No problem, it's not a requirement. But, I'm always willing to encourage those that want to provide more data to benefit the forum. Especially, when it's visual as certain people tend to be more visual learners. I'll also get around to doing the edited image, and resizing it sometime this weekend most likely. As well as tweak some of the explanations slightly, and fix some issues that I'm not quite happy with.

Hopefully, we can come up with a final product that theymos may be able to sticky the thread, add to the report page as a drop down menu or add to the help page.

Use common sense, and take a look at the replies on the thread. If they are being made by newbies with low activity or posts that are just in that thread then it's likely that they are just bumping the topic. Look at the thread, and see if they are offering an incentive to post on their thread. If they are then report it, because it will eventually be caught anyway, and you'll be saving everyone the time.
Another way to tell is if they are bumping it via bumps is when they quote the OP without saying a word.  There are exceptions to these, but generally these are good telltale signs.

It's only natural that non sources will distribute their merit at lower amounts per post. However, sources definitely have a lot more leeway when distributing it. These two could actually complement each other quite well.

I'm pretty sure this is the case. However, I'm not sure what is the criteria for it. I imagine sources that are commonly running out of their monthly limit may have higher limits too.

Generally, you can only check your report history once you've hit a certain threshold of good posts which is believed to be around 300 currently. However, moderators have been known to let people know in the past which one was bad if you ask nicely. No guarantees though.

However, if you get 300 reports you can check yourself from then onward.

I've recently had my head turned about distributing more merit per transaction. I've considered this several times before hand, but after listening to a few users that suggested that it would be better to reward higher amounts as opposed to smaller amounts spread among several posts would be more beneficial to the system. It seems that merit sources are typically running into the issue of not distributing all of the sMerit they received due to only rewarding smaller amounts across several posts, and then running out of posts to merit. Thus the merit is wasted. This months "pool" I've already eaten into, but that's just because I had several posts which were on the back burner that I intended on meriting. I think the next period will likely see me distributing higher amounts among posts which I've just started doing. If I run out of sMerit to distribute for a period I'll just put them in a list, and revisit them in another period when I've not used all the sMerit on current posts.

The reasons that I've considered doing this is because, of the amount of very high quality posts only receiving a handful of merit, because the general opinion is more is better. But, that's kind of shafting the users that have put high amounts of effort into a post to only receive 1 or 2 merits. When another post which is a quality post, but not to the standard of the previous one is getting around the same amount of merit. This is problematic, and higher quality posts should be standing out more among quality posts. I've got some rough guidelines which I'll now use to distribute merit. I originally had a maximum of 5 merit, but have now removed this as I think it's too limiting to those that have made exceptional posts. I've been starting to do it towards the end of my merit expenditure this period, but will certainly be rewarding higher amounts per post once the next period rolls in.

I've already made it clear that I don't really care about the rank of the person, and I won't be only meriting the lower ranks or saving it for lower ranks. A quality post is a quality post. Even, if they are Legendaries, Merit sources or even admins.


This is especially true when considering higher quality of posts. It seems that a lot of users are focused on finding posts which haven't been merited by others. This isn't a bad practice, and is certainly valuable. But, I think this damages the users which are spending a considerable amount of effort in their posts, and only receiving a few merits. It shouldn't really matter how many users have previously sent merit to the post before you consider sending merit yourself. If you think it's a quality post then you merit it regardless.  At least this will be the stance I'll be taking.

I just saw the highlights of the Japan game where they just wasted time in fear of getting more yellow cards. That was bizarre wasn't it? I'm so gutted that my underdogs Senegal got sent home when Japan was playing real negative football on the chance that Senegal wouldn't equalize.

Whatever, I still enjoyed the Columbia, and Senegal game. I guess I got to support England against Belgium 

Banned users can login, but there's a message specifying that they've been banned, and whether it has any time frame or if it's permanent. They can't post etc, but they can read the forum as normal whilst logged in AFAIK.

Scams aren't moderated so they are unlikely to get involved even if proven. You can let others know via another thread like you have done or by contacting those that are "wasting their time", but the moderators will not lock or do anything due to scams not being moderated.

Awesome! Thanks for letting us know. I'll probably fit this somewhere in the original thread. I think that's pretty much confirmation that it's 300 good reports. At least It's good enough for me until proven otherwise.

This has always happened, however it is now exaggerated by the fact that the forum is more active than it ever has been. The increased media coverage of Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies didn't help us in terms of the signal to noise ratio. Bitcoin hitting a new high also encouraged others to get involved with Bitcoin, and the ICO boom has also contributed to the issues.

This sounds a little like the newbie jail which was implemented a few years ago. This was abolished because of the exact same reasons why your proposed changes would not work. They fall into the same pitfalls of requiring unnecessary content that we just don't need on the forum. For example, back when the newbie jail was implemented there was a restriction that you had to post x amount of posts in order to get out, and wait a certain amount of time. I think this was a total of 1 post, and 4 hours respectfully.

What this resulted in is newbies opted to post introduction threads which added no value to the forum other than them saying hello and describing a bit about themselves. I've seen dedicated sections to this on other forums, and they just aren't needed unless someone is introducing themselves but, also bringing an opportunity for discussion. If the thread has a point other than introducing themselves then they are normally fine, but this wasn't the case when the newbie jail was around, because they were forced to make one post.

Now what has been proposed is a quiz which would be asked of new registrations at the time of registration, and depending on the answers given there may be certain restrictions placed upon them. For example, questions related to bounties, and trying to find out through a series of questions whether a new user is primarily looking to participate in bounties. Honestly, this will likely be ineffective once the questions/restrictions are public knowledge, and won't prevent the malicious users that register, and only prevent genuine users having the freedom to do what other users can do.

Finally, all this does is confine the spam to one section, and encourage that section to be bombarded by useless posts. It effects genuine members from partipating because they have to go through a real shit period to be able to participate in the forum as normal, and the users that we are trying to prevent spamming up the joint will be fine jumping through holes if it means they can earn money.

I encourage anyone that can come up with a solution to voice their opinion. What we do know is something has to be done, and theymos knows this. He's probably brainstorming himself on the best way to go about it, because let's be completely honest there's no easy way to come at this problem without slamming restrictions on everyone which sucks especially when there's genuine users wanting to participate, but they never get through because of the loops they have to jump through.

I'm sure the staff appreciate the efforts no matter how many posts you are/have reported. I'll thank you on behalf of the community.
This is all we really need from people there's no requirement for reporting things, but if everyone reported that post that they would normally just ignore because it's spam would contribute a huge amount to the overall state of the forum. There's an issue right now with the signal to noise ratio. I'm hoping this thread, and with a few other things we can somewhat combat this even if it's only slightly.

I'm hoping that the examples/placeholders, and the explanations will give people the confidence to start reporting the more complex issues too.

I very much do like the idea of including some sort of video guide which could be better for those that don't want to read my wall of text, and simply want to find out certain things. How to report, how to access report history, and other things could be very beneficial to those that are visual learners rather than those who can follow instructions in text. At the very least I don't see it hurting. If you want I would be more than willing to include the videos in the post below the guide.

Nice one! I've still got a few things to iron out in the thread. Thinking of wording a few things differently for clarity, but being clear, and concise has never really been my strong point. I prefer to go into detail.

This is good advice, and demonstrates exactly why I'm no graphic designer. I'll get around to doing something like this later on today, although I imagine I'll have to do multiple edits to get it right. I'm not sure whether zooming out will be a good idea so I'll try that too.

Probably joking. Out of the 5 Global moderators 3 have titles I would assume that the others just haven't opted to use it.

That looks to be true at least. Mistake on my behalf.

I'm almost certain that Global moderators can display a custom title so Hilariousandco likely paid nothing for it. However, the majority of VIP, and Donators donated a while back when Bitcoins price was much less than it is now.

Only VIP members (50 btc), Donators (10 btc), Global moderators, and admins can display custom titles.

Nah not really. I've disclosed my alt account which I use to access the forum via insecure connections/devices, but I don't expect users to do the same. In some instances this would defeat the object of having a alt account. For example, if you run a account which offers a service to people, and are trying to look professional you might not want your comments on politics, and unpopular opinions on certain subjects to be associated with the account that's offering the service. If you run a charity accepting Bitcoin you might not want to have it known that you quite enjoy spending your money on porn site invites, and tokens for camgirl sites.

Although, the majority of people don't need alt accounts there are certainly legitimate reasons to have one.

This may well apply to some merit sources, but certainly doesn't apply to them all. Merit sources don't really get that much per month to distribute when compared to the amount of posts being made site wide, and especially when merit sources are encouraged to send higher amounts per individual post than users who only have sMerit they've "earned" to send.

Merit sources don't get an unlimited amount of sMerit to send, and I think a few might dip into their earned sMerit from time to time. Remember, that the merit that merit sources get allocated to distribute refreshes periodically. It is certainly plausible for a merit source who was selected because they are good at identifying good posts to find a good post per day. That's 30 sMerit if you merited every single post with 1 merit alone, but this is hardly the case, and several often reward more per post.

My final version of the image was this one:

Which I've included in the original thread for now. I've added colour coded explanations too, but I'm not sure if I'm 100% happy with it.

One would only assume that he anticipated after dropping the merit system, and selecting the initial merit sources he would receive applications for merit sources rather than finding them manually. Yeah, there's tools for looking at the users sending the most merit, and all that, but that doesn't really show they are distributing their merits to quality posts.

At least publicly, there haven't been many people who have applied. Let alone suitable users for merit sources.

Remind me, why I signed up for this?

I've opted to go for the full report history as that's going to be more beneficial to those that don't have access to it, and will be able to see an example of what it looks like when they achieve the desired amount of reports.

The image that I edited is pretty shocking. I'm terrible at this image editing, and I probably should of used a different colour for the status of the report. If anyone wants to improve on that image feel free to send me a message of the edited image.