Topic: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them) - page 13. (Read 26815 times)

I'm all for brainstorming. I'd rather my ideas be shot down or picked apart than nothing getting discussed at all. I'm not saying all these ideas are great either and some certainly have flaws or may cause more harm than good, but I'm just putting them out there. I'm sure many of them can be improved by others suggestions, and hopefully people can suggest far better proposals. Somethings like captchas just might not really make much of a difference and cause more annoyance than issues they solve, but other things like assigning sub board mods and requiring a merit achievement for Juniors are no brainers in my opinion and are not disruptive. Same goes for punishing ICO campaigns who are responsible for the majority of the destruction here.


Theymos seems to be against them going by a comment he made today. One at the top of a few of the main subs like this would be lucrative:



That way advertisers can target their market ie a gambling site would advertise in the gambling board and so on.

Most of the ideas are good, some need a little more brainstorming (something that a lot of users are not able to do).
But the real question is, is there at least an interest to improve the community and its platform from the staff.
If I had to choose only 1 it's about the email verification to be able to change email/password. To protect its users is something to consider important. It's as if someone raped you in my living room and I tell you I have no time to look at it

I won't have a problem to see more advertisements displayed because I don't find it intrusive the way it is here

Going through the activity logic, if Full member require 100 merit and 120 Activity, then Member should require 50 merit and Jr. member should require 25.
So definitely we can increase the Merit requirement for Member rank and introduce Merit concept for Jr. Member.


I do not think anyone will agree with my suggestion but to control Signature spam, we can introduce the requirement to get at least 2 Merits in previous month. (If I have not got any merits on July, then signature will be disabled for August month (even with Coopper membership, irrespective of rank in forum. If I receive 2 merit or more in August then it will be enabled for September and you again need to earn 2 merits in September so  that it will remain enabled for October. )

On a side note, this will halt the account sales too.

Since system is already in place for more than 6 month, so we should decay all the default sMerits so that no more merit abuse can take place.

Few additional suggestion :
• Adding "Altcoin Development & Technical Discussion" section/child board since there are many great technology that altcoin have/use and few members began to talk about altcoin technology anyway. But disabling signature might be necessary to prevent spam.
• Implement automatic account recovery with signed message when user lost account access, but already set and verify their Bitcoin address on profile information.
• Add 2FA security option.
• More strict punishment for spam/sharing FUD on Development & Technical Discussion, Mining, Bitcoin Technical Support and Serious discussion (along with it's child boards)


I think choosing category such a spam, wrong section, sharing FUD and others when report would be better.


With the amount of thread/post on Ivory tower, i think it's not needed for now.


Implement cooldown (which increase each time if user/bot keep making mistake) when user/bot answer reCAPTCHA wrong should work/reduce the problem.

I dont know if this is already mentioned by the others, but i really think it would be great if we have something like "spoiler box" feature in a post making, so we can decide to hide a content and others who read our post can show or hide our content which has a really big image or other long post by a click.

I tried it already but it seems doesnt work with our forum. Here is the link which describe the feature I mentioned about www.minecraftforum.net/forums/forums/forum-discussion-info/514283-how-do-i-make-spoilers-on-the-forum

Thanks for listening. I take any comments

I don't how long ago this was but captcha solving has really moved on in just the last 4 or 5 months I've been involved with trying to fight bots. Something like that with a 3x3 grid they would just brute force like they do with reCAPTCHA. There's only a certain number of combinations and they have a powerful backend server just trying until it gets a token to pass to a worker bot.

Back to the matter in hand we already know that these spambots can log in, so they must already have the ability to solve reCAPTHCHA so asking them to do it again to post will not make any difference to them. They just need to add a couple of lines to their script.

The bottom line is if there is a financial incentive to do so someone will find a way to defeat any type of captcha.

I know. It gets worse every time I go in that board. Even threads that are created about something worthwhile quickly get spammed by Junior Members writing their generic one/two liners often just replying to whatever question is asked in the title. Even worse is that when you see a constructive comment written it's often a copy and paste from somewhere else online or some other user in that thread.


People could go back and merit all the posts that are deserving. I know there will be hundreds of my posts that deserved merit that were made before the introduction of the merit system. I think we should concentrate on the newer users that are signing up here just to claim bounties and sig spam etc though.


I've suggest that some of the potential money brought in from something like more donator ranks or ad slots could be used to fund the development of new projects such as a decentralised forum and a better captcha service. Do you have any suggestions for a more efficient one? If a foolproof one could be created wouldn't it have been by now? 

I wouldn't be completely against the idea of removing the default merits to further distinguish the good quality posters from those who earned it by just being around here for a long time, and being somewhat active. Probably a little bit of an extreme measure though.

Although, anyone that has been here for even a short period should know of those that are of a particularly high standard. If we are talking from a campaign standpoint, then maybe the managers just need to raise their requirements. But, again that's up to them, and unless we start putting restrictions on campaigns they aren't going to do this voluntarily.

I found it best to completely avoid any of the established captcha providers.  Back when I used to run a phpBB, I had a little-known visual captcha called KittenAuth.  It basically gave you 9 pictures in a 3x3 grid and the default setting was to select only the kittens.  But you could change the pictures to something more thematically appropriate for your site.  I found that far more effective than any other captcha I've ever encountered.  Only human beings got through after that.

The safest bet is to make a totally proprietary one.  The more obscure, the better.  But not text or numbers.  Use pictures.



That works too.  Would certainly make it easier to spot bought accounts.

We aren't too far from that stage. I literally have to search for non-spammy topics and boards in order to join some relevant discussions. I don't even remember the last time I posted in the Bitcoin Discussion section. 

That's one way to go about it but after being on the forum for all these years and finally hitting the legendary is some sort of achievement. And if asked to start from the scratch again, I don't think I'll have the time or energy to do so. I mean it would be demotivating for people like me who have worked their way up starting from the base.

Some of these suggestions are worthy of attention from the mods but I cannot agree with the suggestion to rmove signatures from lower members when the rules make it difficult to rank higher.

It would solve a heck of a lot of problems and it's not an unreasonable or unreachable requirement either. Ten merit and being here for 2 and a half months is nothing. Something needs to change and we can't just allow people to come here who are 100% only here to earn. Many users literally have no interest or knowledge about bitcoin other than they've just heard you can earn here. Add into the mix when you can't speak English very well and it's a recipe for disaster. These users are then essentially forced to use google translate or just copy and paste a post. It's like signing up to a Lamborghini forum when you can't drive and don't even like cars. Why would anyone do that? Nobody would normally sign up to a web forum for something they have little to no interest in but this one is different when you're throwing payment into the mix. Adding a merit requirement would severely curb this behaviour and force campaigns to not accept and pay anyone for any old crap they can be bothered to make or copy and paste because they can't be trusted to do their job. Sadly, I'm not sure if anything from this list will be implemented anytime soon if at all other than maybe adding a few moderators.


It is when it's temp. It just doesn't on the permaban button. You could put a message and just set the ban to never expire which will be the same.

I quite like the idea of having only members, and above with signatures. That would literally solve so many problems of the bounty spam within the alternate cryptocurrencies section, but also would likely have an impact on several other sections too.

When user is banned, reason of ban should be shown when he try to login. Then we would see less "I was banned without any reason", "I didn't anything wrong" and similar threads

I've been doing a lot of antibot work recently and I'm not saying it is pointless because you want to put as many obstacles in the way as possible. I'm just trying to reduce any expectation that either of these will make a difference. Email verification just requires them to run an email server and a script to create the email accounts at the same time as the forum account and then acknowledge the link sent. You can buy software to solve reCAPTCHA for less than $100 a year subscription and the botnets I deal with have written their own solvers.

It is the only way we'll likely stop them from being a nuisance and an eyesore, though it's a lot more work for staff. The benefits of it stopping 99% of bots outweigh any negatives though. Many other forums have this sort of post verification as well. As for captchas being bypassed, anything can be got around but it's one more hoop for them to jump through. I don't think I've joined many websites or forums before that didn't require email verification and if captchas are so pointless then why does pretty much every other forum use them? They have their benefits and will stop some bots at least.


Agreed. A mere one merit requirement really puts a spanner in the works of bots and the very worst of posters. It doesn't effect anyone else's ability to post here either. It has no drawbacks at all as far as I can see.


These could all be implemented today within a matter of minutes and the board would be better of for them instead of current staff being swamped with more things to do (that often aren't getting done) day after day.


At a minimum it should be one. Maximum probably 5 or something. I would be more for it being just one if Juniors had their signatures removed completely. Then you need ten merit and enough activity to become a Member to get a signature. Either way the requirement should be something and one would be better than nothing. 

Although, 1 merit might be hard to achieve for most of the low quality users here I think I would still be more comfortable requiring a few of them. Something like 3/5 seems to a good point which would prevent most of them or at the very least demotivate them from making several accounts to earn from airdrops and bounties.

There are a lot of really good suggestions here so I'm just going to prioritise what I think is most urgent and what will be the most effective in reducing the spam problem.


This is the only effective way to deal with bots. The other suggestions about captcha and email verification are trivial for botnets and won't even slow them down.


Whichever combination of this is implemented doesn't really matter but until members require at least 1 merit to get a signature there will be spambots by the thousand getting paid in shitcoins/tokens. The same requirement to be immune from the nuke button makes sense as well.


All of these are desperately needed at the moment although implementing the first two suggestions may actually reduce the need.

I wouldn't expect him to do anything major here if the new forum isn't far off, but if it's going to be years before it's released then that's a different matter. However, simple things like punishing sig campaigns and assigning sub boards mods can be done now and take little to no effort from theymos. Meanwhile, the forum continues to the circle the drain getting worse and worse which each passing day. One day we're going to wake up and the forum will be 99% bot accounts and copy and pasters. Anything else can just be considered for development on the new forum if it hasn't already.


How about we remove the default merits completely and everyone starts from ground zero? That would really sort the wheat from the chaff and stop all the whingers about it not being fair.

Merit received for good posts decline naturally should not. But to reduce Merit obtained at startup Merit-system - on that you may want to think.

There are accounts of high ranks which filled activity in bounty companies (links to twitter and facebook) and since the launch of the Merit system did not write any good post and did not receive any Merit.

I understand that this proposal is unlikely to support users of high ranks )))