Topic: Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements - page 2. (Read 41582 times)

Please allow me to disagree,
as I never saw any newbie reporting phishing websites...
even if some exceptions can be found.

They can always post website without HTTP or WWW
that can't be clicked

I don't know which link you gave in OP, but forum corrected as

4. Disable Newbies to add any external links in posts

It will do seriously harm good newbies. If they doubt a site is a phising one, and they don't have rights to post external link to that site, to ask for users ideas, how the forum can help them?

What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion? Also, people should not be required to post in order to get paid; that's already against the rules.

An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
 - "I want to discuss things"
     = Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
 - "I want to make money"
     = Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
     = You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc. (Quizzes are pointless to stop dedicated spammers, since an answer key will quickly be compiled, but it may help in cases where clueless people are ending up here.)

I've suggested it before. It's one way for sure to stop all the messy bot spam.

This wouldn't be bringing back newbie jail. They can post. They just need to be whitelisted before it goes 'live' and most will be none the wiser to it.


It's not impossible to implement. Many forums have this sort of thing. I signed up to one yesterday which had it. I don't know how long it took to verify me as I got no notification just an alert that my account needed to be verified, but the irony is my account was instantly permabanned automatically when I made my first post as being suspected of being a bot. Had someone actually verified my post that probably wouldn't have happened.


This is more impossible as theymos said he won't be bringing it back. There are much better ways than newbie jail to curb spam and I think this suggestion is one of them.


In the past four months staff have been handling between 18-20k reports a month. White-listing a users first post probably wouldn't be a big deal. You could even do a trial run. Ie, the system is put in place but nothing actually changes on the user front and we see how long and how much time it would take to handle them and if a backlog quickly built up. As I already said, more staff could be added to meet demand as well. You could even have one or two staff who's sole job was to handle them. I'm not saying it's perfect and there are pros and cons to any spam measure, but at least this pretty much stops the bots nearly 100% from being an eyesore and infecting the forum.


This isn't what is being suggested. A users first post only needs to be approved just to ensure they're not a spambot. Accounts wouldn't be banned or effected just for posting something a mod didn't like and staff could already remove it if they wanted but if they did they wouldn't be a mod for long.

Primarily, it's just that freedom + size = mess, and with bitcointalk.org I've chosen to keep freedom about as high as possible, for example allowing paid signature ads, poor English, micro-earning services which often attract a spammy crowd, etc. Banning these things (and other noise-generating factors) would be easily possible, and would immediately lead to a cleaner environment, but it'd also be a less free environment. IMO there are enough highly-controlled platforms around, and I'd prefer to try maximizing the freedom axis. (Maximizing freedom on the forum was a policy started by Satoshi when he was an admin, BTW, though it was years after he left before the forum became large enough for freedom to actually come in conflict with signal much.)

Bitcointalk.org is under active development on two parallel paths:

First, although the outward appearance hasn't changed much at all since 2010, I have made tons of changes to the code, including many features. About a year ago for example I added the Merit system, which has improved signal-to-noise quite a bit, by means of changing incentives.

Second, a completely new software platform has long been in development. This software is open source, can be run now, and an instance of it is available for example at https://www.cryptos-currencies.com/ . But I don't think that it's quite complete enough to migrate bitcointalk.org to it yet.

On both development paths, we try to tackle signal-vs-noise by methods such as categorizing posts better, improving incentives, trying to create smaller sub-communities, etc., but not via restriction, if at all possible.

While I don't claim to have nearly maximized the signal-to-noise which might be possible even given a high degree of freedom, bitcointalk.org is pretty anarchic, and it will always be so. (Though note that some sections are much better than others.) If that doesn't appeal to you, then you should use a different site. Smaller communities, like IRC channels and similar, can be both free and have a high signal-to-noise ratio. This was bitcointalk.org in 2010-2013, but it's now too large. You can also have large communities that are more strictly moderated, like /r/Bitcoin.

Genuine new users that have real activity will after some time return to normal forum usage and reduced restrictions
if they had no moderator reports or flags from other forum members

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

< ... >
Edit : screenshot if you're merit source. If you're not, it's exactly same with version 1.1

Jeez, I can't believe I'm still on the recent most generous merit-senders list, since I've been slacking off as of late.

If they complain about amounts, tell them to complain to me. It's best if sources try to exhaust their source allocations, even if it means giving posts higher amounts than is typical. If you have 150 source merit and you only see 3 merit-worthy posts in a month, then I'd rather you over-give each of them 50 merit than let the merit expire. That way there are more people capable of sending merit, and the "merit economy" is less top-down.

It is strange to know @LoyceV, whom is one of the most merited users in the forum, just ranked at the 6th position in the list of Most generous merit senders, all time.

Check more, I found that LoyceV has likely more actively sent his sMerits recently (for the last 30 days), from Most generous recent merit senders.

From those evidence, I guess @suchmoon was a merit source very soon after merit system started

For Merit levels, see Merit stats.

Now I regret being passive all this time.

Should focus some attention too on who these merit sources are.

I thought there were only a few sources and paying some attention on merit level could be a guide on who to follow and possibly interact with.

Why? If you haven't posted at all, (lack of) Merit doesn't matter at all. What you really can't make up for, is the lack of Activity for this year.

I've considered this, and created [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source .
You don't strike me as a spammer, if you keep up writing decent posts, Merit will find you. And if not, feel free to post in the above thread.
Once you're a Newbie-with-Merit, that highlights your posts above all the spammers. That's a good thing!

I just didn't want to start getting involved before I get truly acquainted with the forum rules/guidelines and know how to navigate through the numerous threads.

Should focus some attention too on who these merit sources are.

Asking for Merit isn't appreciated, so it doesn't really matter. But most of them are publicly known anyway.

I've been a member for more than a year now and some of these restrictions are quite disconcerting.

I appreciate that you've considered how good newbies would be affected by garbage-posting that they have not been a part of.

I just didn't want to start getting involved before I get truly acquainted with the forum rules/guidelines and know how to navigate through the numerous threads.

Should focus some attention too on who these merit sources are.