The problem with presenting information in such a non-digestable format every time is that regardless of the actual evidence that is or isn't provided, the increased time investment disincentives reading. 754 words; 4,358 characters. That gets you pretty much halfway through JFK's inaugural speech.

I could write essay-format replies, delving into every nook and cranny, questioning and presenting counterarguments ad infinitum - or until the word count limit. Why bother doing that if the discussion doesn't move in that direction, though? I could address concerns much more efficiently by actually addressing the concerns people raise directly.

A great man once decreed:

   Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
   And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
   I will be brief

Find a way to ferry those targeted users in your proposal into the port of rulebreakers.

Take for example #1 and its extension:


If you have enforcement against users that are spammers, should there be enforcement against users that create spammers?
Or users that incentivize spam (e.g. rule 15)?

After all...

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Well, that's on a thread-by-thread or post-by-post basis, whereas signature campaigns impact the entire forum and multiple posts at once. Too much for moderators to handle there: they can't possibly have that responsibility or else we've crossed the line. Unless another campaign gets to YoBit levels of spam, I doubt you'll see much restriction against signature campaigns (even if they are run by Newbies, red-trusted, no-escrow, shady platforms).

Since long ago.
Because that is how it is.
Because they aren't moderated... by the staff.
Yes.
Yes. Yes.

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Leave if you don't like the forum. That's advice, not a warning: you'll need to put up with worse than neutral feedback that will eventually be removed if cited without evidence.

Fear of falling down the slippery slope doesn't mean that you can't have a staircase with handrails. If you're scared, just remember to have three points of contact.

If you ban a false scammer, that is not equivalent to banning a false campaign.

Since moderators already decide what is considered spam via reports, extending that to campaigns would widen the scope to include multiple users, as opposed to individual posts. In the past, some threads have been locked, showing that moderator discretion extends to threads worth of content, some of which may have a greater post count than what was produced by campaign posters in the same period.

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Ad-hoc solutions of simply "moving spam" to another place don't work either and result in places like Investor-based games (99%+ spam to redirect ponzi threads), Serious discussion (dead board with TWO threads above 100 replies), Bounties, and Altcoin Discussion.

Imagine someone was shitting on your floor, and your solution was to tell them to shit in the tub instead. Or, maybe, you decide that you should go upstairs with your actual guests in a new, shoddily-built room. Then, when all their friends come along and increase their shitting output, at least you'll have some refuge from the horrible activity you can never prevent.

At a certain point, you're going to have to ask yourself: are these shit-covered walls worth it to prevent those very few people whom enjoy the smell of shit from being wrongly barred from your house? They have to be, right? After all, we need to maintain those people that are still willing to join the forum in its crumbling yet unfaltering state. Even if 95% of posts are spam or scams, our values are uncompromising.^*

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I wouldn't change anything, though. Let's see how this experiment ends, after all.

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Look at any bounty campaign and think about the minimum cost required, then think about what their minimum post requirements would be in response to that.

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Image not displaying? Must be censorship, because Bitcointalk staff monitor all incoming images right before posting to ensure the political values are appropriate.

Unless you delete your posts after the fact

IIRC this is just a native SMF easter egg: simply part of the toolkit. It just wasn't removed like a few of the other things as it has no significant impact.

Having a link to the rule list would be a good idea for turning the hint into an explanation. You wouldn't even need to have moderators change anything (i.e. adding a reason for deletions)

what?

Unfortunately, your friend probably was not directed to the Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ topic.

If they had read these rules, they probably would have been able to follow them. It's too bad - they should have known better.

Hint, hint: import some keys, sign your transaction, broadcast at your leisure.

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The wallet that combines the best features of both is the combination of your brain and your hands.

One half-measure^{(eighth-measure even)} is to use Wasabi's change address as your secondary output. Not the same as pay-to-many when N>2, though.

Some yarn:

If scams and legitimate services occupy the same space, which one do you think will saturate the market?
Assuming the same amount of effort, which has a lower barrier of entry? New scam threads, or new service threads?
Considering that users can be "downgraded" to red trust but are always able to participate in the scam economy, what will users do with the larger market?
Considering that new users are (effectively) no different (+/-) from users with red trust in terms of reputation, what is the largest possible market?
When competing against other signature campaigns, would it be possible to cut costs by scamming the participants as well?
Given the amount of time it takes to generate a significant reputation on the forum, and given the risk compared to using the equivalent number of red-trusted accounts...

Would it be better to constantly prop up scam signature campaigns for scam sites, so that you can get something closer to 95% return (based on total deposit/input) as opposed to regular means? Direct theft is more profitable than starting a real website, and it's far easier to set up: no need to worry about long-term considerations since you're going to close shop very quickly.

Under these circumstances, Bitcointalk still is occupying a relatively peaceful time: scammers have yet to maximize forum exploitation.

This is true.

Is there some reason why telling new users that scams are not moderated/bannable on this forum is unnecessary? This is not redundant information. Something along the lines of, "WE DO NOT MODERATE SCAMS! SCAMMERS ARE ALLOWED HERE!"

How about any indication of where the forum rules may be located? As far as I'm concerned, you're just tossed into the snake pit and told that you're surrounded by Full, Sr, Hero, and Legendary members.

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Thankfully, since people are given the proper tools to learn about the forum, they should take full responsibility for their foolish actions.




I'm not asking for the banning of scammers. Though, some people are... and their confusion could be easily cleared with a simple message, don't you think?

Here's some yarn to spin:

If responding to a recommendation demanded by someone other than the thread-owner, is it advertisement?
If not, what happens if a malicious user creates users posing questions as a method of advertisement?

Now, assume that the malicious user is the thread-creator - acting on behalf of a service for the purpose of Q&Advertisement.
Can the thread creator ask about a specific service/platform?

What happens if an honest platform is given a malicious Q&Advertisement campaign as an associative attack?

... and so on.

Searching "quote [name]" works perfectly fine as a forum alternative.

Is it better? No.

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Chicken or the egg: did poor campaign management cause quality members to leave (from increased spam), or did the shift into poor post quality lead to respectively poor management?

The existence of zero/extremely-low entry fees for altcoin campaigns made it so that low quality could easily seep into any board. Bad money drives out good, and the same could be said about posts. Why would people bother with high quality when they could farm with 20+ altcoin campaign accounts, spewing shit into the air to get paid? Sad state of the forum.

Because the rights of the falsely-accused scammers are so important to Bitcointalk that these innocent people will be happy to be granted immunity from consequence. Additionally, much like other places in the world, Bitcointalk operates as a wonderful two-state solution so they can share the space with the real scammers. After all, it's not like people just use the trust system without any thought and create feedback at their own discretion! The falsely accused have nothing to worry about!

Scams should not be moderated: rather, it is better to have your board filled with 19 possible scams and 1 real trade than to remove all of them. But make sure your scams are different: if we catch you repeating the same scam, you are permanently banned! No tolerance for that bullshit.

Risk is perfectly fine, as long as the willing participants are given awareness.

I was under the impression that a welcome message - an introduction to the trust system + scammer indifference - could bring about that awareness and could be a very simple and non-restrictive measure. I don't think your liberty is going to be compromised with a few extra hand movements as a guest. It is not unreasonable to request a landing page for guest users.

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Are you able to leverage people's comments in accordance to their actual content via research, or do you place some bias on their site-based reputation? Similarly to as if someone were to trust a member based on rank, the expectation of some local reputation system is perfectly reasonable. Yet, who do you actually trust? Sure, staff can be trusted to some degree, but apparently even DefaultTrust is a bad measure of trust due to the legacy of past exit scams: I would even grant that someone new, having read through enough of the forum, would rather trade (and post) elsewhere unless they wanted to scam others.

Which other forums do you visit to where the rules are inaccessible unless you go to their forum discussion board located at the bottom of the front page, view an "Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules" buried within SIX sticky threads, and go all the way to rule 19 to find out that scams are not moderated? This is an excessive scavenger hunt.

In fact, unless you count an warning to use escrow as a direct "scams aren't going to be removed and we're not going to do anything about them" message, then there's almost nothing said about forum policy.

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Was it a programming issue, integrating a DefaultTrust rating as a guest view of trust (preferably with some description/links to explanations)? DefaultTrust is good enough for registered users, after all, and the only difference is a few minutes!

Or, is it instead a fundamental problem?

Writing a welcome message

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As it currently stands, imagine you hit the front page of Bitcointalk: there's no way for you to even know about the existence of the trust system unless you see a thread in Meta or some discussion about it. What's the likelihood of that? You accept the risks of a free forum now, because you know the conditions. Anecdotal evidence is not always sufficient, but our sample size well exceeds 10 at this point (in relation to ONE scammer): how many scam victims were ignorant of the forum policies and expected intervention?

Suppose you are a guest and you want to investigate the currency with say, $10. Currency exchange seems good! (and any variety of potential situations as a result of easily-preventable ignorance)

Consider a scammer that exclusively uses Newbie accounts: do we flag them so that guests will see a warning? If so, then what if the Newbie is genuine? If not, then what action do we take to caution users if not a message on visit?

If we're to specifically target marketplace sections and boards where scams proliferate, a warning that uses a significant amount of screen space and cannot be easily-avoided (i.e. a banner that requires scrolling down or a landing page) can be applied to guest users. If this is annoying, all the more reason for people to register and see (at the very least DefaultTrust) defined trust ratings, with numerical degrees of impact. After all, having -1 red trust is different from -8 red trust, and untrusted ratings are only accessible to registered users.


It's not as if you can't make a ^M_W^A_A^S_R^S_N^I_I^V_N^E_G in bbcode.

Could've just asked me in a PM. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯