Suggestion to make rank-up more difficult

[coinlocket$]

I don't think is too easy to rank up.

I'd love to see a script to check retroactive merit transactions from Theymos side (AFAIK he is the only one who can see IPs) to check if merit has been sent from the same IP to alts. (also trust)
It would be fun to see.

[1714193946]

1714193946

[1714193946]

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[BD Crypto]

But, in my opinion, ranking up is way too easy now.

I agree with you but it's also true that high ranked users send merits to other high ranked users.But they don't give merits so much to  those who are working hard to prove them.
That's why Newbies are getting disappointed and approaching to make plagiarized posts.

[JeromeTash]

But, in my opinion, ranking up is way too easy now.

I agree with you but it's also true that high ranked users send merits to other high ranked users.But they don't give merits so much to  those who are working hard to prove them.
That's why Newbies are getting disappointed and approaching to make plagiarized posts.

You agree with OP and then you end up saying that newbies find it hard to rank up? Don't see that you are contradicting your statements?
Maybe the newbies you are talking about are posting in the wrong places like Bounty threads, ICO spam threads etc. I have seen so many newbie accounts that make contributions in the forum earn merits even on their very first post. Stop having such a negative mind if you ever want to receive any Merits


Ranking up shouldn't be made more difficult either. It's not a competition or a game that has so many difficulty levels for God's sake 
The purpose of the Merit system was to kill spam and account farming, period.

[Watoshi-Dimobuto]

- for ranking up to Jr. Member you need just 1 merit; for Member you need only 10. Indeed, it seems so hard for a Newbie to earn 1 merit  but it is not hard actually (explained below).

IIRC in the beginning there was only one section where newbies could post. Over time I think bitcointalk is generally relaxing restrictions and making it less difficult for new users to actively post, send messages and rank-up.

Newbies and Jr. members have restrictions placed upon them. Once they receive merit from more established members, they are given more relaxations as they rank up? It is good. It shouldn't be hard to rank up.

- activity allows to become Legendary in 2 years or 2 years and a few weeks. Literally speaking, in real world, legends are built in far more time, not just in 2 years.

Time runs faster on the internet. 2 years internet time is more than 5 years real time.

[Charles-Tim]

But, in my opinion, ranking up is way too easy now.

I agree with you but it's also true that high ranked users send merits to other high ranked users.But they don't give merits so much to  those who are working hard to prove them.
That's why Newbies are getting disappointed and approaching to make plagiarized posts.

You will have to change this mentality if you want to rank up, my very first topic earned a merit, my second topic earned ore than 5 merits, I have made topics that earned more than 15 merits, I joined less than four months ago. I was so patient to learn about the forum, knowing their rules and ways of meriting posts before starting at first.

I will advice you to be positive about high rank members still give merits to low rank members, study the high rank members, knowing how they comment to topics, there will be similar things like that later again, comment like them and they will not hesitate to rank your post. Also check merited posts to improve yours. Good luck.

[Chrystora123]

I feel the rules applied by the moderators in this forum already have heavy considerations..  making ranking even more difficult will only make this forum a closed forum because people who just joined are subject to very heavy rules compared to old members.  I would rather agree with strict rules in registering (not ranking up) in this forum, such as applying KYC or other strict rules before registering or members who have joined for a long time (no difference)..

[UserU]

I feel the rules applied by the moderators in this forum already have heavy considerations..  making ranking even more difficult will only make this forum a closed forum because people who just joined are subject to very heavy rules compared to old members.  I would rather agree with strict rules in registering (not ranking up) in this forum, such as applying KYC or other strict rules before registering or members who have joined for a long time (no difference)..

We don't need KYC on this forum. Else, that pretty much defeats the Trust system in the first place.

[o_e_l_e_o]

such as applying KYC or other strict rules before registering

I'll get right on that, just as soon as hell freezes over.

[Rikafip]

I would rather agree with strict rules in registering (not ranking up) in this forum, such as applying KYC or other strict rules before registering or members who have joined for a long time (no difference)..

Regarding KYC part (something that will never happen on this forum), you might wanna reconsider your stance. I suggest that you read topic made by @1miau Why KYC is extremely dangerous – and useless where it is nicely explained dangers of giving your documents and info to 3rd parties, and that s not as good and effective as you might think. KYC is not a solution, if anything it is part of the problem.

[GazetaBitcoin]

I would rather agree with strict rules in registering (not ranking up) in this forum, such as applying KYC or other strict rules before registering or members who have joined for a long time (no difference)..

[...] I suggest that you read topic made by @1miau Why KYC is extremely dangerous – and useless where it is nicely explained dangers of giving your documents and info to 3rd parties, and that s not as good and effective as you might think. KYC is not a solution, if anything it is part of the problem.

Additionally to 1miau's very thorough topic, I'd suggest also a topic of mine which depicts other dangers associated with KYC: Governs are coming for the traders!. To be more precise, the topic shows the great dangers which may occur once that the govern has your personal information -- personal information given willingly (through KYC) by the people to centralized exchanges or banks. I believe the topics are complementary about the dangers determined by KYC, each of them covering different aspects.

[GazetaBitcoin]

Meaning it took me 109d 4h 59' 34" in order to reach the threshold for Sr. Member rank (and, respectively, I obtained this achievement with 56d 8h 45' 15" before the date when my activity would allow).

today at 17.24:21 I just reached the necessary merits for becoming a Hero, while I'm still a Full Member, having a merits vs activity ratio of 2.12.

As my first merit was received on Friday, Oct. 25th, 2019, at 11:55:50AM, it means it took me only 163d 5h 28' 31" to earn the Hero threshold, earlier with 240d 7h 8' 59" than the moment when my activity would allow me

On October 16th 2020, at 15:29:53 I received my 1000th merit (thanks nullius!), the threshold necessary for becoming Legendary member, while I'm still a Sr. Member. I managed to obtain this achievement in less than a year since I received my first merit. So it's doable It took me just 357d 3h 34' 03" to reach this milestone. Considering that I obtained my first 500 merits in 163 days, it took me an amount of time just a bit longer for obtaining the other 500 (~194 days).

My current merits vs. activity ratio is 2.60 while my merits vs. posts ratio is 0.70.

Therefore I'll repeat what I said in the OP and in another post inside this topic:

- practically, all you need in order to rank up is to be a honorable person and to wait. Honorable person means the following: to not spam, to not scam, to not plagiarize and post what you think is helpful here. To act as a normal person. And users will appreciate your work. They will give you merits if you post useful consideration and if you don't try to cheat the system. So merit barrier is not a real barrier at all if you act with good intentions.

Given the above mentioned details, I still believe that the rank-up should be a bit more difficult.

Now all I need to do to become Legenday per se is to obtain the required activity. Meaning the "to wait" part. Of course, I won't resume to just waiting and posting low value post just for increasing my activity. I'm not that type. But obtaining the merit threshold for becoming Legendary still seems too easy. For being Legendary you need 775-1030 activity. I'll surpass the 775 activity on November 3rd, 2021 (I'll have 784 activity at that activity update) and I'll reach 1036 activity on the activity update from June 29th, 2022. So I earned my merits for being Legendary with 1 year and ~3 weeks earlier than reaching 775 activity and with 1 year and 8.5 months earlier than reaching 1030 activity (in case I'll be unlucky enough to get promoted after reaching the upper threshold of 1030 activity points).

Due to the above mentioned statistics, I want to encourage all honorable members to keep doing what they're doing and they'll be rewarded. Obtaining 1000 merits is not impossible and also not hard. Just act with decency, be respectful, share your wisdom and try to help the forum as much as you can, either that means to report posts, to flag scammers, spammers, plagiarists, to help newbies, to answer questions and so on. Bring your contributions on the areas where you have knowledge! And you'll see, ranking up won't see too hard!

[DdmrDdmr]

Determining whether it’s easy or not to rank-up is a subjective matter, but objectively it stills doesn’t seem like a simple thing to achieve, be it for whatever set of underlying reasons. This is a summary of the accounts, created in 2017, that have been merited at some point, and have ranked-up at least one level:



Theoretically, all those accounts have had the time to rank-up to Legendary (perhaps the trailing December 2017 created accounts still need another cycle in the worst case scenario). The numbers indicate that only 0,74% of those accounts have made it to Legendary, and 0,95% to Hero Member. Seems a pretty small subset of those 2017 created and merited accounts (I don' track unmerited ones).

Now, of course, there are many factors that play here: available time, stamina, expressiveness, the treated topics, novelty, and so forth, so we can’t really distinguish in the numbers those accounts really made the effort from those that didn’t, but even so, from an objective point of view, the numbers seem smallish to me, and don’t stand behind a need to increase rank difficulty.

[Rikafip]

Therefore I'll repeat what I said in the OP and in another post inside this topic:

Given the above mentioned details, I still believe that the rank-up should be a bit more difficult.

Yet again I have to disagree with you my fellow cinephile & spambuster, and repeat what I said before, that just because it was easy for you to reach Legendary merit requirement way ahead of the curve doesn't mean that it should be made harder in general. You are not an average bitcointalk user, not by time spent here and your knowledge, you even have experience in running news website, and when theymos decided on those numbers, he probably had an average  users in mind, and not experienced writers, crypto experts and generally creme de la creme of the forum.

By even doubling current merit requirements it wouldn't change anything for you while it would discourage those that are not on the same level. Based on all available metrics new users are rare, forums are not as popular as they were 10-15 years ago so there is no reason to make additional obstacles when main purpose of merit system is to prevent spammers ever reaching higher ranks and not make some kind of "forum elite".

Before introducing something like that, you have to ask yourself how exactly would that improve quality of the forum as I honestly don't see how would that happen. As I said before, new users are rare, especially good enough, just look at this interesting fact shared by @suchmoon the other day

A few notes on the new data:

• Banned and Active numbers are lower and higher respectively for the more recent months for obvious reasons (I even removed September from the Active chart because it looked too weird). However it's quite interesting that Active number drops off very quickly. After a few months 99%+ users no longer post, not regularly anyway.
• More registrations don't result in more long-term activity. Look at the Dec 2017 - Jan 2018 boom.
• 80% of users never making a single post is just mind-boggling. I'll triple-check this to see if I didn't screw something up but so far it seems like that's an accurate number. Must be some bot farming going on.

99% of the new users give up after few months. I know that increased merit&activity requirement shouldn't  discourage quality members and those that are genuinely interested in crypto, but it might some of those that are new to all this and forums in general. Because of them, and all the others that struggle even now, I don't think that increased requirements is a good idea.

Or look at these numbers from @DdmrDdmr Merit Dashboard, rank of the people who created account between 1.1.2019-31.12.2019. Numbers are not the best to say the least, and show that it's not so easy for new users to rank up.


https://public.tableau.com/shared/B8ZB5M7FT?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link


Last but not the least, congrats on reaching 1000 merit, well deserved. Cheers!

[Darkelf11]

Ranking up is already difficult for the users of this forum. I do not think that it is better if we will make it more difficult. Let's say that some merits are earned through giveaways but not all merits are earned with that way. Still, you must be creative and constructive when creating your post, making sure that it is always on point. Before thinking about how many merits you will gain, you must first question yourself if this post you are creating helps the people in our bitcoin community.

[notblox1]

Maybe Legendary rank should be possible in 5-10 years, not in 2.

Due to the above mentioned statistics, I want to encourage all honorable members to keep doing what they're doing and they'll be rewarded. Obtaining 1000 merits is not impossible and also not hard. Just act with decency, be respectful, share your wisdom and try to help the forum as much as you can, either that means to report posts, to flag scammers, spammers, plagiarists, to help newbies, to answer questions and so on. Bring your contributions on the areas where you have knowledge! And you'll see, ranking up won't see too hard!

What you say may be true in some cases but I noticed it is not so easy for everyone to earn merits like in your case.
Ranking up even more harder in current situation would be terrible for this forum and your suggestion for reaching Legendary rank in 10 years... some of people will be dead before they ever get to this rank, and they would have no motivation to ever reach it.
This is forum and not a gulag or concentration camp.

Or look at these numbers from @DdmrDdmr Merit Dashboard, rank of the people who created account between 1.1.2019-31.12.2019. Numbers are not the best to say the least, and show that it's not so easy for new users to rank up.


https://public.tableau.com/shared/B8ZB5M7FT?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

That means there are no legendary members and only 5 are potential to become Legends in 2021 from that time frame.

[GazetaBitcoin]

[...]

Yet again I have to disagree with you my fellow cinephile & spambuster, and repeat what I said before, that just because it was easy for you to reach Legendary merit requirement way ahead of the curve doesn't mean that it should be made harder in general. You are not an average bitcointalk user, not by time spent here and your knowledge, you even have experience in running news website, and when theymos decided on those numbers, he probably had an average  users in mind, and not experienced writers, crypto experts and generally creme de la creme of the forum.

99% of the new users give up after few months

Or look at these numbers from @DdmrDdmr Merit Dashboard, rank of the people who created account between 1.1.2019-31.12.2019. Numbers are not the best to say the least, and show that it's not so easy for new users to rank up.


https://public.tableau.com/shared/B8ZB5M7FT?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

I understand what you're saying. But I'm thinking that maybe not the difficulty of ranking up is the problem with all these account. It is possible that their lack of determination brought them in this situation. If these users would have been motivated to rank up and to help the forum and to help themselves too by learning from the forum, then those numbers may be bigger. It's hard to find a motivation though. Indeed, maybe for some the rank up criteria may look hard. But in case they don't even try to achieve the criteria, the criteria will never be filled. Besides, it's also possible that a substantial number of those which "gave up trying" were in part accounts created by entities similar to Vitor Services (just for spamming / farming purposes); they could be accounts of users which were interested only in earning money from the forum and seeing they can;t earn money so easy they decided to head to other horizons (such as CryptoTalk). I can't say for sure what percentage represents the two types I mentioned, but for sure some of them were in these cases. And they influenced the overall low numbers. For the rest of the users contributing to the low numbers shown by Ddmr I think, in part, are those which did not find a good motivation and, in part, those for which the rank up was indeed hard... But I certainly don;t believe that those numbers are so small only due to users which found ranking up to be too difficult.

That means there are no legendary members and only 5 are potential to become Legends in 2021 from that time frame.

Although what I'll write here won't change these low numbers, there is a chance to have more Legendary members. I'm not sure how Ddmr counted, but I think he counted those members by their actual rank. But some of them - let's say some of the Full Members - could have earned already the merits for being Hero but they're mentioned by Ddmr as Full Members because this is their actual rank. If this is the case, it means for sure that the real number of Hero will be bigger at some point in the future, when these Full Members with more than 500 merits will also meet the activity criterion for being Hero. And the same applies for other ranks. For example, there are 21 Sr. Members and 5 Heroes. From these, maybe a few earned already more than 1000 merits so for sure they'll be Legendary members when the activity will allow them. I'm not 100% sure if this is the case (Ddmr can correct me if I'm wrong).

Last but not the least, congrats on reaching 1000 merit, well deserved. Cheers!

Thank you so much, Rikafip! Much appreciated! It's been a nice journey to this point!

[Rikafip]

https://public.tableau.com/shared/B8ZB5M7FT?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

That means there are no legendary members and only 5 are potential to become Legends in 2021 from that time frame.

It isn't mathematically possible to have Legendary members among the accounts created during 2019. If you created account on January 1st 2019 and have reached merit requirement, you would still be a few months of activity short to reach Legendary activity requirement. And that's best case scenario in case RNG gods like you and you became Legendary with 775 activity.

Another thing is worrisome here, and that's the number of Sr Member accounts. Even if you made account on December 31st 2019, by now you would have enough activity to be Sr Member now, if you are an active user and have met merit requirement of course. Based on that data, only 22 managed that, out of 1100+ accounts that got at least 1 merit. When you put that in the percentage, less than 2% of the accounts created during 2019 and received at least 1 merit are Sr Members now.

To me that shows that even something like that is a problem for huge majority of new users, so there is no real need to increase that. If numbers were opposite, if we have inflation of new users reaching high ranks, then I would think of this request as valid.

I'm not sure how Ddmr counted, but I think he counted those members by their actual rank. But some of them - let's say some of the Full Members - could have earned already the merits for being Hero but they're mentioned by Ddmr as Full Members because this is their actual rank. If this is the case, it means for sure that the real number of Hero will be bigger at some point in the future, when these Full Members with more than 500 merits will also meet the activity criterion for being Hero. And the same applies for other ranks. For example, there are 21 Sr. Members and 5 Heroes. From these, maybe a few earned already more than 1000 merits so for sure they'll be Legendary members when the activity will allow them. I'm not 100% sure if this is the case (Ddmr can correct me if I'm wrong).

You are correct, only those that met both merit and activity requirements count among those 5 Hero, 21 Sr Member, 26 Full Member etc. Out of all those accounts created during 2019, four members earned more than 1000 merit: Ratimov, zasad@, efialtis and me.

[TopTort777]

GazetaBitcoin, if you suggest to create rank-up more difficult, then are you ready to repeat you path to Legendary once again ?

You already have some reputation on the forum so for your "account name" it will be easier to rank-up once again. But lets imagine you are new, unexperienced or anonymous on this forum. Will you be able to reach Legendary rank with, for example, 2000 merit + 2000 activity requirement? Maybe proper words will be "still have desire" or "still have strength" to repeat all that way once again?

[GazetaBitcoin]

GazetaBitcoin, if you suggest to create rank-up more difficult, then are you ready to repeat you path to Legendary once again ?

You already have some reputation on the forum so for your "account name" it will be easier to rank-up once again.

If you would have read the previous posts, you would have seen that I already stated that

If you really think that ranking system is very easy to attain. Why not you request to theymos to X2 your required merit to rank up so that you will find it more challenging.

However, if theymos reads this, he can double my barriers in ranking up. I accept this challenge

But lets imagine you are new, unexperienced or anonymous on this forum. Will you be able to reach Legendary rank with, for example, 2000 merit + 2000 activity requirement? Maybe proper words will be "still have desire" or "still have strength" to repeat all that way once again?

Well that's a good question. That's what I was talking about in my previous post: I think many new users lack the motivation needed for ranking up. Everybody should find what determines him/her the most in order to engage in a rank up until becoming Legendary. Even after obtaining the 1000 merits this motivation is still needed. In my case, for example, I have the merits, but not the activity. And for obtaining the necessary activity I am supposed to wait between 1 year and ~3 weeks and 1 year and 8.5 months. Of course, in this time I should be active.

Maybe finding the proper motivation is the most difficult thing... not the difficulty of the rank up system.

[stoat]

Any geek off the street is able to be a hero member now. mostly by posting pure bounty hunter bullshit. they merit each others posts too and it becomes a popularity contest of gaming the system.

This site needs to cater to real actual discussion not 5 line replies where someone repeats the same lame point over and over again in broken english.