are not allowed to delete any posts made before the topic became self-moderated.


When merging, you merge from a topic into another topic. You don't add two topics and get a new topic. So it'll be whatever the destination topic is. When splitting, the new topic is not self-moderated. If you move a topic to a section where topics cannot be self-moderated, it loses its self-moderated status for as long as it is in such a section.

I have indeed received the 50 BTC.

I accept your apology, and I don't have any negative feelings toward you, though your actions here were very unprofessional. Probably it will take quite some time before people can look back and view this just a temporary lapse in judgement that was quickly resolved.

It seems that those two posts you were complaining about were deleted by a moderator (in response to your reports) before he even saw your thread. We wouldn't have changed/violated forum policy as a result of this issue.

The forum's expert "certification" (recently also extended to /r/Bitcoin) predates "Certified Bitcoin Professional" by at least a year, I think. Here's where I officially announced it, though it existed for quite some time before that. People with a Bitcoin expert badge (or an equivalent core dev badge) are intimately familiar with the theory and inner workings of the Bitcoin network, and they are able to intelligently discuss any proposed change to the network. If they time-traveled to 2007, they would be able to reconstruct something feature-equal and at least a little better than Bitcoin from scratch.

Receiving this badge requires a recommendation from someone who already has the badge and approval by an admin. There is no fee or exam.

In the last 7 days there have been 2,240,172 requests from 152,385 unique IPs.

I can't estimate long-term ongoing costs now with any sort of accuracy because the wiki isn't on its final server yet, I'm not sure whether the final server will be sufficient, and I'm not sure how much work bawolff will need to do in the long-term (right now he's doing a lot of work to get the wiki in good shape).

The ads will need to be manually approved, and maybe new or dangerous-looking services should be disallowed.

Anything can be implemented in an ASIC, though maybe you could design a hash algorithm that gives modern computers enough of an advantage to discourage ASIC creation. (But I don't know that much about hardware.)

I see two problems with memory-hard PoW:
- If it takes a few seconds to complete one hash, then the network can be DoS-attacked by broadcasting many invalid blocks which nodes then need to waste tons of time checking. It'd be nice to have an asymmetric PoW algorithm that requires much more time to create a PoW than to verify one.
- AFAIK it's not actually that expensive to create ASICs with a lot of memory, and it looks like scrypt ASICs have in fact been created.

I wonder if ASIC design/creation would be made prohibitively expensive if the hash algorithm was especially complex. For example, if the simplest way of representing the algorithm in assembly code was 1 GB in size, I suppose this would be quite difficult to translate to an ASIC, but not any particular obstacle for general-purpose CPUs. You could still create an ASIC that worked like a CPU but with only the subset of CPU features actually used by the hash algorithm, but this'd be pretty expensive to design and might not earn you much extra efficiency.

I also wonder whether it might be good to use a PoW that is especially easy to build an ASIC for, but so simple that the most dead-simple ASIC design is always the best one. Then you'd have to buy hardware to mine, but no ASIC would have much advantage over any other. I don't know if this'd actually help anything since there'd still be economies of scale in power consumption, though.

The only reason you would need to know who deleted something is to pester them about it, which would be a pointless annoyance that might even prevent moderators from doing a good job. Admins are the only ones who can restore deleted posts and the only ones who can properly deal with inaccurate mod actions: post in Meta and we'll look into it.

Self-moderation is moderation in addition to global moderation. Both of those posts were insubstantial, so deleting them seems correct.


That sort of message isn't always sent.


Even sections with assigned mods can also be moderated by global mods.

Those images are pretty cool-looking. Does anyone see anything in them that would suggest specific changes to the default trust list? I was trying to look for "islands" of not-default-trusted people that aren't just created by one person, but nothing stood out. I wonder if it'd be good to increase the default depth to 3 -- a lot of the graph isn't trusted by default.

Automatic unproxybans are enabled again.

Search is enabled again.

GIF images are allowed. Animated GIF images are not allowed because they are annoying.

I propose adding non-annoying banner ads in two places: one square slot (about 165x165px) in the left sidebar under the "tools" section and one slim rectangular slot (about 700x42px) at the top of each article above the page title.

Currently bitcointalk.org pays for all wiki expenses. This can continue (the expenses aren't all that much), but it'd be nice if the wiki could be self-supporting without much cost to usability.

After subtracting expenses (or maybe just a percentage of expenses if expenses are usually greater than revenue), the remaining ad revenue can be entirely distributed to active editors in some way to encourage more contributors. The wiki really needs more contributors. Here's a rough idea of how the money might be fairly distributed: Every month, select (say) 50 edits at random from the last month. Have the wiki admins go through them and discard the ones that are bad. Replace removed edits with newly-selected random edits. Repeat until you have 50 good edits, then split the monthly profit evenly among those edits. Publish the discarded edits to demonstrate that there was no bias in the selection.

The ads should be manually approved like bitcointalk.org ads; AdSense (etc.) would allow people to advertise phishing sites or malware on the wiki, which can't be tolerated. The ads could be sold in auctions like forum ads. Hopefully one or more of the wiki admins would be willing to handle this.

Forum ads are done using HTML+CSS, without images. This has various advantages, first among them is that it allows ads to bypass ad blockers if both the ad and the page are specially designed to do this. But this creates a lot of extra work for everyone compared to just using fixed-size banner images, so I don't know if replicating this is desirable.

Done for now. There might be ~5 minutes of additional downtime (502 errors) sometime later today.

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.