Topic: Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements (Read 41211 times)

According to theymos, the forum no longer needs donations, and according to the donation page it is not even clear that VIP/donator titles are even available anymore.

When VIP accounts were more commonly purchased, they were frequently purchased by business owners and were somewhat of a way for businesses to advertise their brand. Also, I don't believe many businesses were willing to spend much on actual advertising, at least not enough to support the resources required to run the forum. Today, businesses are more willing to advertise, although ad revenue has declined over the past several years, so there is little reason to collect "donations" in exchange for special features.

We never know 

If in 2017, the forum received last transaction from Claymore for a donator badge, we might see others in future. As observers, we can think it is insane but in reality, services charge fee on customers by specific input coin. If the input coin is Bitcoin, fee will be in Bitcoin and there is no harm for them to donate in Bitcoin. Like ChipMixer, there is no harm if they donate 10 Bitcoin and have a donator badge.

• Donators & VIPs after 10 years

That's theymos

It's not worth necrobumping a thread to ask it, especially when OP likely could have searched and found the answer (though I have my doubts about bitcointalk's search functionality).

Bah, who cares about squabbling over something as inconsequential as this?  And I mean that.  Buying your way into the bitcointalk VIP club is so far in the rear view mirror that it looks like a speck of dirt or a dead bug.  The reality is that while one could purchase a VIP tag, nobody has done so in a long time and it's basically a dead feature of the forum.  That's not to take anything away from those who donated in the early days (or whenever) and became VIPs, but at this point it's just a novelty that crops up in threads from time to time.

OP, if you've got a question like this, either search for the answer or start up your own thread.  Bumping old threads is against the rules.

I'd say VIPs and Donators are just "relics from the past". No sane person will buy it anymore, and the ones who have it will eventually stop posting (within the next 100 years for sure).
All this happened before I even joined Bitcointalk anyway. And it doesn't belong in this topic

No, not really. Those were different times. Bitcoin didn't have the value it has today. Don't forget that we have faucets that gave out 5 BTC per claim at one point in the past. Do we have those now? No, because no sane person would give away such amounts. Bitcointalk doesn't want donations anymore. I could have said doesn't need, but I think want is more precise. If theymos wanted people to donate, the requirements to become VIP and Donator would have been lowered. But he doesn't want the donations because he doesn't need them.

This comment makes very little sense to me. 

In other words, fuck those nonsense theories of acting as if those 50 bitcoin that might have been spent prior to 2013 could not have been replaced for a few hundred dollars (if that much).. back when the VIP amount was established.

In other words, it would be fair to have the VIP price come down and to have some kind of a peg to dollar value rather than staying at 50 BTC which is outrageous at this point to expect any mere mortal to be ready, willing or able to pay that amount for forum VIP status. 

Sure, the VIP amount could be $1k, $10k or some other reasonable amount. .(not 50x $40,0000 = $2 million.. seems ridiculous to me to keep the amount pegged to a strict BTC value when the price of real BTC in the real world has surely changed over the years). ... so if $1k were considered a reasonable amount, then such amount would end up being somewhere in the ballpark of 0.025 BTC these days.. which seems reasonable and comparable to me..

Of course, when someone acquired their VIP status will have varied and will surely affect what the dollar cost would have been for them at the time that they had paid the 50 BTC for such status (unless they acquired it in another way),... So, surely there may have been some folks who also acquired their VIP status at later dates.. such as after March 2017 when BTC prices went up beyond $1k for the last time (so far).

I'm not sure anyone would regret spending that much money later on, and it wasn't a lot of money when they lauded that amount of BTC. If they hadn't paid for the VIP or Donator rank, they'd spend it on something else. The 1BTC we are spending today could be worth $2 million in the near future, and no one would ever regret spending such a large sum for something they needed in the past.

I spent 0.1 bitcoin on some random ebooks in 2016, and it's now worth millions in my local currency, but I've never regretted it.

I don't know where exactly the question is worth asking, but maybe not in this thread, and more likely in a thread of the same relevance or indeed creating a new thread.

Here are a few things you should know, now the forum is no longer accepting donations, pay attention to the part I bolded.

with the current price of BTC to UDS? then yes. as far as I know, the price in BTC is not updated. the price of VIP and Donator has always been the same which is 50BTC. if you are thinking that it would be unfair for people right now to pay that much BTC, then you have to realize that it would be unfair to the people who already paid 50BTC in order to get the Donator/VIP title.

Just curious if the Donator and VIP memberships are ever updated or is it correct that it is $2 million USD to be VIP?

Lol, you started off over 11 Months ago

You can go ahead and have activity of 1000 with the newbie rank but In a few years, you will start realizing how important a rank is. Posting those spam bounty links isn't worth it in the long run. Build your account and learn more about bitcoin, blockchain, wallets, trading etc

I started a month or two back so I dont mind. And This totally makes sense. But As a user I never look at Rank.I do over 150activities post..

It was really a positive move and it has had a positive effect, getting one merit is quite easy to do, but it's easy to say that simply because we're good posters, for the terrible posters, getting one merit is like swimming across an ocean, and when this was implemented they tried and tried till they gave up, which help get rid of some negative forum members.

So in general, Theymos really improved the forum implementing that.

Yeah, I know. Probably I just expressed myself wrong. I had to say "happy birthday enchanced newbie restrictions and requirements" .

Effects of enhanced merit system (aims at old-era Junior Members) can be seen on the time-series plot, with a spike (from abuse) in September of 2019.
Another evidence is total monthly registered accounts fell dramatically since September 2018. You can see from that raw statistics and from the time-series plot. After merit system run in January 2018, people kept creating new accounts, because they were still able to rank up to Junior Member rank from shitposts, but since September 2018, with this change, they realized the fact that they were unable to rank up to Junior Member from shit posts. Most of shitposters are unable to earn a single merit, so they stopped creating new accounts.
Let's compare stats of September (total register accounts from mid-August 2018 to mid-September 2018), for the month before the enhancement and some months later:

• One month later: 16oct2018 (figure from mid-September 2018 to mid-October 2018), at 41516 and 35335, respectively.
  It means about 14.9% drop after one month since the enhancement.
• Three months later: 15dec2018, the stat fell to 20733, that equals the 50% drop.

Visit Assumed monthly statistics on registered accounts of bitcointalk.org (2009-2019) to get full details, please.

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You are incorrect.
Merit system's birthday is not today. In fact, its birthday is January 24, 2018, 11:00:11 PM (forum time), or Wednesday 24 January 2018 22:12:21 (GMT time). Please read: One year anniversary of merit system. We have not yet reached the 2^nd anniversary of merit sytem.

I noticed just now that new rank requirements were released one year ago. Release of merit system was big thing, but I think that these rank requirements (1 merit to become Jr. Member) have real effect. It changed forum a lot into positive side.
Happy anniversary merit system! Long live!

- Just some additional thoughts. Like making the option for wearing a signature a privilege and upgraded based on membership status/rank, what's a signature basically anyway but simply just a mark pointing to one's identity? Why go with the online forum/blogging culture's general distortion of the meaning of wearing a signature and make it worse like how I see it in this forum, a form of hierarchical privilege for one to promote something/post an ad?

In the real world, anyone can have that claim to singular identity like marking work/doc/etc with a signature. It's kind of comical to reinterpret this online that some can't mark that 'identity' or can't have a 'signature' even if they want to. Is this the modern way? It's even funnier that the bounty trend and seemingly everyone else supports or just goes along with this technological mishap, if technological development is to be considered as this grand progress towards humanity's advancement. Why consider 'signature' as an official promotion/participation to a campaign? Can't anyone just promote, post an ad, leave a digital signature just by using the text editing features in drafting a post?

'Signature' may be one of those jargon that got stuck along, no offense but still kind of stupid...LMHO! Why not just relabel 'signature' as 'Official Promotional/Marketing Tail'? ...wagging in anticipation of a treat (bounty)... The longer or fancier the tail, the bigger the treat... LMHO! ... Just noticed now before posting this, fortunately it's optional in the 'Look and Layout Preferences' to view other users' 'signatures'.

Some suggestions that may have been suggested before... First off, leave the option on wearing a signature a default option to every member and let everyone stay true to the essence of leaving one. Second, restore some freedom and get rid of 'signatures' as a fancy status symbol equivalent to membership rank. Weren't or aren't the combination of length of membership or member ranking, trust rating, merit system, moderation, flagging, etc. not enough? Third but definitely not the least since I could think of more, as implied in last paragraph, privilege or not, hell, probably the alternatives have been staring right in front of the face of forum dev for the longest time. Some alternatives could be to rename or remove the field for adding 'signature' codes/design and just have the option in post text editing. I don't know much about how bounty managers here come to be but they could somehow be advised, left with the responsibility of maintaining promotional link campaigns, PM codes/design to users maybe not just based on rank (since forum acct is not really equivalent to 1 owner/same owner since sign-up), but also on bounty qualification/participation and be allowed to flag or disqualify participation in current/future project campaigns.

It makes perfect sense as I myself seen people do it.

Higher ranked members can post that links, and they are reported as you said previously.

It does not make sense, people whom are curious, careless, and dumb will do copying and pasting links provided in code blocks. I know now I understand your ideas with the fourth point. You proposed that point not only to prevent bad newbies to post external (phishing) links to scam users, but also for good newbies to do this with their posts (due to their carefulness).
It leads to another points, there are higher ranked users whom still post external harzadous links (with their posts or reports), intentionally or unintentionally. Do you really think of it?