Altcoins are part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. If you ban discussion of altcoins entirely,
there will be attempts to promote and discuss altcoins within Bitcoin threads, thus your moderation load may not decrease and the signal-to-noise ratio in the Bitcoin threads be adversely affected. Because where else do you expect legitimate altcoins to go promote and discuss to a wide audience.
There is an algorithmic solution to this dilemma. Require all Alt-coin threads to be self-moderated and send all moderation requests to the thread owner's Messages inbox. Forum moderators would then only be called in to close entire threads in extreme cases. Then make a separate recent posts for Alt-coins, even allow readers to individually configure their account to turn off if they want.
I am in favor of banning paid posting, because it causes the signal-to-noise ratio to decrease egregiously such that non-paid discussion is a needle in a haystack. And it is desirable for this money go to advertising, if these folks want to get their promotion interleaved with non-paid discussion.
There are other ways for readers to earn money on this site that increase the signal-to-noise ratio, e.g. doing due diligence on altcoins and mining/investing in them.
The low signal-to-noise ratio giveaways are probably diluting gullible newbies' learning curves for some near-term income, yet this will hurt the ecosystem long-term because slaving away just to pay the rent is not going to raise them to the next level.
In short, paid discussion makes us dumb.
Bitcoin forum, people donated for a Bitcoin forum. Many of those people want Alt Coins gone entirely from Bitcointalk. The Altcoin section was made essentially as an off topic section, to group all non bitcoin crypto currencies in one place that is out of the way from the Bitcoin discussion. The spam is overwhelming the entire forum.
I'm afraid the admins at this forum are so protective of their Bitcoin SHA-256 wealth that they are oblivious to/ignoring the real-world implications of Bitcoin SHA-256's MIT/X11 Open Source License.
Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin SHA-256 under the MIT/X11 Open Source license for the specific purpose of allowing the creation of other versions of Bitcoin (aka Alt-coins). Yet, the know-it-all forum admins here constantly threaten to ban users and remove discussion of alt-coins not deemed the one official "Bitcoin."
Here's a newsflash: Bitcoin SHA-256 is not the official Bitcoin. There is no official Bitcoin after Satoshi stopped working on the client (0.3.19) AND the blockchain forked. Indeed, under the MIT/X11 Open Source License it is logically impossible for there to be ONE official Bitcoin after the original author's source-code was modified without the origin author and the blockchain forked after such modification. At that point, Bitcoin SHA-256 technically became an alt-coin called Bitcoin also operating under the MIT/X11 license. Bitcoin is a protocol. Bitcoin SHA256 is a crypto-currency. Re-read this if it doesn't make sense.
Stated differently, it's like creating a Linux forum when Linux came out, calling it a Linux forum, having people donate to the Linux forum, then limiting discussion to RedHat Linux because any other open-source distro is simply an Alt-OS and not the official Linux and is causing too much clutter. Pretty self-serving and contradictory to the spirit of Open source.
It's your site and you can do what you like, but it is a grave threat to the whole Open-source ecosystem when certain actors have the power to deem one version of an open-source source-code as official and deem others to be unofficial so as to undermine those alternate versions of the open-source source-code.
Again, this is your site, but instead of ignoring the spirit of the MIT/X11 Open Source license, you should change your name from "Bitcoin Forum" to "An Alt-coin named Bitcoin Forum."
However, considering that this forum derives it power from continuing the legal fiction that Bitcoin SHA-256 is the only official Bitcoin I doubt we'll see a name or policy change.
If you disagree that the forum operators are going against the spirit (if not the letter) of the MIT/X11 Open Source License, I look forward to your response.
It is pretty obvious the mods are overwhelmed with all the posts here in the altcoin section, but if you have 5 mods or something that have to mod 5000 people that is obviously not going to work.
so they basically have 3 options.
1 = more mods, so there can be more effective moderation, dealing with the ever growing number of posters and post.
2 = try to limit the number of posts by banning certain posts.
3 = create an unmoderated forum section , called wasteland or something, where folks can spam all they like and focus moderating on the other forums.
Looks to me the handfull of mods here have lost control, because the forum just became too busy and now they are hitting the emergency breaks, even considering banning alt-coins all together, well. It is their site and they can do with it whatever they like of course, we are just guests, but right now this forum is the epi-center of the entire cryptocurrency world and I'm pretty sure if they get rid of alt-coins it wont stay this way and this forum will just became one of many little places where folks talk about bitcoin. So basically they will just remove themselves from the market. It is like if a big retailer would say, it is just getting too busy in our shop, we cant handle all the customers, we dont have enough staff, from now on we just going to sell one brand , so it is not as crowed in our store anymore.
People don't seem to understand. Essentially we are saying, we don't want your coin spam here. Take it to your own forums, Bitcointalk doesn't cater to thousands of threads about *insert coin*. We aren't motivated to keep the conversation here, so a vote wont do anything, we are trying to get you to take your conversations elsewhere.
People that are saying, FIX IT OR WE WILL LEAVE! thats kind of our intentions. Obviously we don't want people to leave the bitcoin discussion here, but we do want you to take the majority of your altcoin discussion elsewhere. This is Bitcointalk, it can't handle the alt coin discussion volume for 600 different coins, so we are asking that you take it to your own forums.
KeyserSozeMC, we are trying to get people to do exactly what you are doing. Creating your own forums for giveaways like you are doing, I actually really appreciate it.
The main point here that is irritating that people are ignoring, if we don't cut down the post spam, IE hundreds of thousands of posts of people just pasting their addresses, we will lose the entire section. I for one would like to keep the Alt Currency section, however people seem to be ignoring the fact that creating a giveaway subforum wont help. We want the excess spam off of Bitcointalk, not just jammed in a different corner.
I've been moderator in a forum with 100k+ people (gamers).
Not people interested if cryptos. That's much worse than your position in this forum.
I know what you're talking about, I understand you. But still, it's not a good move to restrict such thing. It's nothing bad. Lock/delete existing giveaway topics, clean the mess. It might take you 3 hours, instead of taking you 3 hours per day, every day.
Make a new subforum where we actually can promote things. Where we can bring more people.
I understand that the forum name is 'bitcointalk' and not altcointalk. But there's already a section for alt-coins. Which means we can talk about anything we like ( that's how I see it and more than 90% other people )
You can even make a non post count section for such purpose.
Giveaway KING
I follow you, but what people don't seem to understand, is that Bitcointalk encourages people to go to their own forums, we outright say that this is not the place for your to post every detail about your coin. In the most blunt possible way of saying it, is we want people to go away to their own forums.
This is primarily a Bitcoin forum, that much we are on agreement with. The Alt Currency section was made to be a place to isolate the maybe 100 alt currency threads that there were at the time of creation of the board. It was not designed to handle this much volume, nor did we plan for it, or want it to happen. Everytime someone posts, it adds that post about some Alt Coin that 99.5% of the forums aren't interested in to the recently posted lists etc, so people that are looking for new information about something Bitcoin related on that list are getting drowned out by *insert day old coin name*
Having a giveaway subforum does not help. We don't want to reorganize giveaway threads, we want them to be hosted on forums dedicated to other coins. Its not our job to handle masses and masses of Alt coin information, if someone wants to know more about their own coin, they should go to their own coin's forum. Theres nothing wrong with an announcement thread and a bit of discussion, however with the 600+ Alt coins (that I know of) there really isn't room here, and there is no desire to accomodate it.
If we want to keep the alt coin section at all, we have to make some changes, and we are hoping that removing the giveaway threads will help. We have measures in place to keep the amount of post spam to a minimum, but there are thousands of posts in Alt coin giveaway threads over very short periods of time. Alt Coin giveaway threads are actually the exception, because we wouldn't allow Bitcoin giveaway threads like these anywhere else on the forum. Even the ones in games and rounds pale in comparison.
Thats the next step if things continue to get out of hand.
Things will continue to get out of hand. This is not communism era.
Either remove alts from the forum or let people do their own stuff.
Thats the next plan if this doesn't help.
Stop being such a gangster.
''before the whole alt currencies section gets deleted'' <= Wont happen, ever. Capone.
It's staff's mistake, not people's mistake. They could make a new sub-forum AGES ago, instead of closing threads.
Most of the admins/mods are lazy, bored to move their little finger. That's what happens.
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Make a new section for giveaways.
Could be as soon as today if I can't get things straightened up.
You would be surprised by how many reports the Alt Currency section generates per day, far more than the rest of the entire forum combined. I'd say about 200-300 on a non busy day, but I've seen 1,000+ on heavy traffic days. At 30 seconds to finish an action on reports that dont involve reading a page of context to decide a report's validity, you are looking at a minimum of an hour and a half worth of Alt Coin reports to deal with, thats like on a Sunday when there isn't much traffic. 3-4 hours isn't uncommon, and when dogecoin was first released it was far more than that. Its not laziness, its trying to remove spam, not content in general. Having an Alt Coin Giveaway subforum doesn't fix the problem, it just shifts the spam to another subforum. The fact of the matter is that there is just too much content to be held on the
Bitcoins forums. The intent was not to host alt coin conversation here; like I keep saying, it was to help direct people to their own forums.
