Any local moderator or dedicated section moderator can request bans, and they are usually looked into, and issued within a few hours from my experience. Global moderators are generally more experienced in the art of moderation, and it makes sense that they issue bans on those who are more established here. So, your local section moderators should be able to request any bans that they want looked into.

I can't really comment on the workload of the admins, and global moderators, but considering the amount of time that it usually takes to get your requests looked at I don't think its too much of a issue, they just need to be requested. The only issue I see is that global moderators still have to take the word of local moderators when considering translation issues.

Although, proof of authentication posts here on the forum doesn't prevent users impersonating others any more than Google Forms. Email accounts are easy to create for google forms, and user registration here is easy too. As proven by the 100s of account farms which get uncovered now, and again which are abusing bounties.

Speaking generally here as this case seems to be in the process of being addressed. It should be in the campaigns manager best interest to publicly state why a user has been removed, unless its obvious. I personally, would want to keep a log, and evidence of why a user was removed for transparency.  I would agree with actmyname that blanket statements are annoying, and because of the campaigns managers position of power they generally don't give reasons why they have removed someone. Although, I would disagree with actmyname that specifying specific removal criteria would likely be abused, and loop holed as well as complaints from users who get removed from the campaign for any unforeseen circumstances.

I'm glad Zwei will be looking into the issues though.

They've made the mistake of looking to streamline, and simplify the service, but without giving the optional option for those that understand fees a little more. I don't think they should scrap the "priority", and "standard" options. I think instead they should keep these as the default values, but allow any user which wishes to customize their fee the ability to do that within the same window.

They're flawed due to the fact that they're easy to bruteforce, and test different password combinations on without any sort of limit. However, a brainwallet is as secure as the user makes it. As LoyceV points out putting unique information within a sentence instantly makes it more difficult to crack. Common passwords for brainwallets used to be sentences from books, and I think there was a pretty famous one which used a random page in the Lord Of The Rings books. I've never used a brainwallet, and would recommend against them just for the sole reason that they can be attacked easier than most other ways of storing Bitcoin.

Surely you want to see some 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 knocking around the forum TryNinja?

In all seriousness I'm on board with the majority of users here, and I hate threads which get plastered in emojis. What ever happened to just the cheeky little wink now, and again? I'll admit that some emojis are fine at times as long as they're not over done. However, just go look at the altcoin announcement thread, and you'll likely run into a few threads which have 10+ emojis in the title which is just excessive, and makes it look unprofessional.

Those are the easier cases! It's when you start diving deeper with the individual linguistic fingerprints that we all have. Some are easier than others. Obviously, this isn't really enough to go by on its own, but when combining with other data the user has posted could prove to be useful. I think I've only done this a couple of times in the past, and that was back when I was reporting. I remember years back I looked at the type of language this alt ring was using, their login times, and all sorts. If my memory serves me correct they didn't have any addresses posted publicly. They were then banned. I've yet to do this as a moderator though as it just takes so much time, and without any other data backing it up its a waste of time.

Users are now automating reporting? Damn, if only I had done this I would have avoided sore thumbs, and aching arms from sitting in awkward positions trying to report as much as I could. I used to dedicate hours a day to reporting manually, and not a single on of my reports was automated. The machines really are replacing us!



Looks like we might have a decent race to 100k with a few other horses racing. If only there was a prize?


Yeah, plagiarism takes a lot more investigation, but there's also a few other issues such as busting alt accounts that have been banned. They also prove to be difficult, and can be a time consuming act.

It isn't all about quantity though. Sure it looks impressive, but quality also is a major contributing factor. If you are reporting harder to identify posts as well as the easy stuff you will likely get a personal thank you! That's not to say we don't appreciate users who report the easier to identify stuff like spam too though!

Lets just say I know for a fact that someone else has higher reporting statistics than me at 39k, although I stopped reporting once I was made a moderator back last year apart from the odd one out of my jurisdiction. Apparently I've now been left in their dust .

My guesstimate would be that there are more than 5 users with 15k+ reports now. Although, I think the leader of reports is quite a bit ahead of everyone else, and if they're not then I'll be impressed as the figures I was hearing are absolutely insane!

I have 263 bad reports, and now that the new system out where bad reports are actually shown you'll be able to guess why, and hopefully improve upon that. Honestly, bad reports aren't that big of a deal.

Thank goodness its getting harder to get into a signature campaign. Anyone, and I mean anyone was able to get into a signature campaign a few years ago, and with the introduction of the merit system we are now seeing a more functional forum with actual quality posts rather than the garbage which was spewed out, because users were getting paid for it. I honestly thought monetary gain would be the ultimate motivator to making good posts, but as with everything users got complacent, and now we have a system which prevents that from happening. I also believe signature campaigns should have a rule that every participant should earn a certain amount of merit each period. If they don't they get removed, and someone else gets put in their place. This would mean you'll only be hiring those that are actively earning merit rather than have done in the past which means it would prevent them from getting complacent.

If I was in charge of a signature campaign I would probably only want the elite advertising the service, and even if I had spaces left I wouldn't hire someone just for the sake of it. I would probably recommend actually approaching noteworthy users, and not just relying on applications too.

As far as I know moderators in the local sections don't have permission to edit the titles of the local sections, and they have the same permissions as normal moderators. They can only delete, and move. They can also only nuke certain users. Global moderators still handle bans for those that can't be nuked, and temporary bans.

Local section moderators can probably create stickies, but when it comes to SEO that will likely be a admin related permission.

Seems to be a pretty good idea, and its a fairly easy change to make as long as we've got people to translate all of the local sections. I'm sure that's the only reason why it hasn't been done from the start, but hopefully now our user count is big enough we can get some accurate translations.

Would likely have positive effects to our local section population, and the need for locally speaking moderators would likely rise too. Some of the local sections are pretty abandoned compared to the rest of the forum, and the popular languages like Spanish, and Chinese get a fair amount of posts.

(Maybe we'll get some Welsh speakers soon? No? okay then)

We all speculate on what the criteria is, and only theymos actually knows his criteria, but your opinion is as valid as the rest of us as we are making educated guesses. There's probably loads of things that are taken into consideration, and considering there haven't been too many incidents with moderators I would say its been largely effective whatever the criteria is.

Even if someone had something absurd like 100k reports within a year, if they're not reporting in sections which aren't getting addressed quickly by moderators then there might be no need. Of course, it might make sense to just make them a moderator due to the fact that they are doing the work anyway, and putting more workload on the existing moderators, but if the existing moderators are handling that effectively, and other factors aren't in the favour of the user who is reporting, then they'll likely not get made a moderator.

Things like reports, timezone, existing moderators workload, trust, and personality type could all be considered. I'm not sure if quality of posts would come into it, as I'm sure there's a lot of users who would make a good moderator, but don't post amazing content or might not even post at all.  It sounds like a headache, and theymos has to overseer all of the moderators actions, probably with the help of cyrus, but I'm certainly not jealous of the amount of work they'd have to put in to actually overseer that.

I wouldn't say I know better, and discussion from differing opinions usually leads to the better option as we can all see the pros, and cons of our ideas. When I say pretty well dealt with, considering the amount of spam content that was getting posted, and only a few global moderators, and moderators available to deal with it, I think it was fairly well done. I actually turned up late to the spam attack, and had around 1000 reports in my queue, but that shot down to around 100 within about 5 to 10 minutes. So, yeah the bot attack was an issue which a lot of the forum users noticed, but in retrospect it was actually dealt with fairly quickly. 

Reporting is very much a thankless job, and if it wasn't for possibly a few staff members messaging me when I was actively reporting I may have had the outlook that you have now. I still remember the day cyrus messaged me about my reports after I think busting a fairly decent sized account ring. That probably offered even more encouragement to me, and ended up with me spamming the current moderators with nearly 40k reports :p We do appreciate it, and I have started to message those that are actively reporting to say thanks, because this might sound cliche, but our job would be a lot harder if it wasn't the community pulling together as a whole, and reporting anything. I don't care if its plagiarism or just "great project" posts I appreciate anyone who is putting in the time to actively report as I know the pain of going through that.

Anti viruses only detect known code. Look at the antivirus as a database of all known malicious code, and they will pick that up. They also have a way of detecting possible malicious code, because of the way malicious code is written most of the time which can result in a lot of false positives. Anti viruses do not protect you against unknown code which isn't within its database. This has always been the case, and nothing is new here. This is why Linux is considered a better choice currently due to the way its built, and the fact that the majority of people are running a Windows based operating system so they're the better target for malicious codes.

This is why a lot of experienced users don't use anti viruses at all. Although, despite them running in the background, and marginally slowing down the computer its probably worth the trade off just in case you have a lapse in your security. There are ways of protecting from malicious code right down to the browser security level. For example, blocking code via the NoScript Suite addon will greatly increase your security. However, you're still relying on the security level of that addon which could potentially be compromised.

There are other things that you can do, however each time you are increasing your security level you're also likely decreasing the usability of your computer, especially on the browser side. The more restrictions you put on browsing the internet for example, the less websites you'll be able to access, and display correctly. There are trade offs when it comes to security, although I would much rather a secure machine, but then again I wouldn't store any Bitcoin on my live computer.

This is something that needs to be improved before they roll out of the Beta phase. User interface, and general usability should be streamlined so even the average computer user can use the software, otherwise its just going to get a bad reputation for being only useful for those that are technically competent. The concept of the lightning network is an interesting one, and its by no means a perfect system, however its probably the most interesting development at the time being.

The lack of open channels will hopefully become more redundant as time passes, and more users are using the lightening network. This I wouldn't be too concerned about considering the early developments of the lightning network.

I guess that was me back in August 2018 (?) I can't remember exactly when I was made a moderator, but I was made a moderator around 38/39k reports, but there's obviously a few users here who have been reporting significant amounts for months, and there's no sign of them becoming a moderator yet, and I would consider some of them pretty trustworthy too, but then again I don't see too many reports within the sections that are in my opinion in need of moderators.

Reporter badges are definitely going to encourage certain types of users to report, generally those that like to stick out within a community, and I think that's fine. You'll find a lot of organizations offering achievements, and badges to encourage students to learn. For example, a number of language courses do it, as well as when we were all back in school as a kid we had a system where they would put stars on your report card if you done well etc. It does work even in adulthood.

For now we have an idea of how many users have 5000+ reports from these very vague stats:
So, at the time of that post only 9 users had more than 5000 reports which is a slight increase from the last detailed statistics theymos posted. I imagine the very top have more than 20k reports now. Definitely some additional moderators needed to fill in for the global moderators which are also covering a dedicated section. I think Bitcoin Discussion probably needs a dedicated mod, and much of the altcoin section.

As far as I remember the reporter badges were meant to be implemented into the current forum software, and if I remember correctly theymos even stated he was hoping to do it by a certain time frame. Unless, I'm remembering incorrectly which is a possibility. I'll see if I can dig up the post that I'm thinking of.  

In the meantime its definitely not mentioned as a "new forum software" feature, and was posted here in Meta, and not in the new forum software section which indicates it was for this iteration of the forum.


So here is the quote I was thinking of. Theymos states that he was originally going to implement it a week after the quoted post which obviously we have now surpassed. I'm not sure the reasons, but I imagine more important things cropped up.

This is very similar to the shadow ban system that Hilariousandco has suggested a few times in the past. In theory its a great idea which would prevent spam being seen to the public eye, however whether we have enough resources to handle that amount of posts a day would be debatable. Despite reports not coming in as thick, and fast as a few months ago I would still say that amount of posts could be a little bit hard to deal with. We would likely need a few more moderators in each of the sections. There are still global moderators which have a dedicated section which could probably be optimized by adding a few more moderators to help them out, but only they really know how much additional help is needed.

I for one don't really like imposing restrictions on the majority just because of the minority is causing a few issues. These bot attacks are somewhat quickly dealt with as a community effort, and they aren't as popular as you might think at least to the scale of yesterday. I would have to agree with o_e_l_e_o that imposing to much restrictions is not beneficial to the forum as a whole.


I think the recent bot attack was pretty well dealt with, and a big part of that was down to Mitchell's bot. Reports have died down in recent months across the boards I would say, at least in the sections I moderate, and newbie reports have significantly died down. Although, there are still a few prominent users who are reporting fairly regular.