maybe theymos and cyrus should just take a day or two out of every month to investigate and restore them.
It would take at least a couple hours every day to deal with them. Each case typically requires a lot of follow-up. And it's really annoying work. I used to do them sort-of regularly, but at some point I just couldn't stand it anymore, in addition to not really having time. Cyrus is still doing some, though not enough to keep up.
I'm sure it would take a lot of time, especially with the current backlog, but wouldn't it make even more sense to put someone in charge
dedicated to investigating and restoring them? The pile is only going to continue to get bigger the longer it's left and I really think it's unacceptable how long users have been left in the dark without even a response. I'd be absolutely irate if I was in their position. For some users they are losing business because they've lost accounts here and a lot more will be missing out on money from signature campaigns etc.
There's no need for any fee, and a fee probably wouldn't be appropriate unless absolutely necessary. Money is not a problem. If I could throw $100k at the problem and make it go away, I would do so. But in the real world, there is no magic wishing well where you can throw money and make things happen. You give people money and they don't do what you want, or the people you hire turn out not to be trustworthy, or you fill out the tax forms wrong and then later have to spend more time&money dealing with that than you would've by just doing the thing with current sub-optimal resources, etc.
I don't think we should use this is an excuse not to do anything about certain issues. Sure, some people can be greedy and lazy or turn out to be someone they're not but people can be paid
after they've done the work and to an acceptable standard, and if they do a shoddy job then they can be fired or let go. You can only do your best and at least you tried, but not doing anything about certain things isn't going to make the situation here any better.
I acknowledge that the current situation is very bad, and we have some plans for fixing it. I hope to have manual account reviews going smoothly again before the end of the year at the latest.
What about the users who have been waiting eight+ months already? Do they have to wait another four months in the hope that the system will be ready by the end of the year? What if it isn't? Wouldn't it make more sense to assign someone to deal with the problem in the meantime? Also, what about those who can't prove their ownership with a bitcoin address or can prove in other ways? Will they continue to languish? The majority of people who join this forum these days likely do so for alt coins and that will only continue to grow and if they haven't posted a bitcoin address then there's still going to be a huge hole here that needs to be manually investigated.
theymos mentioned before about hiring someone with a business degree or something to run the forum
Yes, this would be very useful. I
hate that I'm basically acting as a CEO here. I hate dealing with lawyers and accountants, or figuring out who to hire. This stuff is not my wheelhouse, and is in fact not even on my ship. I wish that someone would take all of that business-related stuff off my hands. But it looks like that's the one aspect which is
most difficult to (safely) get rid of, so I've been
trying (with only a bit of success) to delegate in other areas.
I get that it's probably pretty shitty and unfair that you've become the defacto leader (especially if it's not something you truly wanted to do), but you are the 'boss' here and unless you're going to step down/give up and hand the keys over to someone else (which I don't think you should ever do if you can help it) then I think you should look at ways at lightening the load on both yourself and other mods which will not only relieve stress from you but also the forum and make it a better place in the process. I wouldn't want to have to deal with lawyers either as my previous experience of them has been that most of them aren't very nice people at all and don't really care about anything other than money. I also absolutely hate doing taxes and I know how difficult/stressful it is for anyone running a business, and when you're doing the finances in bitcoin it adds an extra layer of difficulty with capital gains and loses etc (and the tax man not really understanding or 'trusting' bitcoin). If this is something that is causing you stress or headaches then you should look to hiring a professional who can help you with that asap. In the meantime, I think you should look at ways of spreading out the workload here so the forum doesn't suffer in the process. You could have a staff member dedicated to account restorations. One dedicated to running the ad slots. One or two dedicated to adding more merit sources. Maybe a couple dedicated to policing shoddily run ICO campaigns. A team of mods dedicated to policing sig spam etc, and so on. A few of the sub boards still don't even have any dedicated mods which I've been calling for for years. All of these are things that will take away the stress from both you and all current staff and the community and users will be better off for it.
When was the last time you spoke to BadBear? Can't you try contact him and try get him to come back if there's nobody else trusted to be an admin or doing things like restoring accounts etc? I'm sure he could help out in other ways too.
