Currently going through all three of the threads, most spam is deleted in the two smaller ones. I will be double checking though as it's easy to miss posts. The bigger thread, I'm currently going through.

I like to think there has been improvements over the years, I think personally we're in a much better position now, than we were a few years ago. The bumping changes definitely made an impact on that. Unfortunately, as its been pointed out before, other websites actually rate their review higher based on the activity of a Bitcointalk thread, so there's an incentive there to get these bumping changes, also there's the fact that some users will actually fall for the hype from these comments. It's also worth mentioning that sometimes these bumping services don't actually say anything promising about the project at all, it was just a way of creating a discussion, and therefore bumping the thread (when this applied, which it no longer does).

Altcoin section definitely has huge issues, however we are in a better place now than we were years ago. Partly thanks to the changes made by theymos, but also because of the effort being put in by the community.

I'm really disappointed with the news I'm hearing this morning about Chelsea being seized by the UK government. I imagine they'll likely approve of a sale to someone that isn't Russian, which you could definitely argue is inherently racist, obviously their pitch will be because of the current owner is a oligarch. Looking at the special license that they've been given to continue operating, it looks like renewing, and buying new players could be a problem until the club is sold. Isn't Rudiger's contract running out this season, and I believe hes said a few times he would be interested in staying. For me, that's a player they absolutely need to keep. Thiago is getting on a bit now, and Rudiger is the only other defender that I think is up to scratch for the top four.

Back to the football on the field; I've got Liverpool to beat Brighton by three goals to nil, Chelsea to beat Norwich by two goals, and keep a clean sheet. I've got that accumulator with Chelsea also to beat Newcastle without conceding next week, and Athletico Madrid to beat Manchester United in the champions league without conceding. It's one of my long shot accumulators again.

Despite there being a war that is definitely effected millions of people, either directly through the war or through sanctions, I don't agree with booing, or removing Russian fighters. If the Russian government was directly benefiting from the athletes winning fights, then I could potentially see why people would want them not to compete, despite whether or not I would actually agree with that, at least I could see why people came up with that answer. However, right now I'm seeing hostilities to Russian athletes across several sports, and all its proven to me is that a lot of people are being racist, and holding innocent people responsible for something they have no control over.

I think the UFC are doing the right thing by avoiding politics interfering with how they handle things. At the end of the day, the Russian fighters are innocent people who happen to be from Russia, they had no control over the situation that's currently ongoing.

Anyway, enough about politics back this weekend's card. Looks a decent card, I'll try, and get my predictions up Friday. Although, last weekend I had an absolute mare, including the main event. I honestly thought Masvidal would get dominated on the ground, but would be able to get enough separation to put Colby to sleep. There was one point in the fight where he did drop him, and I thought that might be the beginning on the end for Colby, but Masvidal didn't really pressure it.

Although, I will admit the most sound call was likely a Colby decision, and throughout the week I kept flipping between the two, either a Colby decision or a Masvidal knockout, with the knockout being priced at 4.0 (might have been 4.75) I thought that was were the value was.

I think Rizzrack answered that question quite efficiently .

I'm not surprised by users recycling content, I'm sure you've noticed with the amount you've reported, that these bumping services which are being used, are very likely being run by the same people. Since, they're pretty much identical to one another. It's absolutely ridiculous, the amount of accounts which are posting the same stuff every day, and have been doing that for years. Plus, taking a look at that link Nutildah I can now understand why we've got such a problem, apparently its good money to make minimal effort posts. I'll be honest the amount of money these people are earning has surprised me. Although, the bumping changes definitely have impacted it like I've suggested previously, if not the amount that are offering these services, and performing at least nowadays less users viewing the altcoin section are being subjected to the spam. I slowly think we're making progress towards curbing this though.

I've handled all remaining reports I have in my report queue.

Had an issue with my machine recently, so I wasn't active the last few days. Shouldn't have any issues going forward hopefully, especially annoying since I recently took the step back from off forum work to free up my schedule a bit. Anyway, I'm going to go through the remaining threads that have been mentioned over the coming days.

GazetaBitcoin, how many actually got handled in the end? I've seen this a few times, but I believe in most cases they do eventually get handled. I'm not sure if there's a limit to how many get handled within a certain amount of time or if trashed threads get added to the back of the queue. I'm not entirely sure. This isn't something I could provide a definite answer on, more like speculation.

I'm sure if your claim is correct, you can either provide the information that you provided the account recovery team, which should be sufficient for everyone else or you could ask them to verify it themselves by posting here if some of the information you provided was sensitive.

You're nearly right I'd say. The forum was compromised, however as stated above the leak involved hashed passwords, rather than plain text. So, ultimately malicious users could brute force or use dictionary attacks against those hashes, although ultimately if you had a strong password, it would have been unrealistic to guess, so it still depended on the users security in the end.

Although, you're right there's been no known compromises since that big one where they got access to the database.

Whether you invest in altcoins or not, there are legitimate discussions going on in the altcoin section, which are sometimes very high quality. It's just that because of it being one of the most popular sections, it comes with the territory that there's a lot of spam there too. We must remove thousands of posts a day in that section.

The statistics on the OP are largely inflated due to the activity in announcements threads, they seem to be absolutely full with artificial comments, or when a project has caught the eyes of many, actually has some decent conversations. I must admit though, a lot of projects  seem to look to artificially increase the hype of their project via bumping services, which also play a part in these statistics since there are thousands of accounts which partake in it.


Yeah, that's another thing. Users do tend to slot in with other users, and once some of those users go it can effect the whole group. However, I think drama has definitely caused quite a few of our users, some definitely high quality to leave prematurely.

There's at least a collective effort going on to try, and clean up that section. It has gotten slightly better with the implementation of the bumping changes, and by that I don't mean that magically projects have stopped trying to artificially inflate their threads with fake conversations, but at least they aren't rewarded as much for it these days, and therefore when they do this  sort of thing, less users actually see it.

I'm not a massive advocate for a new rank, neither do I care about status that much, and there's plenty of others that don't, but there are definitely users on this forum which are motivated by this sort of thing, and that could potentially be good for the forum. I do definitely see the downsides, and I definitely don't think the forum needs a new rank, but if implemented correctly it could potentially contribute positively to the forum. What the criteria should be I don't really know.

As long as we don't become like one of those gaming servers like I pointed out earlier.

Then it's decided, the new rank will be called "fossil" or "part of the furniture" .

Maybe, earned merit could be a contributing factor to getting a certain rank, might potentially increase the motivation for users to get more merit that they earned, I don't know.

While it definitely is something that artificially changes the way users act, it does actually provide motivation. When there's a limited rank that only a select few will ever reach, then some genuine users will be motivated by that. Unfortunately, you do have the flip side, where the status hungry users then try their absolute hardest, despite it potentially being detrimental to the forum.There's pros, and definitely cons to adding an exclusive type of rank.

Probably very difficult, and probably isn't going to be on a lot of people's mind. If they face difficulty getting their money out. I suspect with everything going on, a lot of them aren't going to think about alternatives, but rather watch the war closely hoping it'll end, and the sanctions end. It'll probably take months of restricted funds until people start thinking about alternatives. The thing is, if the war continues the longer it goes on the more sanctions, and restrictions that'll come into play. So, it could be incredibly difficult right now, but it's likely to get worse as the war goes on.

That's the idea, though I think this has somehow been lost in translation over the years. People focus far too much on the anti government side of things, instead of the real benefit of Bitcoin.

I'm not sure if this is just the article writers not having the knowledge to differentiate between the two, or if they've purposely tried to clickbait. Gut instinct tells me it's the latter.

While I don't obviously encourage any illegal activity which would result in having your assets seized in the first place, it's a worry for legitimate people storing their funds on exchanges. Obviously, we all know you shouldn't, but the fact of the matter is a lot of people, potentially even the majority of Bitcoin users are using an exchange as a permanent location to store their Bitcoin, whether that's through laziness or lack of knowledge, they do it.

This basically means, that a government can force their way into the exchange for any reason, it doesn't necessarily have to be for legitimate reasons. That's a security concern in itself.

Hopefully, despite these exchanges acting in good faith, and not limiting users from their money, people start to think twice about storing any large funds on exchanges. Ideally, that would be the case already, however far too many Bitcoin users ignore this, and store it there anyway. I don't think it's even limited to users who only have a small amount of Bitcoin, which is the worrying part.

After all, it's the fundamental reason why Bitcoin exists, and a lot of people will argue that it's Bitcoin's most important feature. The ability to be in control of your own money, and security without relying on a third party. That's the ultimate definition of freedom, which I suspect after this conflict ends, a lot of people will be seeking as a result.

My thoughts too. Whatever your position is with the current conflict, I'm not one for punishing the people of a particular country, even if it's a way of getting through to the government. I'm actually disgusted by the amount of companies that are basically making this a PR stunt, banning Russia from x, y, and z just because it looks good on them in the West.

At the end of the day, you should be punishing those responsible, not the people. I suspect this is a good thing for Bitcoin, since a lot more people will want to be in control of their money, but it's pretty tragic that political pressure has caused this in the first place. Same as deporting, and banning Russia's from certain things, and competitions. While I understand it hurts Russia, it also hurts innocent people.

There's no Bitcointalk application, if your referring to an app which is on the apple store or Google store. The forum doesn't officially support the usage of mobile devices, although Simple Machines Forum, the software the forum is based on, is somewhat usable without a dedicated app.

There are third party apps which make the forum a little more intuitive, but as with anything third party, we wouldn't recommend them unless they were at least open source, and vetted by the community.

The only rank that makes sense to me, without this place becoming something you see on a gaming server with loads of different ranks, which usually just become meaningless with the more you add, would be one beyond Legendary which is reserved for the exceptional. Think 10k or even 20k merits.

Would be news to me, I'm pretty sure theymos has never commented on further ranks being added at least in favour of it, I could be wrong in that though. I think other staff might have hinted at supporting the idea.

I can't remember who proposed it first, but "mythical" was suggested before by cryptoaddictchie here, while it definitely does sound a little cheesy, I think it's the only one which I think would work in the current system. It seemed to get a little support at the time.

Bloody Leicester, I had a few bets I had them to draw with Burnley 0-0, and Tottenham to draw 0-0 in the FA cup. Plus, I then had a few champions league games. It was looking so promising until they messed it up. I wasn't convinced they deserved it either. Although, I only caught a little bit of the second half.

Even the refs recently....nah I'm not that bitter, I swear. The thing is I do think a lot of teams end up sitting back against them which plays into their type of players perfectly, it's when teams attack Man City that they start having problems. I don't know what it's whether it's fear or what, but teams just sit back against the better teams. We have it a lot, and we can sometimes struggle to break that down. However, Manchester City have different types of players which can break it down much easier.

Despite that, they've been really struggling recently. Even tonight in the FA cup, Pep names a full strength side, and yeah they end up winning it 2-0, however they looked as bad as a 2-0 win with dominant possession can get you. They looked awful considering the statistics against a lower league team, that's struggling to stay in their current league.

Devonte Smith is now fighting Klein, which to be honest destroyed my bet, but at least this match up is much more competitive. I'm actually leaning towards Klein for this fight early doors. Not sure what I'm going to be putting on my accumulator this weekend, but I think Umar Nurmagomedov will actually struggle a little against Kellecher, but will ultimately get the win. I'm going for Spivak against Greg Hardy, simply because I pretty much want to see Hardy lose at every opportunity. Xiaonan Yan I just feel an upset despite my bet from last week, which I've now cashed out due to the Devonte Smith opponent change.

Ah right, yeah it that case it can definitely happen from time to time. Depends on how the moderator's process, some might handle the reports before taking action or it might have just been a mistake. When we're talking hundreds to thousands of reports being handled, it's probably easily done. I've probably made the mistake myself, might have even been me this time, who knows. I know I've handled quite a fair share of your reports recently. Good news is, I should be a lot more active from now on. I alluded to it in another post, but it seems my life is starting to finally become less busy after having to step it up a little bit during the peaks of Covid. So, I'm hoping I'll be returning to not only handling reports, but patrolling about a little more too, and will put it on my schedule to clear some of these independently also. I'll probably focus on the ones which are more recently active though, as a priority.

The Altcoin section is huge, and without knowing the statistics I'd say most reports are done within that section. I think hilariousandco suggested that the main Bitcoin marketplace also has a hefty contribution, but I don't see all of those so couldn't possibly comment accurately on that.

I wouldn't say burned out, but I think most users that have been here longer than five years have taken a break at some point. Whether that's because of Bitcointalk, or just Bitcoin in general. Life does seem to get in the way at times which you preferred that it didn't. I imagine Covid, and that whole scenario has effected tons of users posting habits. I know at one point I was rushed off my feet, and then suddenly dead the next week. I've only now gained normality in the last few months, where I'm starting to find more time not only to post, but contribute more via moderating.  

I suspect there are users that could get burned out here, depends on their habits. As we know, there's quite a few users that either attracted drama or participated in discussions which resulted in drama, and I think that can definitely lead to burn out. I don't think that quite fits the description of your habits though, I expect you've either stopped posting in discussions you've had before or might not be as motivated or eager based on your circumstances. Some users will constantly participate in the same discussions, over, and over without an issue. I don't think that's something you do really.

Yeah, I hate modern day football, actually pretty much any large scale business, it's just ruthless. While, I probably wouldn't  go to the lengths of calling him a tactical genius, I think that's just media sensationalism, he was a decent manager, probably managing at the level that suits him best, and I think his tactics suited Leeds. There aren't many other managers out there that would be interested in coming to Leeds, while still being on the same level as Bielsa.

They haven't been playing bad at all, they've just been lacking in a few key areas, and recently they've come up against some pretty decent sides which has made it look worse than it is. I have no doubt once they have their full team back they'll be playing exciting football again. They've never been a team known for their defensive capabilities, but rather their attacking football, hence why they're so popular from a neutral point of view.

Its not like they aren't playing at the level expected, when they finished mid table that was a shock, that wasn't their natural level, and it was always going to be that teams adjusted to their attacking style, that's what the Premier League is all about. So, I always expected them to struggle a little more compared to that season. I'm not sure what the entitlement is form the board expecting that they have to perform to that level every season.

It isn't the forum per say, it's the service that's being used as a captcha service, so Google's  reCAPTCHA. I do believe theymos has expressed his hesitancy to use  reCAPTCHA before, but explained that it's probably the only one that's good out of the options, which I'd probably agree with, and because of that it's unlikely to change anytime soon unless a better alternative pops up. Though, most alternatives at the moment just do text captcha's which aren't very effective against protection of automated sign ups.

The too fast error code your getting, you'll come across that even without Tor occasionally. It depends on what your doing when you get that error. If your submitting a lot of requests, your more likely to run into it.