Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements

[zen83m]

my announcement post now it's not even visible clearly!

[criz2fer]

It would be better to delete the accounts that reach 6 months without a merit. Make the wall thicker to prevent spamming.

Also newbies with no activity within a certain month. This would also lessen the necro account that could be use by account farming.

By the way, I think in the next few months, restrictions & requirements will be more tighter if the evaluation of spammers will not be lessen.

[Manuel05]

Well the good part about the demotion is reducing spam and 36 new merit source have been added to the forum. I am sad i got demoted but hey! I just have to keep replying and hopefull i get noticed.

[94K]

Due to excessive garbage-posting, you now need 1 merit to be a Jr Member. All existing Jr Members who didn't meet the requirement were demoted. Also, newbies can no longer set any signature or personal text.

Note that this does not affect:
 - PM rate-limiting, which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
 - "You must wait ___ seconds...", which is based purely on activity & whitelisted status.
 
But it does affect:
 - Voting in polls
 - Patroller jurisdiction
 - The "ignore newbie PMs" option.
 - "The body is omitted from this email because the sender is a newbie."
 - BBCode limits
 - Reduced-accuracy link filtering
 - Board restrictions

Many of these limitations can be eliminated with a copper membership. In particular, you can set a signature at Member level if you wear a copper membership.

One reason that I was hesitant to do this before is that there are an awful lot of newbie restrictions, and I don't want the forum to be unwelcoming to good newbies. I'll think about tying some of those to activity instead of rank in the future.
 
With help from DdmrDdmr, I just added 36 new merit sources, which should help newbies achieve the requirement. But if you're incapable of posting anything worthwhile, then you will never rank up, and you shouldn't: this isn't the forum for you.

This is really a good idea to stop those posting garbage. This new development will never stop me from posting. I will continue making my good posts until the merit sources sees me and merit me. Thanks very much Theymos.

[Delphinus]

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

You didn't award merit to a quality post, you gave merit out of pity.

Found the cause of our difference of opinion. It's not pity, but I do have the opinion that 100 reasonable posts are worth the same as 1 excellent post.
In my view, that's still good for the forum because it increases activity of the members. If I want to read excellent blog posts, I can also go to Medium. On Bitcointalk, I enjoy reading the discussion that follows and the interaction between the members.

The people I have merited have not made the single excellent post, but surely contributed to the discussion with at least 100 reasonable posts. That does deserve a jr. member rank in my opinion, to reward them for their efforts (even though I wouldn't be able to point at a single post). It's only the second lowest rank  

Either way, I think we can close the discussion with the conclusion that it's good that we all have merit to give and everyone has their own preferences for giving it out. Diversity will make the forum thrive.

[dat.ho12492]

Congrats!
If only there would be more like you / again, sarcasm avalanche

Yes, indeed. Let's only make merit available for highly educated people who speak fluent English. That won't decimate the forum at all.

We're talking about a single merit for people who have been active on the forum for months. Although you might not agree with the quality of their posts, they are real people trying to make a contribution the best way they can. These people are not here just for bounties or spam. The posts you quoted as "their worst" actually proof that.

It doesn't matter if you awarded 10 or 1 or 1 million, it also doesn't matter how much time that user has spent on the forum.
The single thing that matter is the quality of the post....

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

You didn't award merit to a quality post, you gave merit out of pity.

I think you have been in a very high position in this forum for a long time and what you see are just poor quality articles then you try to judge and give negative opinions, more precisely, you are asking too high with others. Because you are standing in a high place and just playing or talking to people in high places, people lower than you are just ants in your eyes, you may not be satisfied with what I say but this is the truth
You are lacking respect for others and, of course, you can continue to judge and say I'm not good, "he is rubbish", "all that you write is just garbage and poor quality". That is what you are doing everyday, right? )

[MadCryptoLover]

Buying merit or normal ranks is like buying yourself a bunch of trophies to put on your shelf. It's stupid, and it's an insult to everyone who achieved it legitimately. I can't see ever doing that. I don't particularly mind letting people pay for some of the privileges of these things, such as with copper membership, but it should be a parallel system.

Copper membership is good. Now, if you want to participate in signature campaigns, you can either pay the $10-$20 for copper membership or accomplish the herculean task of making one good post. I don't think that it's unreasonable in either case.

If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end. Demanding money in order to bypass a broken system would be really bad. But AFAICT the merit system actually is reasonably effective at identifying good posters.

Been a little busy for a few days. Today I logged in and saw this new rule implemented. Personally, I loved it. This will really help eliminating crap postings in the forum. A very good step indeed.

I really don't mind paying 20$ for copper membership. Can you please direct me to the thread with the benefits of copper membership? Thanks.

[MagicSmoker]

Found the cause of our difference of opinion. It's not pity, but I do have the opinion that 100 reasonable posts are worth the same as 1 excellent post.

In my view, that's still good for the forum because it increases activity of the members. If I want to read excellent blog posts, I can also go to Medium. On Bitcointalk, I enjoy reading the discussion that follows and the interaction between the members.

No, no, no, no! The whole point of this new restriction is because too many people have believed in the idea that "quantity has a quality all on its own"!

Furthermore, there is almost no discussion between members in spam megathreads - instead they consist of dozens to hundreds of pages of people responding to the OP.

There is almost zero chance that some barely functionally literate person will add something new to a discussion on the 50th "why bitcoin crashing" thread in the last month, and definitely not after 50 fucking pages of replies to such a thread.

[Dacosta Osei-Tutu]

At long last this policy has finally been implemented. A lot of old members have been complaining about the rate at which spam posts have been destroying the image of this forum and have been suggesting a lot of possible solutions to help solve this problem. Now that this has been implemented, I hope we will see a positive change in the forum soon. Well done Thymos

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Found the cause of our difference of opinion. It's not pity, but I do have the opinion that 100 reasonable posts are worth the same as 1 excellent post.

I strenuously disagree with that, since spammers produce exactly that.  Sure, the posts might be "reasonable" if you look closely enough at them, they're usually pretty poorly written and cranked out only to earn money here.

However, I do agree with this:

Let's only make merit available for highly educated people who speak fluent English.

This is the standard I've always had, except that you can't really tell someone's education level by the way they post.  You could be a high school dropout with a penchant for reading and therefore be relatively uneducated yet very literate.  I've always looked for well-constructed posts to merit, and that might be a tough standard here, but I think it's a necessary one.  Others might not agree, and that's fine.  Everyone is different, and I think this is a good change and will work itself out with time.

Same here I'm sad as I'm demoted to newbie, I'm doing my best as I can but this system will hurt me. I hope someone that understand me can review my post and I can continue to grow in here. Honestly I'm not spammer I'm learning this technology.

That's what they all say.  I took a quick look at your posts, and they're all short, generic posts that you were obviously making in order to get paid or to rank up.  You don't have a signature anymore, but I would suspect that you did wear some advertising in that space up until a few hours ago, right? 

Either way, merit doesn't have anything to do with trying to learn.  If you want to do that, it doesn't matter what rank you're at, does it?

[mayokaren]

oh sad my account ranked down to newbie but my posts was not a newbie poster at all, newbie need now at least 1 merit to rank up to jr. member and I think my account now should have 1 merit can somebody check my posts to be a jr. member.

Same here I'm sad as I'm demoted to newbie, I'm doing my best as I can but this system will hurt me. I hope someone that understand me can review my post and I can continue to grow in here. Honestly I'm not spammer I'm learning this technology.

[swaggerkeme]

Great, I think this would help promote good and quality posts if you want to rank up. Am sure this is a step in the right direction, we shall all work hard to post good quality posts always.

[stompix]

I think you have been in a very high position in this forum for a long time and what you see are just poor quality articles then you try to judge and give negative opinions, more precisely, you are asking too high with others. Because you are standing in a high place and just playing or talking to people in high places, people lower than you are just ants in your eyes, you may not be satisfied with what I say but this is the truth
You are lacking respect for others and, of course, you can continue to judge and say I'm not good, "he is rubbish", "all that you write is just garbage and poor quality". That is what you are doing everyday, right? )

Yup, you've got me! This is what I do every day, I'm wasting my time judging ants! You should see the alimony some of them get !!!

You're mistaking something, I'm not asking anything from you or from any poster here, not a single thing, it's you who came here and begged for merit!  Since you are the one demanding merit from others, then it's pretty damn obvious you should post something that deserves merit in their eyes, not by your standards.  

Of course, you can show everybody that I was wrong and you were right! Earn more merits!
Wouldn't that be great for the entire forum?

Either way, I think we can close the discussion with the conclusion that it's good that we all have merit to give and everyone has their own preferences for giving it out. Diversity will make the forum thrive.

Yeah, we can close it, especially since you have an almost dedicated thread

[aqila baruroh]

I really appreciate what you have done to reduce spam in this forum. applause for "THEYMOS"

[justsimpleram]

I was shock about this news but I happy with it because this forum will become more cleaner because of this. Because recently I just reading some of the post here are out of the topic and nonsense  at all. So this is the chance for the jr.member to prove that they deserve to earn their merit. And because of this I hope this forum will be more helpful to all of us.

[posi]

NEWBIE SHOULD BE GIVEN MORE

Yes, newbie should be given more but alot of newbie account holder have abused their chances cause back in the early 2016 newbie were allow to join signature campaign, so the restriction rules are implemented base on what's going on inside the forum.

[dat.ho12492]

I think you have been in a very high position in this forum for a long time and what you see are just poor quality articles then you try to judge and give negative opinions, more precisely, you are asking too high with others. Because you are standing in a high place and just playing or talking to people in high places, people lower than you are just ants in your eyes, you may not be satisfied with what I say but this is the truth
You are lacking respect for others and, of course, you can continue to judge and say I'm not good, "he is rubbish", "all that you write is just garbage and poor quality". That is what you are doing everyday, right? )

Yup, you've got me! This is what I do every day, I'm wasting my time judging ants! You should see the alimony some of them get !!!

You've mistaken something, I'm not asking anything from you or from any poster here, not a single thing, it's you who came here and begged for merit!  Since are the one demanding merit from others, then it's pretty damn obvious you should post something that deserves merit in their eyes, not by your standards.  

Of course, you can show everybody that I was wrong and you were right! Earn more merits!
Wouldn't that be great for the entire forum?

Either way, I think we can close the discussion with the conclusion that it's good that we all have merit to give and everyone has their own preferences for giving it out. Diversity will make the forum thrive.

Yeah, we can close it, especially since you have an almost dedicated thread

I'm sorry but I do not go beg merit and as you have seen, my merit just increased in the last few hours, and I did not do anything to get it, Delphinus gave me just because he felt I deserve it. And you're wrong, that's the exact thing that I think people see very clearly because you are just trying to prove to people their mistakes and then want to remove them from the forum, constantly attacking others with words that lack respect, and okay, this is your forum and you are the master, i'm just a coward and stupid in your thinking

[examplens]

Buying merit or normal ranks is like buying yourself a bunch of trophies to put on your shelf. It's stupid, and it's an insult to everyone who achieved it legitimately. I can't see ever doing that. I don't particularly mind letting people pay for some of the privileges of these things, such as with copper membership, but it should be a parallel system.

Copper membership is good. Now, if you want to participate in signature campaigns, you can either pay the $10-$20 for copper membership or accomplish the herculean task of making one good post. I don't think that it's unreasonable in either case.

If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end. Demanding money in order to bypass a broken system would be really bad. But AFAICT the merit system actually is reasonably effective at identifying good posters.

Been a little busy for a few days. Today I logged in and saw this new rule implemented. Personally, I loved it. This will really help eliminating crap postings in the forum. A very good step indeed.

I really don't mind paying 20$ for copper membership. Can you please direct me to the thread with the benefits of copper membership? Thanks.

With copper membership, you have almost the same rights as Member rank on the forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2385104.msg24371150#msg24371150

[mahdie88]

This Law is now implemented and nothing to do now, all newbies that got demoted including me will just need to interact to on other thread and help each other. Not by the Bounties Only, Bounty Hunters are more active in the forum since we need to be Jr. Members for some project that newbies are not accepted. this is a sad story but for sure this will be a great idea that once you are here you have to follow, stop posting reports and move your self to other forum and help people needs your ideas. This maybe my sad days but I will try to work hard because this is my way to enjoy as bounty hunters.

[Pr3ko]

Great work theymos... I know this might have been a difficult decision to take considering the various factors at play buy I am very optimistic that this would help increase the quality of posts that members of this great forum make.
I urge all Jr.  Member ranks to take this at heart and make posts that are relevant to the topic and of good quality and the senior members will not deny us the merits.
Enjoy the week folks.