New message board wish list

[qwk]

Okay, I think this is the one. I think this is critical for BTCTalk 2.0 (or 3.0, I guess?)

Yep. Great idea. I'm still trying to find ways how this could be abused, but as long as I don't find any, this would be second on my wishlist (right after API).

Have Weighted Thread Activity ("WTA") display next to threads, maybe color coded. WTA is displayed in percentage and is the cumulative activity score of unique users posting in thread, divided by 10,000.
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Beyond this, another positive impact can be made with "WTA (decaying)," a column where WTA is calculated normally, but with a 5% (nominal) per day decrease in a poster's WTA contribution since the day he originally posted. This is able to be abused, so once a user posts the first time, that original posting date should be stored by the forum server and unable to be changed, even if the user deletes his original post.
[…]
WTA (decaying) can be used to find the threads recently most actively posted in by high-activity users, a relatively accurate (IMO) "what's hot?" I'd also suggest something similar to a "what's hot?" button in the main user toolbar, where the top 100 or so threads (by WTA (decaying)) are kept.

Why would you prefer the first post of a specific user in a thread for WTA? I'd rather use the last post of a user or just all of them. Imagine a necroed thread with High Activity Users (HAU ) which is mostly kept alive by newbies posting "Hi Mom" (you all know what thread I'm talking about). As soon as a few HAUs post there, it could probably safely be assumed to be interesting again, right? Probably I'm just missing something you've thought of

I'd imagine this would be very resource-intensive, so the dev should be careful about giving rough estimates over hard real-time statistics (for example, don't calculate WTA contributions by user more than once). This would effectively replace having to ban giveaway threads and help reduce the potential for scams (except, obviously, by high-activity members, whose threads would initially be given more credibility). Trust rating could act as a multiplier to someone's WTA contribution, but that seems like a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

The WTA decaying is definitely resource-hungry. But let's just recalculate the WTA (resource-hungry) whenever someone posts and store that value as a numeric value that's compared to the timestamp when you're displaying the list of threads. That's a static request with a simple numeric calculation, not at all resource-hungry.

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[Onews1990]

when we have BTCTalk 2.0 it would be great if these features were present (of course if it's released in this millennium)

[Kluge]

Why would you prefer the first post of a specific user in a thread for WTA? I'd rather use the last post of a user or just all of them. Imagine a necroed thread with High Activity Users (HAU ) which is mostly kept alive by newbies posting "Hi Mom" (you all know what thread I'm talking about). As soon as a few HAUs post there, it could probably safely be assumed to be interesting again, right? Probably I'm just missing something you've thought of

I meant to say only the first time someone posts in a thread will their WTA be calculated (for decay purposes). If a HAU posts once in a thread, it's the only time his contribution will be counted for WTA (decaying), so he can't later make a new post in a thread he's already posted in to increase it's WTA (decaying) score. I was thinking this would help prevent abuse by people thinking they could game the system in keeping it in the "what's hot?" list by just deleting their old original post in a thread and then posting something new to bump it up. I wasn't trying to suggest that everyone's WTA (decaying) resets to the highest value as soon as someone comes in and posts "hi mom" to a 500-day-old thread -- sorry about poor wording there.

I'd imagine this would be very resource-intensive, so the dev should be careful about giving rough estimates over hard real-time statistics (for example, don't calculate WTA contributions by user more than once). This would effectively replace having to ban giveaway threads and help reduce the potential for scams (except, obviously, by high-activity members, whose threads would initially be given more credibility). Trust rating could act as a multiplier to someone's WTA contribution, but that seems like a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

The WTA decaying is definitely resource-hungry. But let's just recalculate the WTA (resource-hungry) whenever someone posts and store that value as a numeric value that's compared to the timestamp when you're displaying the list of threads. That's a static request with a simple numeric calculation, not at all resource-hungry.
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This may end up being most pragmatic. I was hoping for something which could more accurately forecast when HUAs (or many "LUAs") were being most active in a thread so that old active threads would eventually fall off the "what's hot?" list. I think it'd be very time-efficient for people without a time to have a more dynamic version of the "top 10 threads" list @ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats which is effectively useless in finding new, trending discussions (and I think it'd be fairly useless with non-decaying WTA alone, too, since "old" stuff never fades away).

[Kluge]

Bitcointalk holds an abnormal amount of personal information in PMs, from names and addresses, to bank routing and account numbers. A private message self-destruct option would be reasonable, I think. The sender would tick the option and enter the number of days before the PM is hard-deleted from the server (both in the receiver's inbox and sender's outbox). This would encourage extra caution with sensitive information, where the receiver could copy the data and store it locally only if he really thought he'd need it. In the event of a warrant or community lynch mob, it also takes some of the heat off Bitcointalk given they had an absolutely legitimate reason to delete the info.

[Kluge]

For better or worse, I'd post about twice as often if there were [abridge] tags. If you read what I write too often, you'll notice I have a bad habit of including way too much information, frequently going off-topic. In fact, the majority of my time posting is spent in post-posting, trying to remove information but getting so caught up in internal debates over whether or not I should delete something, I end up ADDING a paragraph to expand on a quip in case it might be misconstrued. When I catch myself doing that too often, I delete the entire post, including the on-topic contributions.

The [abridge] tag could work in either or both of these ways:
1) Hide the text but provide a javascript-powered (or whatever) asterisk. A user could click on that * and see the hidden text in case they don't understand what was said or maybe otherwise want more details.
2) Hide all abridged text and have an "unabridge" button which reveals all text within [abridge] tags.

This is meant to be a much less space-consuming form of "spoilers," though I can't think of any reason to not just have "spoilers" have these options.