I don't think reputable / well known / long time users not being subject to pretty clear cut rules with a rather harsh punishment would set a good precedent.
The way I see it: altcoin giveaways aren't allowed because of the spam they cause. Krogothmanhattan's giveaways in Collectibles are appreciated by (most of) the users on that board. I wouldn't see it as an exception for a long time user, I'd see it as an exception for a user who has proven to be appreciated by other forum users.
And honestly, I can't get why thousands of brainless posts spamming Twitter and Facebook links aren't worse than this.That being said: I do appreciate you strictly apply the same rules to all users.
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As theymos has pointed out multiple times, he doesn't believe in definitive lists of rules or rule of law when it comes to forum policy. He's (publicly) made exceptions for certain rules in certain cases (e.g.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5346118.0 being allowed to stay in Speculation). However, AFAIK he hasn't made any exceptions when it comes to running altcoin giveaways. If he did, that's fine and Krogothmanhattan would be free to run his NFT giveaway with no issues. While I personally think that making exceptions to hardline rules with harsh punishments (as opposed to maybe making the punishment more lax) for reputable / well respected / long time / <
insert other criteria of notability here> users is a bad idea, I'm not the owner of Bitcointalk nor would I be arrogant enough to claim to know everything about what it takes to manage a community as old and as large as this forum.
The rule is not about intent, it's about the result of such actions - high volume of very low value disposable posts.
What if it's limited to only 16 or 100 users who can join? I've seen topics with much more replies for a small amount of Bitcoin (which is allowed in Games and rounds).
People would find ways to bypass the restrictions by framing giveaways as a series of giveaways (one ends, another begins), splitting giveaways across alts, etc. If we were to exempt certain giveaways from the "no altcoin giveaways" rule, IMO it should lean more on subjective measures (e.g. allowing community-focused or genuinely altruistic giveaways), rather than objective. While objective measures are usually much better (especially when it comes to clarity, consistent enforcement, reducing rule complexity and just general fairness), creating a hole in this rule gives bad actors a pretty big incentive (and ability) to game whichever objective measure was set. Sure, moderators would interpret the exceptions differently but users are free to appeal moderator decisions and over time what's allowed and what's not would start to emerge in a more concrete way.
You're free to disagree with the rule and attempt to get it changed
I tried. It failed.
Unless theymos is ideologically (or in some way practically) against altcoin giveaways, it makes sense for the rule to exist as it is right now. However, post bumping changes made to some boards, I think making a "Games and Rounds (Altcoins)" board, strapping the new bumping system to it and restricting all incentivized posting in exchange for altcoins to that board
shouldn't cause any major issues with spam. I can, however, see a couple of other (practical) reasons as to why he might not want to do that - (potentially) degraded quality of Google search results and the additional load on the database servers come to mind. But if neither of those are an issue and theymos isn't against the concept itself, I personally wouldn't be against such a change.
There are plenty of users who had pure intentions when giving away altcoins: they just wanted to give away actual money to promote crypto use (doing so via an established altcoin), they made a new experimental coin with actually innovative features and want to give other users some coins to test these features / uncover bugs, etc. The rule is not about intent, it's about the result of such actions - high volume of very low value disposable posts. If theymos set out to provide exceptions for certain cases (e.g. community-focused or genuinely altruistic giveaways), he would've done so and documented said exceptions somewhere. AFAIK he didn't so instead we have a blanket ban on altcoin giveaways that incentivize posting, no matter how pure or innocent the intentions are.
The forum might want to get better at deciding whether it wants to maintain its "we only have unofficial rules" stance.
The dark gray area might want to have a label on the topics that might've been approved by a mod and wouldn't ordinarily be allowed.
For example: "this topic violates rules 14 or 15, however the community elected to keep this topic where it was as they think this users' interpretations of the rules benefit the forum." - even if it worked a bit like the trust system so the mods don't get too full of stuff to do. Or just don't make them visible to certain users (such as: anyone under 100 distinct merit transactions or full/Sr members if you really want to avoid spam).
I'll get a bunch of sassy and sarky responses from this but we could maybe try to express some slight affinity towards users and notice them a bit. Krogoth has done a lot of free raffles and given a lot back to the forum, it'd be nice for the community to try to look into users' histories a bit before posting.
There are official rules, they just aren't (officially) framed in such a way that you would expect. Due to theymos's aforementioned attitude towards definitive lists of rules, the actual rules are more of a loose collection of policies left up to the moderators to interpret. Some of them are more concrete (e.g. hardline "no, you can't do this" rules posted and usually stickied in a board by theymos), others - more up to interpretation (e.g no trolling or
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=749961.0). Each of those policies are subject to a moderator's discretion through assessment of individual situations. What my (unofficial) thread attempts to achieve is to compile all these loose policies and lay them out. When I notice a pattern in enforcement (e.g. when X situation occurs, pretty much all moderators do Y), I can drill down a more abstract policy to a more concrete rule. For some policies (e.g. "no off-topic posts.") there is no easily discernible pattern hence why they stay at that vague level of abstraction.
You could ask: how is a person supposed to learn all these loose policies without relying on an unofficial resource made by a 3rd party ? Well... lurk, I guess. It's definitely not ideal (hence my unofficial thread), but it
is an option. Reading around different boards for several months (on and off) will give you a general understanding of how the forum functions. If you're already an experienced user but mostly hang around in a few boards, you're free to lurk in whichever board you intend to post in next.
As for exceptions, just editing in a moderator's / administrator's note that "this thread is an exception and shouldn't be trashed or moved" I think is sufficient for the exceptions that are usually made. Any substantial modifications to the current forum software are probably gonna be a no go though (at least based on what I've seen of similar community suggestions).
