Beginners Guide to all facets & quirks of Bitcointalk

[DiamondCardz]

This is designed to be a condensed explanation of all of the unique facets and quirks that Bitcointalk has which other forums generally lack. I understand there are topics explaining lots of these things separately, this aims to bring those together in one thread and shorten explanations significantly, as I think a lot of threads on these topics right now are too long for Newbies to actually bother reading.

This will range from what I call facets - which are things created by the administration team, such as the Trust & Merit systems, to what I call quirks which have naturally appeared, such as signature campaigns. It will both explain what these unique things are and what rules surround them.

Facets

Activity
Activity is one of the most important values associated with accounts on the forum. The idea of activity is to prevent people from spam-posting in order to move themselves up the ranks in the forum.

The most simple way of thinking about activity is this: For making a post every two weeks*, you will receive 14 'potential' activity points. For each of these 'potential' activity points to become a real activity point, you need to make a post on the forums at any time.

For instance, if you join the forum, and then post every week for a year, you will have posted in 26* two-week periods. This will give you 26 * 14 = 364 'potential' activity points. If you have made 200 posts then your real activity value will be 200, as you haven't 'activated' all of these potential activity points. If you have made 400 posts, you will have used all of your potential activity points up and so your activity value will be 364. This would make you a Sr. Member.

*These two week periods are fixed and start and end at the same time for all users. If you sign up in the middle of a period and post regularly, after a year it is very possible you may have posted in 27 two-week periods rather than 26. However, this is a one-off thing and so not important enough to care about.

Merit
Merit is a value which rewards users for making contributions that other forum users find valuable. If a user finds your post valuable, they can grant you Merit using the +Merit button on every post. In doing so they use up 'sMerit', which means spendable Merit. For each 1 Merit you receive, you gain 0.5 sMerit which can be sent to other users.

Asking for merit is heavily frowned upon and may result in negative feedback, which can effectively trash your account and reputation. Buying merit is against the forum rules completely.

Forum ranks
There are eight forum ranks which are obtainable through a mixture of gaining Activity and Merit. The requirements for these ranks are as follows:

Rank	Activity required	Merit required
Brand New	0	0
Newbie	1	0
Jr. Member	30	1
Member	60	10
Full Member	120	100
Sr. Member	240	250
Hero Member	480	500
Legendary	775 - 1030*	1000

*The activity requirement for Legendary is randomly generated for each user, in the range 775 to 1030.

Newbie restrictions & Copper Membership
If you are a Newbie, many actions on the forum will be off-limits to you. You will be restricted to posting in Newbie sections and unable to upload avatars, alongside many other restrictions.

To lift these restrictions, you must either rank up to Jr. Member (30 activity & 1 Merit), or purchase a Copper Membership. This gives you many of the permissions someone of natural Member rank would have, and lifts the Newbie restrictions.

Trust
Trust is a system based on three main concepts: Networks, Feedback, and Flags. Feedback is the most simple: any user can leave another user positive, neutral or negative feedback, with an explanation and an optional reference link, which will then appear on their profile. Whether it appears to you as "Trusted feedback" or "Untrusted feedback" depends on the next section.

Every user has a trust list which is used to build their trust network. This is a list of users that they 'trust' to give appropriate feedback. By default, your trust list is configured to use a 'depth' of 2. This means that you will not only trust the users on your trust list to give truthful feedback, but you will also trust the users that they trust to give truthful feedback as well. If your 'depth' is 1, you will only trust the users directly on your trust list, and if it is 3, you will trust the users on your trust list, the users they trust, and the users they trust. So on and so forth.

If you trust no-one, you will by default trust 'DefaultTrust', which is a list of users on the forum that are considered to curate good trust lists. It is created by looking at the trust lists of users with a reasonable amount of earned merit, amongst other requirements. See this post for a more detailed explanation.

The final part of the Trust system revolves around Flags. These are elevated warnings that can be placed on a users profile, and will show warnings for users under certain conditions.

A yellow flag - or newbie-warning flag - can be placed on a user if you believe that there are red flags indicating that anyone dealing with them risks losing money. This shows a # next to their trust for all users, and for Newbies and users with low login time, a flag on any thread they make on the forums. To be in effect this flag needs more people supporting it than opposing it.

A red flag - or scammer flag - can be placed on a user in the event of them violating a contract with you. This shows a red trade with extreme caution warning next to their trust, and red warning flags on threads they make for all users. To be in effect this flag needs 3 more supporters than opposes.

Flags require topics to be made with evidence backing up the flag.

Quirks

Quirks are things that are user-created, but occur commonly enough on the forum that it is important for you to know about them.

Staking addresses
If you plan to use Bitcointalk for an extended period of time, you may want to 'stake' a Bitcoin address that you have control over for purposes of identity verification in the future. That way, if there are ever doubts raised that your account may have been hacked, you can (mostly) quell these claims via a signed message from that staked Bitcoin address.

To stake your Bitcoin address, click here and post a bitcoin signed message stating your forum name, the date, and that you are the original owner of the account. You should use a Bitcoin address for which you and you only have the private key. Bitcoin signed messages can be generated in many wallet clients such as Electrum.

Signature campaigns (+ how not to get banned)
Signature campaigns are a method used by crypto-related companies to buy advertising space in the signatures of forum users. They can pay competitive rates, especially for users from countries in which the purchasing power of USD is high, but they come with some very important caveats:

• You shouldn't change how you use Bitcointalk if you join a campaign. If you clearly start forcing yourself to post on threads so that you can meet a post requirement, it will be obvious. Your posts will be of significantly lower quality and often barely address the topic at hand.
• Signature campaign managers are required to moderate their participant lists, and so if you start to make low quality posts, the best possible outcome for you is that you will be removed or blacklisted from a campaign.
• If you are not so lucky, low quality, spammy posts can result in forum staff deleting your posts and potentially banning you from the forums.
• Plagiarism can result in a temporary forum ban and a very long ban from being allowed to wear signatures on the forums.
• The best thing you can do is to take advantage of signature campaigns, but forget about them and don't let your posting habits be changed.
• If you morally object to a certain subject, e.g. gambling, you probably shouldn't join a gambling-related campaign.

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I'll add more to this in the future, if you have any ideas for facets/quirks that should be explained in a beginner's guide please let me know. Cheers all.

[1714793761]

1714793761

[1714793761]

1714793761

[Bttzed03]

I think newbie posting restriction and copper membership should be there somehow.

[DiamondCardz]

I think newbie posting restriction and copper membership should be there somehow.

Good idea, thanks. I've edited the original post to add some information about the newbie restrictions and copper membership under 'facets'.

[Julian ogan]

Good topic but already there are many threads about Merits, Activities, Ranks, Trust and Signature campaigns etc. Creating a duplicate thread will make Newbies to get confused about which one to refer. They can easily see the pinned posts on every board of the forum. The pinned post is more than enough to know the rules of the forum and how it works.

[DiamondCardz]

Good topic but already there are many threads about Merits, Activities, Ranks, Trust and Signature campaigns etc. Creating a duplicate thread will make Newbies to get confused about which one to refer. They can easily see the pinned posts on every board of the forum. The pinned post is more than enough to know the rules of the forum and how it works.

Hi, I respect your opinion but I don't agree with it. You say 'which one to refer' as if I'm trying to make this an authoritative source. I'm not, I just condensed the explanations (some are extremely long, sometimes needlessly so) into one thread of simple explanations of all the key aspects. Newbies don't bother reading all the different relevant threads on every section of the forum.

Part of the purpose of this thread is so I just need to link people who need help to a single thread only. I don't think it can cause any 'confusion' especially as everything in this thread is objectively true.