Topic: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them) - page 8. (Read 26817 times)

• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.

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.

What about reviewing the merit system!
I am sure many members don't like the actual merit system because they don't receive any merits despite the effort they make when writing helpful posts.

• A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.
• Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).
• More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.
• Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).
• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.
• A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.
• A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.
• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.
• A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).
• Require email verification for new accounts.
• Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.
• A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).
• Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.
• More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).
• Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.
• Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).
• Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying.

• A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).
• Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).
• Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).
• More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).
• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).
• Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).


• Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).

Makes no sense. You're replacing an imperfect system (DT hierarchy) with a stupid one (trust linked to post quality).