Topic: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them) - page 10. (Read 26817 times)

Hey, I did start something similar here : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/theymos-list-of-viable-ideas-to-clean-up-the-forum-4480507

Because I am lazy, I posted in "serious discussion" section so I wouldn't have to many (poor) replies. For the same reason, I also didn't read the 6 pages your thread's got already.

But, you might find some ideas that aren't in your list yet.

Good luck.

Edit: seems like I'm too late... I just saw that Theymos answered already !

It would probably be a good idea for the new forum to have the possibility of having users propose code changes as the forum ages, and new features need to be added or old ones changed slightly. Would probably be better for community input rather than hiring someone to do split the work, or theymos continue doing it himself.

It will work only for 1 week. Then they will learn to use a VPN/VPS/proxy to get around the problem, it's like a war lost in advance.
You also will see a ton of "Sir I can't post..." threads by people sitting in a cybercafé with wife, brothers, cousins, paying a connection 20 hours per day and used one at a time

There are many remarkable ideas proposed in this thread, I just wanted to know if it is possible or not to introduce a ban for IP, I know that there are cases where many people use a shared IP but there are cases that I reported in this forum where some people use more than 500 accounts like in this case (for abusing airdops and bounties) 1 MAN 560+ accounts on forum, Millions of tokens abused.

All of them are farmer or sig spammer. Even reading 4 page of topic, there is nothing new in 58th page. It look bad that some of the accounts are Sr. member + that are doing sig spamming.  Now this Mega spam reached to 63^rd page.





Sorry, I am not able to spot bots. Maybe you can create a guide for spotting them ..

It is interesting to look in this profile, posted 4 to 5 time in this same topic and posted in russian too in this  English thread
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/zlata-orange-1858713

I think we really need to trash bounty threads that are asking to paste fb/twt bounty report in there thread.
1. They are increasing the length of the thread.
2. Giving unnecessary bump to thread.
3. It makes headache to manually go through this post History of these bounty hunters.

Just wondering, you are the Moderator of that board handling and reading so much of spam, I think autolock of thread after 5 page might bring relief to you.

Read the thread before posting. This has come up several times, and unless hell froze over recently and no one told me Theymos has stated


May have paraphrased that a little

Edit: Here's the response.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.32026584

E3 NSA like that.
Theymos want to see the hell freezes before doing so...luckily for us.

I guess KYC for all the members is a must to avoid bots or anyone having so many accounts.

This one falls into the "regulations" category and I don't think there will ever be a forced action. What's far more likely is the easy thing of removing/banning paid signatures.

For now I would say this falls onto the DT network to tag managers who allow spammy shitposters to clog up the forum. While also reporting and tagging said posters.

@theymos, "sir",  
We respect the fact that you are too busy with your own things, and it is not easy at all to do all this along with that, but at least things, like assigning more mods for patrolling, a welcome message for new users containing rules and guidelines, requiring at least 1 Merit to become Jr. member, or forcing campaigns or their managers to do their work and discourage spam, that don't require a lot of time and effort nor any extra thinking over them should be implemented ASAP.
Postponing every single one of these issues will only make them worse in future IMO.

SMF is open source, right? Have you considered soliciting help from the community in the form of patches / peer review / testing?


This is probably more complicated than PHP code but perhaps if you could make more data available publicly you could get help from the community here as well.

Since none of these ideas are new to you, Theymos I think it's about time you start hiring devs who can work on features you deem worthy. Don't give them access to the live version of bitcointalk but instead ask them to build these features on a local version and before implementing them on the live version. You can validate/verify the code yourself. Should decrease the burden on you. If paying these devs will be an issue, many ideas have already been suggested here to generate an income for the forum.


Agreed! but the current policies are destroying it! Unless you see bot-accounts/farmers/Spammers as growth.

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This should be implemented right away. Many "Money Making" Forums charge upwards of $500 per week for different HYIP programs to get listed. Imagine what these ICOs will be willing to pay who "actually" have a "Vision" behind them...

I believe this doesn't even require any coding of sorts just needs your approval.

@theymos
Once you have some free time, please elaborate the No part a little bit especially for the permaban tag + 1 merit (at least) to become a Junior Member.
This will help us improving our suggestion in the future.

That is a nice list you have there, I hope they will be implemented sooner than later.

I have also brought 2 possible improvement ideas to the forum some time back:

• [NEW FEATURE] Seeing a post that quoted your post
• [NEW FEATURE] Live Chat for users 

I would appreciate it if you could take a look over them and if they look good to you, add them to the OP.

I'm not saying all of these are good suggestions and some probably won't help much if at all to combat certain issues, but I'm just brainstorming here to try plug some of the holes of what I believe to be a sinking ship. I'd much rather you just say my ideas were crap or just a simple 'no' (as you have now done) than remain silent for years on them because everyone is in the dark. At least I know I can drop certain suggestions if they're unlikely to ever be implemented and move on to trying something else.



Everybody knows and respects the fact that you're busy and making changes isn't always as easy as clicking a few buttons or writing a bit of code and requires future thought of how changes will effect things in the grand scheme of things here and it's good you do that, but when there's just silence for years things just get worse and worse and nobody knows what to think or whether something is a good or terrible idea or not. It's incredibly frustrating for both staff and members alike when we can see the forum crumbling before our eyes being overrun with bots and spammers and we're making suggestions to try prevent further deterioration and we're just ignored. Years pass and the forum just gets exponentially worse with each passing one and that's only going to continue the longer we leave it.


A bump button is the least of our worries to be honest. Putting a warning when they go to post to maybe follow the rules in the Marketplace and/or a reminder to only bump once every 24 hours and remove the bump when they do would be a quicker/easier fix. Linking the rules to users upon sign up would also give them the information as many just aren't even aware of the rules here.


This could be done very simply and quickly, right? Can we do this ASAP as soon as we've got it ready? New users would then have no excuses for not reading the rules.


Same for this. You sent me the list of highest reporters in Bitcoin Discussion a few weeks ago and there was a clear standout. Unless you know something about him that I don't then I think he would make a good sub mod and patroller. Other staff could volunteer for other boards, but I think one or two of the users who have reported thousands of posts have probably also earned or are deserving a place as mod by now. We've lost far more staff over the past few years than have been replaced and the forum only continues to grow so we need to occasionally add them to meet demand. More staff = less workload and stress for other mods and the board improves in the process.


Why don't you add another? This seems like a quick fix for a few things. If there was more staff and admins added you and cyrus would be bothered less and less. You would be less annoyed by the barrage of PMs and users would be less frustrated and every other Global will then stop being spammed with the same questions for things they don't have the authority to do. It's pointless you two even being messaged about certain things like account restorations if you're not doing them at all which currently seems to be the case. I could even do admin duties full time here if you wanted and I'm practically on the forum all day anyway, but something tells me if I was going to be made an admin it would have happened by now. If you don't trust me to do it for whatever reasons then fair enough but there must be someone else who can do it on staff - Mprep, rickbig, Mitchell or one of the other long-standing mods. Maybe even ask one of the veteran/trusted users here like vod or whoever (in b4 quickseller complains). If none of us are suitable have you spoken to BadBear recently? Maybe try email him asking if he'll come back. You mentioned a while ago that you've considered hiring someone to run the forum so why not hire BadBear? It makes sense for him to do it over some Marlon Rando. BadBear was a great admin as you also said and he knows how the forum works, which would make sense rather than hiring someone external who has to learn all the ways of the world here which wouldn't be easy or something you can learn in a short time.


This needs to happen asap as they're the ones causing the rapid deterioration of the forum in the first place which makes it unfit for purpose and enforcing this would have a tremendous knock on effect on the quality and usability of the forum. I've banned at least 50 users (mostly Juniors) who were copy and pasting content on the Elon City campaign the past month or so. I've no idea how many Rickbig or mprep has banned and could be even more than I have. Elon City accept anyone with no checks and this is why it's exploited by copy and paste bots and spammers. This can't be acceptable. I say we set up some sort of rules where if 5 or 10 users are caught copy and pasting on your campaign or the same amount of users are banned for low quality posts then your campaign gets the ban as well. If this starts happening then campaigns will start doing their job and it will become less common that we have to issue bans because the culture of campaigns doing nothing will change very fast. This forum is too valuable for them to not be able to advertise here for free so they'll start playing by the rules very quickly. If they can hire people to spam for them then they can hire people to manage their campaign as well.


Can this be done soon? People are getting annoyed at all the alt coin spam in Bitcoin Beginners. The Alt coin marketplace is also unusable as it is because it's being used as a catch-all for everything and not for trades/services as intended.

Can you comment some short reasons to some of the No's?


This is already shown to staff, but is there some issue in making this public? I don't necessarily think we should show temp bans but if a person's account is done here then I see no issue in that.


Can you elaborate on this one? To me a merit requirement to become Junior or their signature removed completely is essential and I think most of the community agrees. It can't be acceptable for bots to be able to earn from signature campaigns and wasn't the merit system introduced to curb account farming? It stops spammers from moving up to higher ranks but doesn't stop them from farming hundreds of Juniors and spamming and earning from them which people are now doing and this needs to chnage. One merit to become Junior isn't a lot to ask and most people seem to agree it should be higher. Removing signatures from them completely shouldn't be a big issue either as you did so for Newbies and Juniors barely have anything there now anyway, but this doesn't stop campaigns from paying them for it and that's the whole crux of the issue. People can still purchase Copper Membership to get a limited one anyway.


That's a shame, though I hope someday they will be implemented like Copper was. I think it will severely deter account farming or people trying to purchase merits just to move up ranks. I hope they'll be on the new forum at least.


A new rank obviously isn't essential right now but I think a new one will be needed eventually or the forum will just be full of Legendaries. A new rank with a very high merit requirement would mean only the best posters achieved it. It would be a nice thing for Legendaries to aim to achieve once they've hit that rank as there's nothing after it.

Also, you forgot to comment about Lambos for staff?  Yes/no/maybe? 

I'm a bit disappointed that my delegated merit awarding suggestion didn't appear in the lists. That would be a great help for good posters on the local boards, and it would help the responsible merits sources to distribute sMerits for the benefit of the forum.

So, after reading the post from Theymos, i think that there is one main problem that needed to be solved by the administrator side, before they can start with the forum problems, which is this
Even if we have and suggest a great suggestion, it would take a long time for it to be implemented because the lack of person in charge of coding. This is a hard situation and hard to be solved because finding a partner who is honest and devoted to this kind of job is hard, and if admin pick a wrong guy, it could destroy the forum and all of us in many ways.

Kind of dilemma though.

Without doubt i agree with this part, some changes may sound very easy and fast to do (and probably they even are) but they could have implications in some other part of the code or with a functionality itself you didn't anticipated, bringing some unpleasant cascade effect.

Since in here the the stakes are high is good to be cautious.

Could you elaborate at least on the "No" part a little bit? Some of it I could guess but e.g. displaying the banned status sounds like a simple feature with no downside so I'm curious why it's on the "No" list.

I was always on your side Theymos!!!!