A brief study on contact information in the forum
Hello and I wish you all to have a good day, today I am pleased to bring before you a brief study about one of the features of this forum and its possible impact from my point of view and some data I have taken the liberty to gather manually, this thread is composed by the next parts:
IntroductionI join this community back in 2020 and since then I realized our profiles offer options to make information public, including contact information, since I was not sure I knew the platforms mentioned on our profiles and the reason the fact these were mostly empty for many of the users, I decided to go through this study.
Notice that this investigation did not keep in mind any regional or cultural preferences for specific channels of communitacion, if you have any comment about regional/cultural preference please let me know.
I considered these 4 options and also gather information of aditional information shared on the "Other contact" section.
Summary of contact channels on users profilesIn order to contact with other users outside the forum this one give us the following options:
ICQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQICQ New is a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You". Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.
This software continues to be supported by their developers and it works under a proprietary model. I have also found webpages on the internet which suggest its monthly user base to be around 11 million users.
AIM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)
AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.
…
In June 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications. In June 2017, Verizon combined AOL and Yahoo into its subsidiary Oath Inc. (now called Yahoo). The company discontinued AIM as a service on December 15, 2017.
The latest stable version of this messaging software was released back in 2015, since the service is not officially supported the hyperlinks to AIM webpage now directly redirect towards AOL homepage instead.
MSN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_MessengerThis is a service which does not need much introduction to many people who grew up during the late 90’s and the 2000´s, due to its popularity and impact in pop culture in many countries, mine included.
MSN Messenger (also known colloquially simply as "Messenger"), later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, is a discontinued cross-platform instant-messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the Microsoft Messenger service and, in later versions, was compatible with Yahoo! Messenger and Facebook Messenger…
Following its acquisition of Skype Technologies in May 2011, Microsoft added interoperability between Skype and Microsoft accounts, allowing Skype—which had features unique to its platform and a wider user base—to communicate with Windows Live Messenger contacts. In 2013, the product was discontinued, and Microsoft began cutting service to existing clients. It remained active in China for another 18 months, and ceased operations there on October 31, 2014.
YIM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger (sometimes abbreviated Y!M) was an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Messenger was provided free of charge and could be downloaded and used with a generic "Yahoo ID" which also allowed access to other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail. The service also offered VoIP, file transfers, webcam hosting, a text messaging service, and chat rooms in various categories...
A new Yahoo! Messenger was released in 2015, replacing the older one. Yahoo! Messenger was shut down entirely on July 17, 2018, replaced by a new service titled Yahoo! Together, only to be shut down as well in 2019.[6][7]
As of 2022, a third party company has released a functional version of Y!M 6.0, which can be downloaded from their website Nina, and which operates on different servers.
Assuming there is indeed a third party keeping up the functionality of YIM even untill this day I have expected to find a non-neglectable number of users with their YIM information on their profiles.
Selection of population and sample![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.postimg.cc%2FfywyqdXB%2Fht.png&t=665&c=kqu0iIvz9pdLMg)
In order to proceed with this small investigation I selected a sample from the population (the forum), in order to do so I made use of the official page of BPIP, in order to manually gather data. The population selected consisted in the 100 most recognized user of this forum and the 50 users with most deleted posts.
Most recognized Users in the forumUser with the highest number of deleted postsThis array was chosing assuming those most commited to the community are more likely to have contact information set on their profiles for several reasons, the users with most deleted posts were added for the sake of diversity of the sample.
Gathering of data and summary of statisticsYou can check the spreadsheet with the information gathered hereThe results of the percentage of people with the considered contact information is displayed in the following graphs:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.postimg.cc%2Fd0qMg9DM%2Fc1.png&t=665&c=qfucBnOFuug-nA)
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.postimg.cc%2FYScNSXYV%2Fc2.png&t=665&c=iNRwfcHLESy3uw)
The second graph refers to the percentage of user which have additional information on their profile for example:
"Uses Discord on Location"
"Warning of Telegram on Website"
"Uses Telegram/Twitter on Other contact"
"Warning about scammers on Other Contact"
"Telegram on Other Contact"
This part of the study is not completely quantitative, because it can be influenced by my own perception of what it is valid or not, it is worth of mention the fact I ignored the sharing of Bitcoin and other altcoins addresses on those profiles, since it is not my intention to study the sharing of these.
Out of 150 profiles manually checked:
145 User
did not share any of the studied contact information1 shared her/his
ICQ0 shared their
AIM0 shared their
MSN4 shared their
YIMConclusion and proposalsMy personal conclusion is that a very small percentage of people in the forum uses (or openly share) the contact information studied, it would be even to productive to consider to replace these options for more popular ones within the community of cryptocurrencies, since it is not secret that many of of people who offers their services here use alternative channel besides the PMs of the forum to get in touch with their clients, for example.
If there is no interest in replacing these options, then I wonder why not simply erase them for optimization purposes?
I believe the room taken on our profiles could be used for more appealing features.
Thank you for reading.
I am considering to carry out a more complex investigation in the future about channels of communication here in the forum and among Bitcoin users.