Do you know if the default values of ranking up were 500, 250 etc? I've hosted SMF forums before, but nothing compared to this forum, obviously. I've only ever done it for testing purposes, and setting them up for others. I can't remember the default values as it was a number of years ago now.

Yeah, I think that was the concern at the time many users were spamming their post counts up, getting to a "respectable" rank, and then attempting to scam, and I believe a few new users to the forum were falling for it. I'm sure there was a number of reasons for it to be implemented, and the discussion that the OP linked shows users discussing that.

Users banned for plagiarism very rarely get unbanned, however if there's an email in the message you can try your chances, and appeal. However, its best to be truthful, and as we can see not only are you posting very low quality posts recently, you've plagiarized a couple of times in the past.

Probably depends, it sounded like he had planned to add the reporter badges to the forum before the new iteration, but I'm not sure of the status of that anymore. Plus, we don't exactly know when the forum will be migrating to the new forum software. It's safe to assume somewhat soon due to other forums now running the forum system, but our version of the forum might be a little different with Bitcointalk specific features.

Personal notepads on the other hand would probably be very low on the priority list like Hilarious suggested,

Definitely, I think introducing the activity ranking system was an attempt to prevent account farming. If I remember correctly, signature campaigns started to pick up during this time, as well as the value, and publicity of Bitcoin. Therefore, the forum was subject to more posts, and more account registrations. I'll have a look at the data of this later on when I've got a bit more time, so this is all off my memory at the moment.

So the activity system was introduced to prevent users ranking up by spamming, and then potentially trying to scam. Back then we didn't have a trust system, and high ranks were considered more trustworthy, because it seems our society values higher, and longer term members than newer ones, which I think we as a forum have been proven wrong on this assumption multiple times.

The merit system was then finally introduced to put a significant end to low quality users, account farming, and spammers. I think we'll always have a problem with spammers, and low quality users, but at least these days they don't get rewarded for it. Again, we'll always have account farming, but for different reasons. The majority of account farmers are now those that register hundreds of accounts to bump, and advertise their services.

I'm unsure what my concerns were, but it was probably bias to the fact that I think I was a member or full member at that point, and got demoted with the activity implementation, and the fact by default I'm always cautious of limiting users, but I think I was proven wrong with my doubts, and the activity ranking system was an improvement over the old system. The merit system was definitely a large step up in increasing forum quality, and again not without its downfalls, but I think its been largely successful in what it was implemented for.

Tysat would have been a moderator around that time if I remember correctly, however whether admins officially announced it I'm not sure. It was probably using the default SMF values, unless I'm mistaken. I definitely remember Hero Member being 500, but I'm not so sure about the others. Despite the lack of admin response on that thread, it seems everyone agreed those were the values though.

If I'm remembering correctly, and I'm pretty sure I am the ranking system previously to this was merely just based on post count. I haven't hosted any Simple Machine Forums for quite some time, but it might well be the default ranking system used. I can't remember the exact ranking requirements, but just as an example; to become a hero member you needed 500 posts. I'm not sure if there's any "official" posts regarding this as like I said it might be the default SMF behavior.

Here's a thread discussing it back in 2011 which verifies that my memory is in fact correct: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27917.0


As we can see from the quoted discussion from that thread is that most of the post count values were similar to the required activity these days. However, Jr member was slightly changed.

It's definitely harder to rank up these days, and certain posts are more likely to get merit. For example, the statistics users are chucking out via data scraping, and all that will be more likely to receive merit, because its both informative, and out of the capability of many of the users here. There's been 3 stages of ranking up if I remember correctly here on Bitcointalk. First of all, ranking up was tied to amount of posts you had (activity wasn't implemented at this time) then activity got introduced, and there were a few moans, and groans about it. Finally, the merit system was implemented, and has had the most criticism, and impact on the forum. I personally believe its had a positive impact on the forum, and is the better system of all three. 

If we were to go by the merit stats page of the most generous merit senders of all time, and the most recent we would come up with the following:

All time:


Most recent:


I'm not sure when DdmrDdmr was made a merit source, but it seems that your assessment would be accurate for the most recent merit senders, however in the grand scheme of things the all time merit sent is quite staggering with Suchmoon, and dbshck leading the way by a considerable amount. Overall, I don't think there's too many surprises with the names that pop up.

What is impressive is DdmrDdmr on the merit sources statistic page has only 200 monthly allocation apparently. I'm unsure if that's accurate, and if I'm understand that page correctly, but considering the small amount of monthly allocation, I would say he's doing pretty well to distribute his earned merit which I do admit its a fairly regular income for them. 

You say its impossible, but they would only need to recall all bank notes just like they do when changing to newer ones. The older ones are then considered legal tender for a time period after that, but I'm pretty sure that there is a deadline in which you should exchange that to a bank. If they wanted to document every transaction made, they could recall all bank notes, and move to something like the blockchain. It doesn't have to be Bitcoin, and they could make it their own as long as the transactions were all documented through something like the ledger, there would at least be a little more transparency in a pretty broken system.

There's trolls, and there's more sophisticated trolls, at least the latter are a little more tolerable. Honestly, I can't even think of any sophisticated trolls on this forum, and they are all just the nonsense you see anywhere. We have to types of trolls on this forum that will bask in the sort of validation this thread could give them. Remember, that Bitcoin is something people want to be part of, and remembered within its history, and Bitcointalk is no different now. Even if it is for trolling....

They work, just like any other advertising works. Although, if you aren't interesting in any related services to the ones offering or you don't come here to trade then they aren't likely to appeal to you. However, these promo posts are definitely something which is effective as it gives the illusion that the seller has put in effort, and looks more professional.

I know theymos is trying to avoid this, but he seems to be open to the idea of potentially disallowing signature campaigns, and lets be honest it would improve the forums signal to noise ratio by a whole lot, although we would be removing a rather interesting eco system which has developed because of it. Unfortunately, whenever you have something good, it is always abused by the masses until it eventually ends up being tossed out. 

If staff members were to moderate scams, there would undoubtedly be a lot of headaches where something is removed, and complaints come flying in. Plus, lets be honest the more "successful" scam attempts are usually not immediately obvious, and would need to be thoroughly investigated, and verified. Sure, we could potentially investigate these cases, but verifying it could be difficult. In the world of business people are willing to damage their competitors, and try, and accuse each other of all sorts. Every so often we have report wars with several allegations from competitors on different projects, but investigating that would be a massive headache. This is why the trust system is in place, and it might not be perfect, but it should be good enough as a warning, then users can decide whether they are willing to accept that risk or not.

Just imagine for a second if we were to remove all the scams in the altcoin section. although this would be a grey area, as some of them are obvious cash grabs, but might not exactly be scams we would be there all day investigating, verifying, and removing that we wouldn't have time to eat or sleep. Moderating scams is opening a can of worms that no one wants to deal with. At least with the trust system, and now the flag system we can place up flags, and see if others agree with your viewpoint, because scams are largely subjective if they are caught before an actual scam attempt.

I think this has been suggested in the past, and if I'm not mistaken was actually considered by theymos? By allowing us to filter out/grey out replies on a topic which haven't received any merit, and only showing those that have. Could be a neat little feature, but will probably be something included in the new forum software rather than the existing as I imagine its pretty far down on the to do list.

I get at least a couple per day so I can just imagine how much global moderators, and admins actually get. I only really respond if I actually remember dealing with it. I don't think users realize how many reports there are, and we don't actually remember every report we deal with.  

Yeah, global moderators get reports across the forum regardless of whether there's a dedicated moderator or not.

Depends really, if its not so bad that its readable, and they are making some good points or bringing something to the discussion then subpar English is fine. I'm not going to pass on too much judgement of grammar when this is a pretty international forum. There's plenty of posters who aren't great at English, but are still knowledgeable enough to provide quality discussion. 

Potentially transferring to already existing merit sources might be a good option. Whether, we allow merit sources to see what each merit source has left, anyone who is consistently rewarded merits, and running out then transferring to them might be a good idea.  I would probably avoid transferring it to anyone though.

You forget that I've offered this in the past, and I know how lazy people can be. They simply don't have the knowledge to follow step by step instructions, and struggle technically to extract the information that is needed to safely attempt to crack the password. Thus, they get lazy, and send the wallet file instead. This is my personal experience, and I would say over 50% did not know how to extract the information after multiple attempts, and would opt to send the wallet file instead. This is what I'm warning people of, and not of your service if you're indeed only dealing with mkey data, and will not accept a wallet.dat file under any circumstance then that is brilliant.

Absolutely agree with you. It's usually for bumping, but I am aware of the fact that this could be used maliciously. I can't recall a situation in which this has happened yet, but if this becomes common knowledge, and we remove threads just like that it could very well become a problem in the future. 

Expanding on Bob123's point, extensions can also be used to identify, and create a fingerprint depending on what information the website you're visiting collects. Obviously, Bitcointalk isn't collecting this information, but its worth chucking that out there so you're aware of it. AFAIK Tor Browser only has No Script, and a HTTPS plugin.