Topic: Do You Believe a New Forum Software Will Attract More Users to Bitcointalk? (Read 1480 times)

Personally, I think that the forum is much more transparent and that it is much easier to find some old and valuable information than on Discord or Telegram.
Even without a bounty programs or signature campaigns I'm sure this forum would still be important as a source of information and a place to socialize and chat.
However, I agree that the interest in this forum is decreasing and that there are fewer and fewer quality discussions.
I guess these are generational reasons and that the youngest members may not have the patience for long discussions on the forum and prefer to choose faster ways of communication through social networks, telegram groups etc. 

I never understood the attraction really. It's a spam fest. People sending rockets and lambos and asking when the coin will be listed on a new exchange. If a channel doesn't have a full-time moderator you can see all kinds of spam services being advertised. God forbid that you join a Telegram channel of an exchange to ask a legitimate question about their services. You will be contacted by several semi-retarded scammer wannabes who will ask you "have you invested?", "how can I help you?", "did you heard about our newest investment strategy?" The only thing with Telegram that could appeal to me is being able to chat with someone quickly over PMs. But since any of the parties involved in the private chat can delete the exchanged messages between themselves, it's far from perfect.

Imagine if there is no bounty program in the forum and no profitable section, will there be more people here? For me who are not interested in the progressive plan, I prefer the atmosphere of TEITTER, and more free conversations are done on the telegram. Of course there is DISCORD, which is relatively popular now

I am sure there are such members, but I don't think that group is that big for it to be considered a major problem. Especially now when it's possible to get whitelisted manually by a number of high-ranked users who have been given permission to do that. If the evil fees were the biggest obstacle, they can now try again to get around it.

Life is a bitch and will find ways to kick their ass and punish them in ways much worse than the negative treatment they received here. Users can sometimes be harsh with newbies but just dust yourself off, get back up, and do your best. That shouldn't be a reason for them to give up and hopefully they will be ready to try again. We could use some fresh blood in the Croatian sub as well.

The new forum software is defined as improving for the better and not the other way around. So basically it's just the reason why the forum wants to upgrade to the new software but it has caught the attention that some users who at the time might doubt that it won't attract many new users.

Average people are interested in using forums because they want to discuss, earn money ^{[bounty campaign and signature campaign]}, gain knowledge, run service and trade something of value and many other things. So no reason why they would want to use forum then I think the new software will also be the same as it is today without much change to the user base.

I will not ask what difficulties you had to go through, since your rhetoric suggests that we have registered on the forum for various reasons. I can only say that you are greatly mistaken in saying that newbies are not welcome here, especially if you take into account those newbies who start their way on the forum with the section of Collectible, Mining, or Technical Discussion.

And to make sure that you are mistaken, you can take a look at the message history of The_Crypto_Kid, the guy who registered here not long ago and as it turned out he was all 8 years old, the guy who was very warmly greeted by the regulars of the forum, (and there are plenty of such examples).  

You have raised very interesting point and I  agree with you that newbies are not welcome here and they have to  make vigorous efforts to raise their rank and I went through all these hassles to reach where I am today. I believe that it is a great platform to learn  about Block chain Technology  and crypto Industry at large. Having said that,  I support the idea of upgrading BTT software with new features to make this forum more attractive/informative for new comers.

In fact, I think there is a third group, but it is very difficult for me to say how big it is.
These are members who are really interested in crypto and want to learn something new, make new friends and hang out.
I say this from personal experience because I brought a few friends to this forum and I know well their motivation to join this forum.
Unfortunately, none of them are active on this forum anymore.
Some failed to even register due to the 'evil fee' rule and some gave up after some negative experiences and accusations from older forum members.

BitcoinTalk is not a common forum It is a much popular forum and can be called a repository of bitcoin information. So if it is given a new design, it must be done with improved quality. So the new design will definitely be interesting

This forum is doing everything what's required, according to my opinion new software or new design is NOT REQIRED legacy software should not be changed.

 

People get older, tired of their online habits, and life is taking its toll on them. Those are some of the reasons users are leaving, but there are of course others. I think we are getting some new members, however their reasons for joining and signing up is not to participate in discussions, learning, and spreading their own knowledge. That's the problem.

Most of the newbies that come to Bitcointalk can be divided in two:
1. Those who seek help with a problem they have.
2. Those who have read or have been told that they can earn on Bitcointalk.

The first group simply leaves after they have gotten the answers they are looking for.
Members who belong to the second group explore various earning opportunities (bounties, airdrops, the occasional signature campaign) and aren't really interested to participate in or try to create interesting threads and discussions.

Nobody knows about him and we don't need to explore his identity anymore and keep posting the way we are doing in better manner.There are many rumours or say words about him like some believes he is the original creator of Monero coin and printed the white paper under the author name of Nicolas van Saberhagen to make it untraceable and other features.So we don't know about him and all these are speculations only.

Bounty hunters don't contribute much to the forum and their scope is limited to certain sections of the forum where they submits reports and all that stuff and they don't care about the software is old or new as their sole purpose is earning through these campaigns.But here we are referring to users that are going to make effective contributions to the forum that what difficulties they face and whether the new system will solve these issues and more members will join the forum or this system is fair enough? So this is the main concept of this thread not dedicated to some bounty hunters.You could check bpip.org to have the statistical data of forum members and to know how many members are already on the forum and there are many till now and many more will join with time.

Bitcointalk is already popular coz of Satoshi. all forum user knows Bitcoin Forum has make by Bitcoin owner/owner team Satoshi. And people believe Satoshi still active on this forum as anonymous way. and day by day forum user increasing for offering bounty program. I believe a new forum software also will attract more users to bitcointalk.

New forum software is not going to solve any SEO issues. Search results is largely driven by factors outside of the forum. As the bitcoin ecosystem has evolved, additional sources of information about bitcoin have popped up, and more people are linking to sources about bitcoin outside of the forum.

BBCode can potentially be translated into Markdown (or any other similar language). Any existing scripts that post automatically using BBCode would need to be updated.

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The forum has been on the decline for some time now. It has been a long time since new features of any kind have been introduced, and there are limitations as to what features can be implemented, when taking into consideration the limitations of what theymos is willing to take on, in terms of risk (such as holding user funds).

Ultimately, new features need to be added, either via the new forum software, via the current SMF implementation of the forum, or via a better implementation of the forum (such as via a flask app). I think a good start would be allowing users to select from a list of themes (preferably that include a dark theme). I can't imaging allowing multiple themes would introduce security vulnerabilities, nor would be very expensive. After custom themes are implemented, additional individual customizations can be implemented.

I personally believe that a software upgrade for the forum won't make a big difference when comes to attracting even more users.

The new generation of people interested in Cryptocurrency I believe are too young to have memories of the 1990`s-2000`s when the forum communities were far more common than nowadays. I assume they are more focused on "social media" like Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, etc, where the interaction is faster, so it is the feedback.

They may not see the appeal into posting something or sharing some information here and wait for hours or even days to get the full feedback of their content.

However, this should not discourage the administrators to try to improve the experience for us (the already established users).

It seems to me that new forum software could help keep existing members on the forum, but I don’t believe it will help attract new forum members.
We have two problems on this forum, more and more old members are leaving the forum and fewer and fewer new members are coming.
To attract new forum members we need to find another way, I think the new forum software will not help much.
This discussion certainly came at the right time but we can only share our opinions and advices but the final decision must be made by the forum administrators.

I think it is very good idea to migrate to new software to meet with growing  needs of changing times and I would love to migrate my account to new software, lot of development has taken place in Technology since Bitcoin forum was launched so we should  ride this bus of development and come up with something with  new features & overall much better than what we use now.

Bump

My biggest problem with the current software is the bad usability on mobile devices, particularly on smaller smartphones (on tablets/phablets, its "almost" usable but not very comfortably). I run a website myself and the percentage of traffic from mobile devices/small screens has increased to over 60% in the last years. This means that Bitcointalk is probably getting only half, or even less, of the public/traffic it could have.

A design refresh would also be for sure attracting new, potentially younger public, as would new functions like a better watchlist, where you could get delivered the complete posts instead of only the titles of threads who have been updated, so it's closer to Twitter's "following" model.

SEO is also an issue, like DdmrDdmr stated in one of the first posts; I was shocked that particularly in Spanish the visibility of the forum is so low.

What I'm not 100% sure is if I would like to have features like a "like button" system, like it was introduced in the German Coinforum. I was generally supporting these kinds of features, but a thread by a prominent German forum user made me think about it - it could lead even more to a "popularity-seeking" discussion style marginalizing "unpopular" opinions, like we know it from other social media. On the other hand I can imagine that people familiar with social networks would miss such a feature (and no, merit isn't the same thing). Maybe one could introduce it but make it possible to disable it?

What should however be preserved is the BBCode system (there was a discussion about that some months ago). It can be complemented with Markdown but replacing it completely would make tons of old content inaccessible.

Overall I have voted for "yes", although I'm in favour of a "careful" transition, to not obstruct post habits that have been evolved, mainly related to BBcode formatting.

Even if there is a new software used to create a new forum, I will prefer the old forum because the interface on this forum right now is really classic, and I truly appreciate how the inputs and selections were featured here. And, moreover, this is a forum, and the discussions are the most important thing to me here, and there's nothing wrong with the present forum. Users who are serious about learning about crypto, whether old or new, will come to bitcointalk.