Topic: History of bitcointalk.org's rank system (Read 2094 times)

The devs here adapted the forum quite good as well, I would say. I believe in early days there wasn't any signature or earning so there wasn't much spam either. Just activity back then was sufficient.

Hehe, glad I could help I'm specialized in finding typos; if you want, ask 1miau and fillippone about me I helped them a lot on this matter.


Maybe you're thinking about this topic of mine? However, that is not a topic containing too many historic threads; I created it asking if we need a board for such topics, and I gave a few examples. Other than that, I don't know any topic containing forum's history. 1miau has a big topic with a huge compilation, but that topic is about forum stats, not history (here).

I much appreciated your findings and this report. They are helpful. Never see those typos after months. I already fixed them in OP.

Perfect. It is the thread I was thinking of (and it is yours). 

Hello tranthidung. I spotted a small typo in the OP, as it follows:


I think that first period should be defined as "November 22, 2009 - June 17, 2013" instead of "November 22, 2009 - January 22, 2018", as the second stage starts with June 18, 2013.

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For this part I'd recommend also a few topics, all being related to forum's history; feel free to add them, if you consider suitable. I also tried to sort them by category:

I'm Kevin, here's my side (this topic and the two below can be listed below this topic mentioned by you - Bitcointalk history of MtGox and how a Bitcointalk post caught the MtGox hacker. - as all four are related)
I'm MtGox, here's my side
Silk road and Bitcointalk. How it played a role in its rise and fall.

Units of Evil, copper membership & list of copper members (this topic and the three below can be listed below this topic mentioned by you - History - signature campaigns and bounties on Bitcointalk - as all five are related)
Legendary profiles of bitcointalk
The Bitcointalk 50 BTC VIP club. Where are they now ? Complete list.
The Bitcointalk 10 BTC Donators - where are they now ?

History - Bitcoin Savings and Trust and Pirateat40 on Bitcointalk (PONZI) (this topic and the two below can be posted below this topic mentioned by you - Bitcointalk history of hacks and vandalism. - as all four are related)
knightmb on bitcointalk - from 371,067.36 BTC to Mitt Romney extortion.
History on Bitcointalk - Mining equipment scams, shams and failed deliveries.

Bitcointalk history - index to first 200 topics (this topic can be posted below this topic of yours - The most iconic bitcointalk threads. History on Bitcointalk. - as they are both related)

Bitcointalk trolls, dysfunction and all out flame wars. Guide to the scandals. (this topic and the two below can be posted one under the other, as all three are related)
Wall of fame / shame. Shit posts so bad that they are actually funny
Looking for the funniest trust feedback

After 16 June 2019 on which the merit system was enhanced with demotion on old-era Junior members. You can see how demoted old-era Junior members abused the merit system from the main accounts with the merit time-series plot. Most of merits in the spike came from abuse and farms.

The monthly registered accounts fell since June 2019.

Some put efforts to rank up but after get what they aim at, they become spammers again.

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Sure, merit system has its power to change spammer to good member and some of them will do feel fun when they make high quality posts. Gradually, over months or years it will naturally become a habit -- habit of high quality poster.

I have just became active in the forum 5 months ago, I really noticed how hard it is to rank up to this low point I am but I'm proud of it, creating topics took me some weeks to post because I'm trying hard to avoid shitty posts rather quality, I just imagine the bulky bounty hunters before November 22, 2009 - January 22, 2018 without activity requirements turning to legendary so easily without struggling.

This merit and activity system helped users a lot by letting them creating something tangible, ignites the talents in a user, I have seen series of good posters available in the forum and I'm pretty sure they really the ones having funs here because merit finds them through their good communication and conversation skills. Thanks for the merit and activity implementation system.

I thought the shitposting would switch from shitting to make piddly amounts to shitting to rank up to make piddly amounts. It feels a little like that's the case but perhaps more people have given up. There'll always be enough who plug mindlessly along forever at it not understanding why they're not progressing.

It's nice to be able to quote the above post in 2020 and realize that the shitposting situation that was so rampant up until only recently (I don't know exactly when the shitposting dropped off a cliff, but it was at some point in 2019) has dissipated such that I'm no longer writing long rants about spam and garbage posts being a persistent problem.

Seriously, I used to write a lot of posts in Meta raging about how useless certain sections were.  There are still shitposters, of course, but nowhere near as many as before the merit system was put into place.  It took time, but members began to realize how hard it became to rank up an account past Jr. Member, and I suspect many of them either gave up trying or purchased a high-ranked account.

I agree.  There's a lot of important (to the forum at least) history that's happened just in the last year or so and it's neat to look back at threads like this one.

It's really good to have this revisited. History is good and archives should always be safeguarded.  At least, newbies (if at all they can find their way to this thread as presumably they rarely visit Meta) will know how it all started and went down. Even for me, this thread is enlightening as I never knew there was a time users ranked up without "activities". Just post and rank up 🤔

Thanks tranthidung. You seem to be the statistician and record keeper for the forum. Thumbs up.

There is no perfect thing at born-day, and this is true for bitcoin, altcoins, and all of other things in our lives.
The forum initially created for bitcoin, and both the forum and bitcoin were not too famous years ago. As you can see in OP and related links, the forum did not have any troubles with spam before the appearance of signature and growth of signature industry. It is very simple to end spam by disable all signature in the forum, but due to some reasons this is not what theymos want to do. Admin try to avoid this, but he might do it if merit system does not solve spam issues.

Fortunately, as we all witnessed so far, merit system works, and spam reduced dramatically. In addition, spammers now can not rank up to Full Members and above from their shitshows. At least, they can not dump their shitposts here, destroy the forum reputation and abuse it, then get huge money out, and use the forum as their freely ATMs.

Furthermore, since 2018, especially since April of 2019, the forum has wiped out thousands of higher ranked accounts permanently, and users have more actively reported bad posts, bad users than ever.
No one gets stucked if they made enough decent efforts into their posts, and from their time to read, search, read, and learn before making posts.

My opinion is that those system have to be enforeced from early days and equally for everyone.

I suppose the forums didn't expect this kind of a popularity in the early days, so a simple "postcount" metric seemed to be enough back then.
But when they realised the need to filter out the weed from the legendary members, they should have made the changes in a more smooth way.
The only problem with how things have been developed is that people unworthy to be at the same rank as helpful and truly legendary members have been gifted the same rank as them when all they did and they keep doing is spamming with a signature gampaigns!

When the same performance would have them stuck to Jr.Members, it simply annoys me to see them at high ranks.
This just shows that something hasn't been done that well with this system.

A few threads on history found:
Bitcointalk history of MtGox and how a Bitcointalk post caught the MtGox hacker.
Bitcointalk history of hacks and vandalism.
The most iconic bitcointalk threads. History on Bitcointalk.
History - signature campaigns and bounties on Bitcointalk

Quite true, the system is doing just fine and it has reduced the level at which spammers can easily rank up, the next step should involving the forum tackling the spam directly by introducing something just like the merit system to discourage spamming and motive spam hunters to continue working tirelessly. We have successfully tackled the ranking up system, now let the forum tackle spam directly and a good way to achieve that would be implementing the report badges avatars for motivation and recognition.


Here's the catch buddy, most users getting banned aren't worth giving a listening ear when it come to appeal of ban. There post history aren't impressive, just full of crab and plagiarized posts so it make it even harder for the administration of the forum to forgive them to give a second chance.


Don't forget we have Google at the fingertip, that someone is answering questions here and there doesn't technically means they're knowledgeable. Since we can't authenticate the source of their knowledge there isn't any need for these. Every member should be given and equal chance to rank-up which is why we have the merit system. Quality post = merit reward.


We (forum) have already tried this solution (newbie jail) and it didn't work out, so lets move on. Copper membership is doing great.

My point was to introduce some educative system and not jail like restrictive.
It would be automatic, and if user passes simple knowledge tests he unlocks his account, or grow his rank.
Just an idea... for merit system update.

There is no Newbie Jails for a long period of time, and admin repeatedly wrote that he does not have plans to bring Newbie Jails back.
However, there are suggestions from community, including staffs and global moderators that Whitelist procedure should be considered. Whitelist might create new kinds of work burden on forum staffs, that they might not expect. I still think that if there are some kind of community-led clean-up process like more effective reports, Whitelist is not essential thing to implement. Recent waves of spam bots with Yobit-worded posts eliminated very. I do agree that such things make the forum like a land-fill area of spammers, but it does not last for too long, as I saw.

Interesting history, and I wish I joined in that early days myself

It is very good that we have this merit system,
but I also do think that we may need to upgrade it
so that genuine activity plays a bigger role in ranking up.
We should focus more on rewarding users, rather then banning them,
and make unban procedure a bit better.
Maybe even adding a small knowledge test/quiz for passing to new rank.

I would limit forum access for newbies to only certain parts of forum,
and give them some limited freedom there.

You will find more information if you search manually using the first topics created in this section.
GO TO  >> Meta >>  Pages:  >>  401.
There seems to be a similar system of merit system that exists where users can give a positive or negative evaluation "karma system!" but does not affect the rank. For more Read -----> [applaud]/[smite] system?



So Yes. I think the first system is a reputation system

Again, I request that there be an official archive of the forum.

Same here, I have nothing stored in the memory.

Do you know if the default values of ranking up were 500, 250 etc? I've hosted SMF forums before, but nothing compared to this forum, obviously. I've only ever done it for testing purposes, and setting them up for others. I can't remember the default values as it was a number of years ago now.

Yeah, I think that was the concern at the time many users were spamming their post counts up, getting to a "respectable" rank, and then attempting to scam, and I believe a few new users to the forum were falling for it. I'm sure there was a number of reasons for it to be implemented, and the discussion that the OP linked shows users discussing that.

I can confirm that the default SMF ranking based on post counts. I have tested SMF several times and found out it's too easy to rank up (if anyone wants). Introducing activity counts was a good move.

Two years ago, I was hanging up in another forum for few weeks and that was hosted using SMF and believe me or not, I have seen people to post crazy amount of posts. In a week some people made over 1k posts. So, according to our activity requirements they are Legendary in a week LOL

Anyway, the evaluation of our ranking system is better in my opinion. Especially the last edition of merit requirement. At the beginning some users were totally against it but now it seems, "The hell has frozen" :-P