A brief study on contact information in the forum

[Hispo]

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:


Introduction

I 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 profiles

In order to contact with other users outside the forum this one give us the following options:

ICQ



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ

ICQ 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_Messenger

This 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


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 forum
User with the highest number of deleted posts

This 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 statistics

You can check the spreadsheet with the information gathered here

The results of the percentage of people with the considered contact information is displayed in the following graphs:



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 information
1 shared her/his ICQ
0 shared their AIM
0 shared their MSN
4 shared their YIM


Conclusion and proposals

My 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.

[hosseinimr93]

it would be even to productive to consider to replace these options for more popular ones within the community of cryptocurrencies,

This has been suggested before. You can visit following threads to see similar proposals.

The profile page should be changed. No one uses ICQ, AIM, MSN or YIM.
Why do we still have options for MSN, YIM etc?
forum Profile (Social Media)

Click here to read the response made by theymos.

[Upgrade00]

If there is no interest in replacing these options, then I wonder why not simply erase them for optimization purposes?

I personally like the vintage feel those options give the forum. I didn't use majority of them growing up, but can learn through the forum what instant messaging was before telegram, Twitter, and the likes.
I also do not see how erasing them optimizes profiles.

I believe the room taken on our profiles could be used for more appealing features.

There should be less interest for users to link their socials to the forum, except they deliberately want to.
A newbie on creating an account and finding out they could link their Facebook or Twitter can do that out of curiosity. This could expose their identity inadvertently.
For someone who want to include some contact options, there are variations that can be used to include any they wish to.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

it would be even to productive to consider to replace these options for more popular ones within the community of cryptocurrencies

Hispo, your entire post could have been simply the above words (though members new to the forum might learn something about why the profile section is so blatantly out of date).

But y'know, that new forum software is ready to be rolled out any time now and I've no doubt that the changes you suggested--and more--will be perfectly incorporated into the new look.  Backslash Ess, if you know what I'm saying.

I personally like the vintage feel those options give the forum.

I happen to like the old-school feel of the layout, but the profile page could seriously use an upgrade--and that could be done without making bitcointalk look like it jumped into the 2020s.

[Stalker22]

At the time SMF was one of the most popular open source software for building online discussion forums, these types of communication channels were also very popular. I remember using ICQ a lot. But times have changed, and now some other platforms have taken their place.

Conclusion: This forum software is really outdated and needs an urgent upgrade/replacement.

[Hispo]

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Thank you for you comments and pointing out the admin's thoughts on this matter.
I kinda feel like an idiot after going through all of these things to reach such a short and already public answer.
 

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I also like the vintage style/feeling the forum gives off, it is quite something from the 90-2000s.
Well, when talking about appealing options I had somethings like cryptographic signatures or Telegram, where one can easily avoid to provide sensitive information.

Thanks for your comments.

[mk4]

I'm actually quite surprised there isn't a field for mIRC nicknames or address identifiers. mIRC was the shit back then, with it just purely text-based and very light-weight. Don't get me wrong — I love Discord, especially the gifs and custom emojis, but the privacy concerns suck.

[NeuroticFish]

1 shared her/his ICQ
0 shared their AIM
0 shared their MSN
4 shared their YIM

"Other contact info" was (is?) sometimes used for linking accounts/bounty campaigns. We could learn from them and instead of insisting on the name of those fields (and yeah, the fact they may do something if clicked), just use them for our needs if it's the case. (Actually I think that some few users do that already.)

Conclusion: This forum software is really outdated and needs an urgent upgrade/replacement.

Since it's not replaced yet, I'd conclude that the new software is not considered yet safe enough to be used for this forum.

I'm actually quite surprised there isn't a field for mIRC nicknames or address identifiers. mIRC was the shit back then, with it just purely text-based and very light-weight.

Indeed, irc was simple and effective. I think that for example Monero development meetings are still discussed on irc.
But irc needed to know what software to start and also what server to use and maybe that was one of the reasons it's not in this list (maybe those settings were either too many, either not standardized enough?)

[dkbit98]

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.

I would simply remove most of this outdated contact information fields, or I would just rename them with stuff used today like telegram or discord.
Maybe this is easier said than done for theymos, and I don't think this should be top priority right now.
There is always option to see this updated in new epochtalk forum coming out soon (or not).
 

[DdmrDdmr]

To provide a more overall (yet old) context to the completion of content to these fields, back when @piggy provided a full forum profile dump in late 2018 with data for over 2,4 M profiles (currently at 3,4 M), I took a look and reported the following:

<…> I’ve looked over the current number of profiles that have this information filled in currently, and the figures are pretty low:

ICQ: With data on 3.780 accounts (1.663 of those accounts active in 2018).
AIM: With data on 11.567 accounts (3.808 of those accounts active in 2018).
MSN: With data on 13.921 accounts (4.567 of those accounts active in 2018).
YIM: With data on 12.019 accounts (4.084 of those accounts active in 2018).

And that is not even going into the content which is often bogus or used for other purposes.

Even then, the use of these fields was scarce, and it won’t have changed much since then to better those numbers, at least with the intended data.

As stated on @hosseinimr93's post above, they are known to be close to obsolete fields, and not trivial (yet doable) to replace by others.

In terms of space, I wouldn’t worry at all about them: being so scarcely given content, I’d assume that they contain null values for the overwhelming majority of the records, and therefore barely have a stake in DB size.

[Findingnemo]

Also there is a feature to show our email address to public but 99.999% people choose not to show as public due to privacy concern,so even if we replace the old with current contact information I don't think many people are going to let their personal contact info in a public forum.

[UserU]

Also there is a feature to show our email address to public but 99.999% people choose not to show as public due to privacy concern,so even if we replace the old with current contact information I don't think many people are going to let their personal contact info in a public forum.

Maybe Telegram/ Discord/ Twitter would suffice. After all, there's still some degree of anonymity to those.

[hugeblack]

I remember asking a similar question several  years ago ---> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3153163 and getting the answer somewhere that such changes are profound and cannot happen in the current version of the forum (or something close to that) so I don't think doing more analysis will change anything.

In general, I have not heard or used most of these contact services.

[Findingnemo]

Also there is a feature to show our email address to public but 99.999% people choose not to show as public due to privacy concern,so even if we replace the old with current contact information I don't think many people are going to let their personal contact info in a public forum.

Maybe Telegram/ Discord/ Twitter would suffice. After all, there's still some degree of anonymity to those.

Yes with telegram, discord and etc can be used as contact without the input of sensitive information but I feel that we have more disadvantages with changes if there is any than the advantages because the most of the contact platform mentioned above are directly installed into our primary device so we may invite lot of unwanted links sent to them by random newbies to execute phishing and other kind of attacks.

Imagine a naive newbie has entered contact info which attacked by smart hacker then the newbies privacy and all the data is under the risk.

[OgNasty]

I think it's quite obvious to anyone using the internet over the last 20 years that those contact methods are extremely outdated.  Sure, there was a time when AIM/ICQ was the best way to stay in touch with people, but that was decades ago.  I would be surprised if ICQ and AIM were even still functioning today (maybe the are?). 

Instead of this:
ICQ:   
AIM:   
MSN:   
YIM:

Maybe it should be this:
Twitter:
Instagram:
Facebook:
Snapchat:

Granted I really only use Twitter out of this list, but I imagine there would be much more participation given more up to date options.

[Hispo]

I think it's quite obvious to anyone using the internet over the last 20 years that those contact methods are extremely outdated.  Sure, there was a time when AIM/ICQ was the best way to stay in touch with people, but that was decades ago.  I would be surprised if ICQ and AIM were even still functioning today (maybe the are?). 

Instead of this:
ICQ:   
AIM:   
MSN:   
YIM:

Maybe it should be this:
Twitter:
Instagram:
Facebook:
Snapchat:

Granted I really only use Twitter out of this list, but I imagine there would be much more participation given more up to date options.

It seems ICQ is still on, MSN is not neither is YIM as far as I am concerned.

Also, I would opt for adding Telegram instead Facebook/Twitter, keeping in mind the fact campaign managers and service providers here in the forum use it to communitace and make deals.

[KingsDen]

But y'know, that new forum software is ready to be rolled out any time now and I've no doubt that the changes you suggested--and more--will be perfectly incorporated into the new look.  Backslash Ess, if you know what I'm saying.

Just exactly my thoughts. It could be that the arrival of the new forum software is closer than we imagined. Who knows if it would be theymos new year message for us. I am optimistic that the new forum software will surely include some of the changes and requests we encounter everyday in the forum.
Then, theymos may want to keep this forum this way for history, and could be an online museum or research and such related activities. The forum that the creator of bitcoin, the bitcoin pizza man and lots of them discussed in. So, if many of this changes are implemented in this present software, it could lose its historical value.

[Pmalek]

theymos mentioned earlier that it's not an easy thing to change, but it can be done. However, that's not something that needs his immediate attention.
Many of those fields should be changed really to platforms that are more popular in this age. The crypto kids of today are more into Telegram, Discord, Twitter, and Reddit. Those could be added instead.

[Maus0728]

Am I the only one who disagrees that including Reddit and Twitter is a recipe for a disaster? I mean, I don't want anyone else to see my private shitpost on social media.Plus, It's not like that I am sharing something related to my personal kink, but I feel like some random stranger will judge me when they see those

Aside from Telegram or Discord, and by ditching social media account, I think it would be better to replace them with a privacy respecting apps like Briar^[1]. Unlike Signal, you can create and post your account link on your profile without needing to submit your phone number, you just need a username and a password and that's it. You can also create a small forum with your selected contacts(links). More importantly it's FOSS.

[1] https://briarproject.org/