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

[hilariousetc]

Doesn't really prevent accounts being sold, and then claimed back though. I'm not sure what the forums stance on selling accounts, and who the rightful owner is, but I assume that they would look for information that might indicate that the account was sold, and see if the credential changes link up to that too.

An automated method to claim back your account could severely reduce account sales. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for an account, knowing the previous owner can claim it back at any moment?
Losing your bought account will just become an occupational hazard.

Or just severely increase account scams when sellers just take their accounts back after they've sold them. Most newbies won't be aware that they can be reclaimed in such a way and falling victim to this will become rife (unless theymos has though of a way to stop this). I still think we should allow users to purchase the bigger signatures via donating for Silver and Gold Membership etc. This would essentially kill the account sales market and account scams with it so it's win win for everyone and the forum gets the money instead of some account farmer or scammer. Users don't get scammed, the forum gets the money and users can have the bigger signature which is what they wanted in the fist place.

I also wonder what will happen to those users who can't sign a message posted here because the hacker deleted it but the address can still be found archived online or on one of the bitcointalk mirrors etc. There's also the issue of those who don't have a bitcoin address but can sign one from an alt coin wallet. I'm going to assume theymos' auto-recovery system will be bitcoin only?

[LeGaulois]

Newbies who buy accounts aren't that new. Have you already bought an account before you even know the forum? Ignorance is not an excuse, otherwise, I will stop paying my taxes today and I would say that I did not know.

As I said several times paying a fee is a goo idea. I remember reading a post from Theymos saying the forum doesn't need money. However, there are tons of charities that need it. So why not make an annual donation in Bitcointalk's name, based on the community choice? It can be Bitcoin-related or not.

[Piggy]

Doesn't really prevent accounts being sold, and then claimed back though. I'm not sure what the forums stance on selling accounts, and who the rightful owner is, but I assume that they would look for information that might indicate that the account was sold, and see if the credential changes link up to that too.

An automated method to claim back your account could severely reduce account sales. Who's going to pay hundreds of dollars for an account, knowing the previous owner can claim it back at any moment?
Losing your bought account will just become an occupational hazard.

I also wonder what will happen to those users who can't sign a message posted here because the hacker deleted it but the address can still be found archived online or on one of the bitcointalk mirrors etc. There's also the issue of those who don't have a bitcoin address but can sign one from an alt coin wallet. I'm going to assume theymos' auto-recovery system will be bitcoin only?

Deleted messages in the forum are not really deleted, they are just hidden from everybody. The admin can see them, same story for edited messages.

But i don't understand why going through all the trouble and time spent doing these researches (considering the fact there could be more important things to do with that time) on the account hacked/deactivated.

More importantly everyone should take the responsibility for safekeeping his account imo.

[hilariousetc]

Newbies who buy accounts aren't that new. Have you already bought an account before you even know the forum?

Lolwut? You got a source there? Newbies do buy accounts. Do you think it's just old timers that do? If newbies come here to earn and they realise they can buy an account then many of them do. Some people will just be told to buy an account straight away rather than wasting time trying to get merit and activity.

Ignorance is not an excuse, otherwise, I will stop paying my taxes today and I would say that I did not know.

This isn't relevant to anything. This forum essentially sanctions the sale of accounts, so newbies will think it's fine and ok to buy one. Their sale might even go through ok (assuming they don't get scammed), then hours or days later their account is taken back.

Deleted messages in the forum are not really deleted, they are just hidden from everybody. The admin can see them, same story for edited messages.

How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?

More importantly everyone should take the responsibility for safekeeping his account imo.

People should, but nobody is invincible or watertight with their security. The forum was hacked. Who's fault was that? Shit happens sometimes and anyone can slip up somewhere, doesn't mean they should just be left to languish in limbo for eternity.

[suchmoon]

How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?

I hope it won't be based on a post but rather set in account profile without the option to update or remove it (except perhaps using a signed message from the old address although that opens some loopholes). At least that's how I'd do it. I'm not theymos in case you're wondering.

[coinlocket$]

How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?
~

If he has no time or desire, he may perhaps delegate this "power" to global moderators.
I say maybe, because I do not know how this power works on the forum and I do not know if you can pass this skill or he needs to create a new rank with more powers than a global moderator.

[hilariousetc]

How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?

I hope it won't be based on a post but rather set in account profile without the option to update or remove it (except perhaps using a signed message from the old address although that opens some loopholes). At least that's how I'd do it. I'm not theymos in case you're wondering.

I've suggested addresses in profiles be logged before so they can be used, but they're not currently so the people who have already lost their accounts won't be able to restore them this way. Regardless of whatever system theymos does implement I'm almost certain there's still going to be cases that need manually reviewing for numerous reasons.

How is this going to help when admins aren't looking into hacked accounts? Many people have signed messages from addresses that are still visible, but they're just not being restored and theymos' auto-system likely isn't going to help that either as I doubt it will take into consideration deleted posts, but even if it does what if somebody has another or an older address posted. Can they still claim the account back?
~

If he has no time or desire, he may perhaps delegate this "power" to global moderators.
I say maybe, because I do not know how this power works on the forum and I do not know if you can pass this skill or he needs to create a new rank with more powers than a global moderator.

Well that would be the logical conclusion, but only theymos can initiate that. If it was going to happen then it likely would have already been done by now. Maybe he just doesn't trust anyone to do such things. With that being said, he did put my suggestion to create more admins or demi admins in the "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation" category so hopefully that will happen at some point. Workload also needs to be spread out between other staff members as well to lighten the load on everyone. More patrollers should be added and mods assigned to sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion.

[Piggy]

About the automated recovery system through BTC address: it would be enough to activate it at any time by binding it permanently from the profile page, you are given a message to sign and when confirmed that BTC address used is binded to your account. In some special cases theymos could intervene IF the binding was done by somebody who already stole an account.
When an account get compromised, you are asked to to sign a message and if confirmed you can get back your account.

The advantage of this change alone is that will probably be able to handle most of the cases on the long run as more and more account gets protected, the rest, those contested could still be checked manually.

[LogitechMouse]

I have suggested this opinion of mine a long time ago but got ignored (maybe I'm not that popular since I'm not that fluent at English.) .

I have suggested that the admins must put a rank requirement in Announcement section. As we can see, most ICO ANN are being bumped by newbies and Jr. Members although there are some Members and up who are joining the SPAM SQUAD. I think putting a rank requirement in posting on that section will significantly reduce the spamming problems there.

I should say a minimum rank of Member are the ones who can post there. Maybe some will say how will new members post their ICO projects there. The solution that I see is to purchase a Copper Membership in order for them to post there. How will Newbies and Jr. Members post on Announcement section? They must buy Copper Membership in order to post. In that way, there is a high chance that more members will purchase it and will add to the revenues of the forum.

Just a suggestion.

[HellRey]

Well that would be the logical conclusion, but only theymos can initiate that. If it was going to happen then it likely would have already been done by now. Maybe he just doesn't trust anyone to do such things. With that being said, he did put my suggestion to create more admins or demi admins in the "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation" category so hopefully that will happen at some point. Workload also needs to be spread out between other staff members as well to lighten the load on everyone. More patrollers should be added and mods assigned to sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion.

What kind of trust can we talk about when working on the forum, in reality you can trust only in yourself in the network, but as dozens of other moderators work there, it means that there is an opportunity to trust other people by placing some of their responsibility on them.
I also do not think that assigning another person the task of restoring user profiles will somehow violate the overall security of the forum and affect its operation. Especially it is possible to give a probationary period, and to make sure that a person copes wonderfully or not.
But until a person is appointed to this position, the problems of hacked accounts will not be solved for a long time.

[hilariousetc]

I have suggested this opinion of mine a long time ago but got ignored (maybe I'm not that popular since I'm not that fluent at English.) .

I have suggested that the admins must put a rank requirement in Announcement section. As we can see, most ICO ANN are being bumped by newbies and Jr. Members although there are some Members and up who are joining the SPAM SQUAD. I think putting a rank requirement in posting on that section will significantly reduce the spamming problems there.

I should say a minimum rank of Member are the ones who can post there. Maybe some will say how will new members post their ICO projects there. The solution that I see is to purchase a Copper Membership in order for them to post there. How will Newbies and Jr. Members post on Announcement section? They must buy Copper Membership in order to post. In that way, there is a high chance that more members will purchase it and will add to the revenues of the forum.

Just a suggestion.

Most suggestions are ignored (or at least not commented on), so don't take it personally. Maybe theymos has taken them into consideration also, but he rarely comments on such things individually. What you're suggesting has been mentioned before, as well as similar suggestions. I've suggested ICOs have to pay a fee to list here and lower-ranked members don't bump ICO threads to the top. Theymos did address some of these suggestions if you look back to page 5.

Well that would be the logical conclusion, but only theymos can initiate that. If it was going to happen then it likely would have already been done by now. Maybe he just doesn't trust anyone to do such things. With that being said, he did put my suggestion to create more admins or demi admins in the "OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation" category so hopefully that will happen at some point. Workload also needs to be spread out between other staff members as well to lighten the load on everyone. More patrollers should be added and mods assigned to sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion.

What kind of trust can we talk about when working on the forum, in reality you can trust only in yourself in the network, but as dozens of other moderators work there, it means that there is an opportunity to trust other people by placing some of their responsibility on them.
I also do not think that assigning another person the task of restoring user profiles will somehow violate the overall security of the forum and affect its operation. Especially it is possible to give a probationary period, and to make sure that a person copes wonderfully or not.
But until a person is appointed to this position, the problems of hacked accounts will not be solved for a long time.

It would depend on what sort of responsibilities and access they are given. There is obviously some trust required to be a moderator here. You can delete people's posts and threads, so you need to be trusted to not abuse that. A Global mod can issue bans and needs to be trusted not to just ban people he doesn't like. An admin has access to a lot of private info that mods don't such as people's IPs, and they are also able to reset users accounts and they need to be trusted with that. An unscrupulous admin could just reset accounts to an email they controlled then use that account as they wished. Unlikely to happen but it could. They might abuse their position to check users IPs or for alts as well. Depending on what sort of access they were given they could do something like what happened when the forum was hacked and scrape everyone's details and password hashes etc, but I think theymos is the only one who has root access here and even cyrus has limited admin powers or not full ones like theymos does. I'm sure there's other reasons as well, so there does need to be quite a lot of trust placed in an admin, even a 'demi' admin with limited powers.

[Makkara]

Well that would be the logical conclusion, but only theymos can initiate that. If it was going to happen then it likely would have already been done by now. Maybe he just doesn't trust anyone to do such things.

To demonstrate you are worthy theymos trust you can undertake a simple test, he will leave you in a room alone one hour sitting on a chair in front of a table. On the table there is a plate with delicious cookies, by the time he comes back if you haven't eaten the cookies you are in  

[RivAngE]

Today, as I was going through the daily spam once again, I was wondering why new accounts are created and spam with 0 merit since they won't get signature payments anyway; and then an idea came to me!
I went through most of the pages of this thread and I didn't find my idea suggested by anyone else, only something close which I'd like to improve on. The similar idea is mentioned bellow,

...
I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:

• 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.
...

OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance.
...

I figured that there are two possible reasons people create new accounts and increase their postcount with spam even though with 0 merit they won't get paid for signatures,

• Either they don't know that without merit they won't receive any payments from signature bounties. Most of the spammers obviously don't know English and don't research the forums at all.
• Or they're planning to trade merit after they've reached enough posts.

Proposed solution for case (A),
As mentioned by Theymos, a newbie welcome message explaining the rules guides etc. But because spammers won't bother reading them, force them into answering a quiz before they're allowed to post. The quiz could select 5 random questions from a pool of about 20-30 questions. It has to be multiple choice and it has to punish wrong answer with a time limit before they can answer again. Every time they fail to answer all questions correctly, they have to wait 1 hour for one wrong answer and up to 24 hours for 5 wrong answers. Every time they retry the quiz the questions will be shuffled and randomised so that they won't get the same questions every time. One of the questions will always be about the merit system, something that will force them to understand that without quality posting most campaign managers won't reward them.

Proposed solution for case (B),
This is something that the community must help to eradicate. Most, if not all, bounty managers require not only high rank but also not negative trust. If we give negative trust to spammers even if they have 0 merits we safeguard that the person behind this account won't start posting normally after 500 spam-posts, buy merit and then sell the account or farm campaigns with it. But right now the trust most of us give have no value. I noticed Theymos proposed a change to the DT (DefaultTrust) system so I have hopes that this might be improved in the near future.

Sorry for the long post, I hope I managed to keep everything simple and easy to understand.
I also hope you read my post even though I use a paid signature too and you didn't automatically qualify me for a spammer!

[matthewoz101]

Add a blockchain for voting. I want votes only to be made by holders of the Merit currency. This will stop potential spam bots to control the votes.

[LoyceV]

I have another suggestion that's not really important, but can be annoying. I've ran into it many times: if a user creates a wide post, it looks good on the forum. But in the user's post history, it totally messes up the layout.
Example: this post makes me scroll about 20 meter left and right in my post history (note that this last link will point to the wrong page in a few days).
I often run into this problem when I check the post history of a "bounty manager" in an altcoin ANN thread.

[hilariousetc]

I have another suggestion that I forgot about: The ability to 'share' ownership of the op of a thread so those relevant individuals can make changes to it. For instance, when you create the thread you can add 'co-owners/operators' who then can edit the thread the same as you can. This would be helpful for community-lead projects and threads like the Sig Campaign Overview where you can let a couple of trusted individuals make the required changes, or for businesses who have a couple of employees who can make the required changes instead of just relying on the person who created the thread. Obviously you would only grant access to those who you trust but I think this would be very helpful, especially for projects where the op may lose interest or not be as active as they once was.

I have another suggestion that's not really important, but can be annoying. I've ran into it many times: if a user creates a wide post, it looks good on the forum. But in the user's post history, it totally messes up the layout.
Example: this post makes me scroll about 20 meter left and right in my post history (note that this last link will point to the wrong page in a few days).
I often run into this problem when I check the post history of a "bounty manager" in an altcoin ANN thread.

Yeah, this is annoying, especially when you're going through someone's post history and trying to remove infringing posts.

[LoyceV]

I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:

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

No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified.

This was one of the most needed improvements, and I know many users support it. But from the "No", I never expected this would be the first suggestion that gets implemented!

[MagicSmoker]

I've been giggling like a little school girl all morning reading meta. Out-fucking-standing, is all I can say! And a special note of thanks to hilariousandco/etc for pushing the "1 merit to become a Jr. Member" suggestion repeatedly.

[hilariousetc]

I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:

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

No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified.

This was one of the most needed improvements, and I know many users support it. But from the "No", I never expected this would be the first suggestion that gets implemented!

1 down about tree fiddy to go. I was surprised by this and I'm glad theymos came round to it and I hope he starts to take more of my suggestions on board, but I still don't think this goes far enough though. I agree with one merit to become Junior but we should also remove Junior's signatures. Requiring ten merit to become a Member and get a sig would really sort the wheat from the chaff here. Far too easy to beg, buy or trade one merit and this will become rife. Ten is a much different ball game and becomes exponentially more difficult the more accounts you have. I think the users with one account will struggle but the people who are farming en mass will probably have earned enough money to buy merit and then trade it around their various accounts and I think this is something we're going to have to keep an eye out for.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

1 down about tree fiddy to go.

Yep, but this was a big one and I'd also like to thank you for pushing the idea for so long.  It certainly seemed like it wasn't being listened to from my perspective, but sometimes Theymos surprises everyone.

I've got so many members on ignore, it's not even funny and even with all of them I still can't keep up with all the garbage posters here.  I have no plans to modify that list, though I'll probably not be adding many more for now.  And as I said in another thread, I don't plan to lower my standards, but I'm going to try harder to seek good posts to merit--especially from the lower-ranked members.  Ranking up had gotten to be a little too slow, and it actually just got worse for Jr. Members who haven't yet earned a single merit.

It's all good though.  Got a huge smile on my face this morning, and I think I'm going to be tap dancing around the house later.  This is almost as good as when Theymos rolled out the merit system in January.