Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)

[hilariousetc]

What I propose is that everyone gets to suggest improvements to the forum. Please make them in this thread and I will add them to the list. After a couple of weeks or so I will compile them all into a new thread and let users vote for which ones they think are a good idea and I will gradually arrange them in order of votes so the most popular ones will be pushed to the top. Hopefully theymos can use it as a sort of 'to do' checklist, but at least he can see what is popular amongst the community. Please keep your suggestions as concise as possible and try to stick to one or two sentences if you can. Here are the various suggestions I've made in the past (in no particular order):

• A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.

• A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).

• Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).

• Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).

• Remove signatures completely from lower ranks (at least Juniors). Purchasing a Copper Membership (or higher) could still get you one.

• More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).

• Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).

• Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).

• More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.

• Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).

• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.

• A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.

• Two report buttons/queues: one for sig spam and low quality posts and one everything else that is more urgent (hundreds of reports on spam posts are currently burying more important reports).

• A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.

• A sub board for highly merited users to encourage constructive topics only by users who have proven their worth here over time (or make the Ivory Tower merit requirement much higher [OMG ITS LIKE SOVIET RUSSIA GULAG]).

• A new member rank after Legendary as it is becoming far too common now and will only become more so as time passes. I would suggest fixing Legendary at 960 activity and the new rank is double that at 1920. You could also make the merit requirement very high for this rank so it's only for the crème de la crème of users [OMG NAZI RANK ITS LIKE THE RICH KEEP GETTING RICHER].

• Additional perks for Legendary accounts or a higher rank if added (for example: custom title, image banner in signature, clickable link in personal text, access to exclusive sub board etc).

• Charging ICOs a fee to make their ANN here. You could even get rid of the ANN board completely and give them their own sub once they've paid the fee. If there's no Ann board then there will probably be no paid bumping because it will be useless, but let them spam away in their own slum and squalor.

• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.

• A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).

• A captcha added to deleting a post.

• Require email verification for new accounts.

• Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.

• A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).

• A dedicated Marketplace for the Alt Coin board that would be used for currency sales/exchanges and advertising/requesting services etc (the current one has no description and is being used as catch all for anything and everyting and not what it was intended for).

• Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.

• More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).

• Requiring manually whitelisting of all new accounts before they can post. All new users will essentially be shadowbanned until they've been verified by a mod. This will eliminate 99% of bots and spammers before they even start. Spam threads can be trashed on sight before they even become spam megathreads.

• Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.

• Press board locked/archived as it's served its purpose and now is mostly just used to get away with legalised copy and pasting or blog spam, or:
B) Sticky some guidelines that only notable bitcoin Press hits are allowed from non-bitcoin related websites (IE articles from cointelegraph and cryptocrapnewsdaily.net aren't allowed).

• Some local boards have Press and Off topic subs. They should be removed as they're hotbeds for account farmers/spammers and are not necessary here.

• Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).

• Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

• Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying.

• More advertisement slots. This forum is badly under-monetised in my opinion and we likely lose hundreds of thousands in lost revenue to signatures and lack of ad slots and visibility. Many people don't even seem to know we have adverts or assume they're just another sig ad. What I've suggested before is that there are a few 'premium slots' that are displayed at the top of certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion, Gambling, Services etc. Companies would pay a lot for these as you could target your audience and you could run them for a month or even longer for a fixed price rather than having to bother running auctions every week.

• Warnings in red displayed to lower ranked users when they go to post alerting them to the most commonly ignored/broken rules. They should be specific to the sub board that they are going to post in as well. Ie  Press: Alt Coin articles do not belong here. Alt coin Anns: Please don't post generic posts like "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?" etc as they are not permitted. Maybe in the Marketplace we can have a warning to Only bump once per day and remove old bumps etc. Bitcoin Discussion: Do not post topics on the value of bitcoin - they belong in Speculation etc. A lot of people break the rules because they're just not aware of them so they would then have no excuses.

• KYC for all new users. Just kidding.

• Lamborghinis for all staff as a Christmas bonus (will also accept an Audi R8). Not kidding.

[digaran]

Introduce a new system based on trust system, all the +- feedbacks without risked amount should go to reputation score.
Pick 10 active reporters and pay them $5 daily to each for 1000 good reports per month.
Show Alia's nude pictures after every 100 good reports to members actively reporting. just kidding.
Give a damn to the actions of DT members. not kidding.

[hilariousetc]

Introduce a new system based on trust system, all the +- feedbacks without risked amount should go to reputation score.

I've suggested tweaking the feedback algo a bit before. Tiny trades with a smallish value probably shouldn't count for much or turn you 'green' after a while. Some people are obviously just doing trades for the feedback and to essentially buy a feedback as cheaply as possible.

Pick 10 active reporters and pay them $5 daily to each for 1000 good reports per month.

Would be abused if you give out monetary rewards. Some people are already obviously going crazy reporting things after theymos merely mentioned the possibility of reporter badges and that's just for a worthless badge. Imagine what will happen if we monetise the system. The report queue will become a mess like the forum already has. I wouldn't be against issuing some other sort of rewards but probably best not for cash prizes.

[pugman]

I'll add one for now:

Have more options for polls. For example, ability to restrict certain ranks from participating, not showing the poll results after vote but to show the results only after the end of the poll.

[RAMSHIVDEEPAK]

A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts

Reason should be clearly given for permanent ban....for temporary ban, For temporary ban ,there should be some team ,who handle these case,because currently no one is replying for that...

Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member

It can be more,

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).

I don't think this is the good feature for implementation ,it will affect the popularity of forum.


Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic
 
you can allow,but this type of activities(bounty report,off topic,) has not been counted as a post.

Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest

we should provide the list of high reports of the month like high merited person,So if other member's want to give some award they can free to give them in terms of merit or something else.Most merited member is getting rewards by earning merits. they can be utilized in upgrading the rank. I am not in favor of cash price.


don't post generic posts like  "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?"

for this we can make the limit of posting like 20 words or more.

all other suggestions are very good,they should be implemented soon.

there should be some features about the security of account like 2fa, hacking case are increasing day by day...

[TheBeardedBaby]

I'll add one for now:

Have more options for polls. For example, ability to restrict certain ranks from participating, not showing the poll results after vote but to show the results only after the end of the poll.

In addition an option to delete the poll if you have put it by mistake.
Great list, can't wait to see theymos reaction on this one. I guess I have to wait a lot as usual.

I will add two more requests:
- report button from the search engine /For those with a report badges/
- An option to see if the post you are reporting is already reported by others, so we skip the double work on the both sides. /again for those with report badges/

[Jet Cash]

One merit is nothing for juniors. It would be far better to restrict newbies and juniors to starter boards, and leave the merit system alone.

Animated avatars would be a nightmare, If they are introduced, then please provide a method to disable them.

Removing merits from deleted posts would be a tremendous advantage in my opinion.

I'm not too bothered about badges or higher ranks.

Allowing a compact jpeg or png banner in a sig would be great, but charging for it would mean that only the spammers would use it. I think it would be far better to allow it for contributions to the stability of the forum.

[hilariousetc]

• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).[/b]

I don't think this is the good feature for implementation ,it will affect the popularity of forum.

No, it will effect the quality of the forum and greatly so. If you don't contribute anything here and get merit or aren't going to cough up for a donator rank then you shouldn't be allowed to spam away and earn here by posting rubbish. People are literally coming here with no knowledge or interest in bitcoin other than they just got told you can earn here. Many can't speak English to an acceptable standard so they just garble out nonsense or copy and paste. This can't be acceptable.

for this we can make the limit of posting like 20 words or more.

Then people would just make sure their posts are 20 words or characters or whatever and would just make things worse:

Give me bounty. Very good. I like the Project. Great time. Much support. When is airdrop? I like free money. Blah blah blah. Is this twenty words yet?

there should be some features about the security of account like 2fa, hacking case are increasing day by day...

2fa is coming on the new forum, but if that isn't coming anytime soon then I agree it should be implemented here.

One merit is nothing for juniors. It would be far better to restrict newbies and juniors to starter boards, and leave the merit system alone.

I'm suggesting at least one merit. Currently it's nothing. I wouldn't be against it being 2/3/4/5 or more etc. You could even bump up the Member merit requirement to something else. Personally, I think I would probably prefer something like Junior should be at least one merit but only Members and above can have a signature. That way you would still need ten merit to get a signature which spammers will struggle to get. Currently anyone can have a signature as soon as they've hit Junior and this is being colossally exploited by farmers and bounty abusers. It's so bad even bots often become Juniors now. Bots will never even get one merit.  Theymos has also stated he is against restricting new members just to one board so this almost certainly isn't going to happen.

Animated avatars would be a nightmare, If they are introduced, then please provide a method to disable them.

You can already disable avatars, but those are just some of the examples of possible perks, not they should definitely have these rewards. I'm not a huge fan of animated avatars either, but people have already worked out how to have them here anyway.

Allowing a compact jpeg or png banner in a sig would be great, but charging for it would mean that only the spammers would use it. I think it would be far better to allow it for contributions to the stability of the forum.

It would only be for the Premium rank. I don't think spammers will pay $1000 for it or whatever. You could also give it as a reward for the 'very high merited' user rank or Legendaries or whatnot.

- An option to see if the post you are reporting is already reported by others, so we skip the double work on the both sides. /again for those with report badges/

Maybe, this post has been reported by x amount of users, though maybe people would get annoyed if they see this on their own posts, especially if the reports remain unhanded. The more people that report it though will get the attention of the mods quicker and if it's something multiple users are reporting then it's likely urgent.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Payment for being a Merit Source, even if it’s something low like $100 per month.

[Jet Cash]

Payment for being a Merit Source, even if it’s something low like $100 per month.

I'm not sure that is a good idea - giving them the ability to fly a png/jpg sig would be good though.

[hilariousandco]

Payment for being a Merit Source, even if it’s something low like $100 per month.

Yeah, this isn't going to work. People will just want to become a merit source for all the wrong reasons then. I have no issue in giving merit out to those who contribute to the community and am happy to do it, but I don't think sources should be paid.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Payment for being a Merit Source, even if it’s something low like $100 per month.

Yeah, this isn't going to work. People will just want to become a merit source for all the wrong reasons then. I have no issue in giving merit out to those who contribute to the community and am happy to do it, but I don't think sources should be paid.

No problem boss

[Vod]

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

You can't hide evidence by deleting posts.

We still know who you sent it to and how many you sent - we just don't know the content of the post.

Example:  https://bpip.org/smerit.aspx?to=PavelRostov
It says "Deleted Post" for each post that has been removed.

[The Cryptovator]

• Restrict posting/reply on Marketplace (Altcoins) board & disable signeture for newbie & Jr. Members.

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

You can't hide evidence by deleting posts.

We still know who you sent it to and how many you sent - we just don't know the content of the post.

Example:  https://bpip.org/smerit.aspx?to=PavelRostov
It says "Deleted Post" for each post that has been removed.

We can see only merit history. But we will not able to see the post really it's deserve merit or not. Delete option should be disable from merited post.

Easily fixed.  I can start recording the content of merited posts as soon as they are mertted.  I can display that content if the post is deleted.

Thoughts?

It will be great.

[hilariousandco]

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

You can't hide evidence by deleting posts.

We still know who you sent it to and how many you sent - we just don't know the content of the post.

Example:  https://bpip.org/smerit.aspx?to=PavelRostov
It says "Deleted Post" for each post that has been removed.

You can. People can merit shit posts or a copy and pastes. What happens if someone gives a large merit to a deleted post? We can't see the content whether it was deserved or not. Most times it probably wont be. Huge loophole in my opinion.

[AdolfinWolf]

I can't find the thread anymore, but one user suggested to remove to ability of (low-ranked) members to make locked threads in the marketplace section.
I think this would go a long way to prevent the autobuy scams that a lot of Jr/Newbie members are pulling off.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1353400.0

Animated avatars would be a nightmare, If they are introduced, then please provide a method to disable them.

Aren't these already a thing? See bill's profile, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=370611

[Vod]

• If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).

You can't hide evidence by deleting posts.

We still know who you sent it to and how many you sent - we just don't know the content of the post.

Example:  https://bpip.org/smerit.aspx?to=PavelRostov
It says "Deleted Post" for each post that has been removed.

You can. People can merit shit posts or a copy and pastes. What happens if someone gives a large merit to a deleted post? We can't see the content whether it was deserved or not. Most times it probably wont be. Huge loophole in my opinion.

Easily fixed.  I can start recording the content of merited posts as soon as they are mertted.  I can display that content if the post is deleted.

Thoughts?

[hilariousandco]

Easily fixed.  I can start recording the content of merited posts as soon as they are mertted.  I can display that content if the post is deleted.
Thoughts?

Sure, if you can. I think it would help a lot.

[leetlezee]

- I think there should be an option to report a member, instead of an individual post. The format could include selecting a common reason for reporting (Sig Campaign Spam Poster / Plagiarism / Off-Topic with a comment section for other possible reasons), and then have it only alert a moderator once several people (maybe 5-10?) have reported the same member. Would reduce number of reports and probably be more effective in eliminating the worst offenders.

- a twist on your suggestion for a sub forum on BCT for highly merited members. Instead of merit as a req, you have "bouncers" who let people into the "club" based on looking through their post history and determining if they contribute value to the forum (not that every post has to be long and philosophical, but is on topic, and actually adds to the conversation). Perhaps a thread could be started for people to submit an "application" to the club. And as the club grows, you could add a number of "Suggesters", who can suggest members for selection into the club (to be approved by a bouncer), and as the club gets big enough, a major change could be implemented to the forum across the board where only those "in the club" have privileges on the forum (such as avatars, sigs, starting threads, etc). I know it will seem too exclusive or elitist to some, but it could be a possible solution to many of the issues currently plaguing the forum.

- an alternative to the idea above is simply adding more (maybe a lot more) moderators. If this happens in conjunction with making it a little harder to get to Jr Member (or at least the first rank where you can have a sig), I think most of the bots / crap-posters would be weeded out. You just have to make it hard enough to be not worth their while.

- what if merit--all merit--slowly deteriorates over time? This could help solve some issues--for example, members who got grandfathered into the merit system with a high rank, but do not post anything worth meriting. Over time, their rank would deteriorate unless they step up their game.

- an alternative to showing on each post if a member has been reported by other members, only have it show up when you click on "report to moderator".

[Vod]

- I think there should be an option to report a member, instead of an individual post.

- what if merit--all merit--slowly deteriorates over time? This could help solve some issues--for example, members who got grandfathered into the merit system with a high rank, but do not post anything worth meriting. Over time, their rank would deteriorate unless they step up their game.

You can write whatever you want in the box provided, so if it is a user issue, just say so there.

Merit should not deteriorate.  If I make a good post, what makes that post less valuable over time?