Dont forget the snails.

You are welcome to sell drugs here as long as they are legal where you are selling them. Online Gambling is illegal in a lot of places too, its up for the users not to engage in any activity that is illegal in their jurisdiction. The world is a big place with a lot of differing laws. Theymos knows that not everyone here is from the U.S, E.U, Turkmenistan, you name it. You can't lump what is legal/illegal to the entire world. If it is indeed a ponzi, and ponzis are illegal in your jurisdiction, don't partake. If you live somewhere where they don't care if you want to invest your money into a ponzi, go for it.

Its not descrimination against signature advertising participants, its statistics. If you live in an area with 100 people, and there is a car accident every two years, your car insurance is going to be lower based on the statistical information the insurance company has on what is has had to pay out, rather than living in a highly populated area with lots of wrecks. Same thing here, the percentage of paid advertising spammers is far higher than any other usergroup, so measures were taken. While you are correct that they are the minority technically speaking, it has got completely out of hand, and Im quite happy about the new signature restrictions. I'd be happier with an activity based paid advertising system, or none at all for that matter, but I do believe people are entitled to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't negatively effect others. Spam effects others.

Really, you are one of the only people who aren't providing any sort of critical feedback, you are just complaining. Goat is complaining too, but he at least isn't complaining for no reason, he wants basic answers. I tend to trust people that have proven themselves in the past, so I am indeed giving Theymos the benefit of the doubt on this one. I dont think hes incompetent, I just think that it would be better if he addressed the serious questions, and ignored you. I dont think hes stealing the forum money, because he could have just taken it all and since he is technically the forum "owner" and the forum is not a registered nonprofit, he could probably legally take it all. Like I said in my previous post, I dont think Theymos is in this for the money anymore, because either he has plenty, or he thinks he can make more by operating the site legitimately. No one ever goes against self interest.

Agreed, I sort of expected Theymos to make some sort of official statement, after that he wouldn't have to answer anything else. I still trust Theymos' decisions, but I'm curious as to why he hasn't responded at all. Of course there are going to be the idiots that wont listen to reason, but he can ignore them. Would be nice if he wouldn't ignore the people that are asking reasonable questions in a calm and inquisitive way. Do I think Theymos is stealing the forum's funds, no, probably not. He could stand to make far more by operating the site legitimately and going other avenues. If he really wanted money, he could make a killing off of merchandising, but he seems to have little interest in that, leading me to believe he isn't all that interested in the financial aspect.

I have already come to terms with the fact that the reasons he picked wangbus are his own, and I'm sure he has some. Great, I'll judge if it was a good call after they create the forum software. I have come to terms with the ESTIMATED $1M that will be spent, and have decided to complain once again after seeing the quality of the work. I have even come to terms with the fact that Theymos is a busy guy and doesn't have time to respond to every single question that is asked, but it would really be nice if he could find time to answer some rather weighted questions.

1) What sort of transaction details can you give to show that you aren't embezzling the money. It is a valid concern and should be pretty easily disproven.

2) What sort of progress has been made already, why is the forum auction system being developed so early (Unless other things are already falling into place?)

3) When will Wangbus be asking the community for feature requests

4)  "Insert the questions Goat raised in the OP, they are pretty well thought out and should be easy to answer"

5) Can you get a little bit more in touch with the community on this? You don't have to answer to everyone, its your project, but you have 250,000 accounts that would like some sort of reports from time to time. The basic questions should be addressed, and the stupid questions ignored.

I am removing my "vouch" for the time being. The netflix code that I purchased has worked fine, however I've received a message or two saying that you have been ripping people off.

How did this turn out? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=354131.msg3818138#msg3818138

We have witnessed spam start because of the chance of earning money from it, so we are trying to undo that. Restricting how many times per day you can post is more restrictive to everyone, than changing signature styling which is just restrictive to paid advertising.

That sounds like a neat feature, hopefully something interesting like that could be implemented with the new forum software?

This is a forum, not an ad agency. The goal here is to be without spam, and to allow viewers the freedom to participate in a range of conversation and access to the information here. It has no obligation to its users to cater to a destructive spamming system. Some sort of solutions will be tried and found, the goal is to allow people to continue signature ads, however not if its at the expense of damaging the forum's main purpose.


You can ignore the content of the signature itself, but you can't ignore the thousands of spam posts that are disrupting everyone's conversations.

The thread was locked rather than deleted, because if I moved it to the trash can, there would have no proof of its existance for matters that may be influenced by this thread in the future. You can stop reporting it and just let it disapear until someone needs to reference it for something.

Thank you guys.

What? (Guesses that your posts were deleted for necroposting, however no background info)

No, it is quite true actually. The negatives to paid signature advertising far outweigh to positives. Of course we understand that its nice for people to be able to earn a bit of coin while posting as usual, however the sheer volume of spam is almost uncomprehendable. You are correct, it takes maybe 30 seconds to 1 minute to properly moderate a post on average. That involves checking the post for prior context, etc. Now multiply that times a few thousand over a short period of time, and it quickly becomes something that is difficult to keep up with. Your points are valid on a  small scale, but we are talking about tens of thousands of posters. The forums has 255k members, taking into account that many are inactive, and many dont partake in signature advertising, we are still talking about hundreds of man hours per day to clean up and ban the many users that are causing the problem. The fact of the matter is that many of us have been moderating for years, we saw the report volume before signature advertising, and now after and have concluded that it is a generally negative.  I can speak for the sponsors of paid signature campaigns on this matter, because for the larger ones, for example primedice, it wouldn't be humanly possible for Stunna to sift through every affiliate's posts to judge what is worthy and what isnt. We spend a good chunk of time moderating and reviewing these posts, and thats with a 40+ person team. I'm sure if they see something fishy they will review an indviduals post history, but what about when that person makes another 30 accounts to spam with. Chances are some of them are going to get through.

The only reason paid signature advertising wasnt banned looong ago, is that we generally believe that punishing the whole for the missdeeds of the few (in this case far more than a few) isn't fair.

We state it as true, by observing spam variances since paid advertising's induction to now. It is absolutely conclusive that paid signature advertising has increased spam to an astronomical level. People that do paid signature advertising as the only way to earn Bitcoins, rather than spend 20 hours per day forumlating hundreds of thoughtful posts, spend 30 minutes posting hundreds of times per day, giving the moderation staff hundreds of posts per day to delete and users to ban. If you think the sponsor has time to look through tens if not hundreds of thousands of posts per month to judge if they are spam or not, you would be incorrect. They can say they only pay for substantial posts, but they dont have the staff nor time to read through everyone's posts. I'm glad some sort of change happened, now we will see if that fixes the problem more or less, or if more steps are needed.



Correct, the issue was first addressed a bit over 3 months ago to be exact.

That was an option we thought of as well. I personally dont care about paid advertising, however I understand others do and some people aren't abusing it, so I'd rather we not ruin it for everyone. I am quite against removing signatures all together however, as I like having a link in my sig to advertise my own goods/services. I dont even need to spam to get my own advertisements out there, just post responsibly and people that read/reply will see my sig.

If it was an issue of just the actual signatures being annoying with their big bright letters, it wouldn't be a problem, because individuals can turn off signatures so that they cant see them. They can't however turn off the tens of thousands of posts that people are slapping all over the place at an attempt to make some extra coin.

I had Bobsurplus purchase something for me on Ebay for $310. He ordered, had it shipped to me, and I paid when I received them. Incredibly smooth transaction, and highly appreciated.

Tradefortress isn't on the default trust list. He was removed shortly after the Inputs.io thing

Yes I mean that.


More often than not, yes. If you have 70 activity and >2000 posts, the vast majority of users spammed their way there and deserve bans. Its not a clear and cut, "if you post this many posts in this many days you are a spammer" but there is a very direct correlation. You may be one of the rare ones, and of course you wouldnt be banned if your posts are quality posts, my point is that not many people with that many posts are as dedicated as you might be, and would rather spam short useless replies, rather than thoughtfully respond.

Like I said, we have been discussing this for months, and hopefully we can make a minor change, rather than removing paid advertising or signatures all together. The fact of the matter is that something needs to change, we just have yet to figure out how to change as little as possible, but still get the results we need.

Well, if we cant find a suitable solution, signatures all together could be banned, or a slightly less radical approach would be to just ban paid sig advertising all together. If you are earning enough money by posting to support yourself financially, chances are you will be banned before your first payday. You are correct, there will always be spam, but paid advertising made the amount of spam go through the roof. Volume of posts does not equal quality of posts. If someone is posting a lot, but they are rubbish, they are making the forum worse, not better. A lot of vets who helped build the forum to what it is today are leaving and its just getting spammier. Our best course of action would be my original suggestion and have paid signature payout rates based on activity rather than post count. If you have 20x more posts than activity, your chances of getting banned are astronomical. We see those huge post counts and check through your last posts with a fine toothed comb. If there is a significant amount of junk, you are banned indefinately. Pre Signature Advertising, there were a few people banned per day, now they are a few peopled banned per 30 minutes. By doing it based on activity, paid signature advertising beneficiaries only need to post once per day, or 14 times per two week period, that means they can post 14 quality posts, rather than one word answers and faces.

The moderators from the Silk Road forums were also users of the Silk Road, and easily trackable because of their positions. I figure as long as I stay out of the drug markets I'll be alright 

The disclaimers are very similar to what you will see on craigslist. The Moderators aren't responsible for what people put on this website, we moderate posts to cut down on spam, and remove the outright stupid posts, not to protect people from scams. It would be impossible for us to catch all but the obvious scams, and by taking action against any of them, we would be providing a false sense of security, leading to even more scams. Use your own judgement, don't get scammed, and let others know if you detect fraud.