This project is under construction...
used format from https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/comprehensive-guide-to-bitcointalk-newbie-friendly-calculator-and-infographic-2534500History of Bitcointalk's forum changes.
[introduction/short description]
Content list
THE IP LOG
Announcing the recovery team Cryptios
Viewing TRUST when not logged in
Retention/privacy info
The new forum software information
Regarding the Merit points system
Changes1
Changes1
Changes1
Changes1
THE IP LOG
The newest change (06.06.2019) The new IP log for the past 30 days.
It's tricky to get email notifications right so that they're not too spammy. Maybe later.
For now, I added this page where you can see your IP logs for the past 30 days: https://bitcointalk.org/myips.php . You could pretty easily write a userscript to periodically check this and warn you if it's weird. (But don't scrape it on every pageload.)
I don't want to make older IP logs automatically accessible because that'd give a hacker a bunch of useful/sensitive information. But 30 days is probably not too harmful.
For now, I added this page where you can see your IP logs for the past 30 days: https://bitcointalk.org/myips.php . You could pretty easily write a userscript to periodically check this and warn you if it's weird. (But don't scrape it on every pageload.)
I don't want to make older IP logs automatically accessible because that'd give a hacker a bunch of useful/sensitive information. But 30 days is probably not too harmful.
Announcing the recovery team Cryptios
The announcement of the recovery team Cryptios.
FYI: The humans handling the new account recoveries system which was implemented late last year are a company that Cyrus created called Cryptios. alanst, 3dOOm, and Rizzrack -- the "mysterious newbies" who some people noticed -- are three of their employees. They've been doing a great job.
Although Cyrus created the company with bitcointalk.org in mind as their first customer, they are accepting additional customers. Their main specialization right now is high-security, social-engineering-proof customer support & community moderation.
Although Cyrus created the company with bitcointalk.org in mind as their first customer, they are accepting additional customers. Their main specialization right now is high-security, social-engineering-proof customer support & community moderation.
Viewing TRUST when not logged in
Viewing TRUST when not logged in announced>
Logged-out users will now see a warning in trust-enabled sections if more DT members neg-trust the topic starter than positive-trust him.
This increases the responsibility of DT members not to give negative trust for stupid reasons, but only for things that cause you to believe that the person is a scammer.
This increases the responsibility of DT members not to give negative trust for stupid reasons, but only for things that cause you to believe that the person is a scammer.
Retention/privacy info
Retention/privacy info
I wrote a new unified IP logging/retention system, and I changed the way backups are done in order to ensure limited retention on certain privacy-sensitive things. See: https://bitcointalk.org/privacy.php
Previously I said that IPs are only logged when you post and in some limited other cases, such as when you encounter certain errors. This is no longer true: you should now think about IP logging as happening constantly.
There's now an option in your account settings which will allow you to reduce retention of your logged IPs to 3 months. You should only consider enabling this if you've staked a pubkey in the thread and you're sure that your account email is correct. I'm not sure if 3 months is enough to respond adequately to all abuse; we'll see, and I might change it later or perhaps restrict it based on rank.
I considered putting a warning on trust pages for users who have enabled limited retention, since it theoretically might make legal action against them more difficult in case they scam you, but my current thinking is that this is kind of pointless because someone could just not enable the setting and use Tor for the same effect. And it'd be both privacy-invasive and futile whack-a-mole to try to indicate when people are using proxies. On the other hand, scammers are often pretty stupid, so I could be convinced to add the warning.
Previously I said that IPs are only logged when you post and in some limited other cases, such as when you encounter certain errors. This is no longer true: you should now think about IP logging as happening constantly.
There's now an option in your account settings which will allow you to reduce retention of your logged IPs to 3 months. You should only consider enabling this if you've staked a pubkey in the thread and you're sure that your account email is correct. I'm not sure if 3 months is enough to respond adequately to all abuse; we'll see, and I might change it later or perhaps restrict it based on rank.
I considered putting a warning on trust pages for users who have enabled limited retention, since it theoretically might make legal action against them more difficult in case they scam you, but my current thinking is that this is kind of pointless because someone could just not enable the setting and use Tor for the same effect. And it'd be both privacy-invasive and futile whack-a-mole to try to indicate when people are using proxies. On the other hand, scammers are often pretty stupid, so I could be convinced to add the warning.
The new forum software information >
The software is substantially complete. The main period of development was a while ago; the current work is mainly just maintenance & relatively minor improvements. Try running it yourself and you'll find that it's working, fast, and nearly feature-complete.
The things blocking a transition from the current software to the new software are:
- There hasn't been enough testing. I think that immediately after transition, a variety of small missed features, bugs, and performance issues would crop up. As a result, if the transition happened now (which is technically possible!), I'd expect the post-transition user experience to be poor for months while these things are fixed, which I don't want.
- I am the only bitcointalk.org sysadmin and on-demand programmer, and I'm used to the current software. Furthermore, I need to frequently make changes to the current software, but each change I make might require alterations to Epochtalk, which is problematic.
- The current PHP software, while ugly and sub-optimal in many ways, performs well, especially since I have extensively modified the backend to add features and improve performance. So I don't feel much urgency.
- The data-transition procedure still has a few known minor bugs.
We continue to work on these issues. I think that ultimately I may need to hire one or more full-time people, since a big problem is that the full transition is likely to create a ton of work which I won't be able to effectively handle alone.
The software is not vaporware (it's long existed in a runnable state, and is currently basically feature-complete), and is not abandoned (look at the git commit log). If anyone is unhappy with the progress, I invite them to take the Epochtalk code and create a competing forum with it; since they won't have to worry about the transition issues, they'd have a much easier time, and their testing will also end up helping us.
In short: If you want the software quicker, go run your own forum with it, and work to get any problems or missing features you find resolved via bug reports, etc. This would increase public interest, provide much-needed testing, and I might even hire you to work on bitcointalk.org when we're ready to do the final transition here.
The things blocking a transition from the current software to the new software are:
- There hasn't been enough testing. I think that immediately after transition, a variety of small missed features, bugs, and performance issues would crop up. As a result, if the transition happened now (which is technically possible!), I'd expect the post-transition user experience to be poor for months while these things are fixed, which I don't want.
- I am the only bitcointalk.org sysadmin and on-demand programmer, and I'm used to the current software. Furthermore, I need to frequently make changes to the current software, but each change I make might require alterations to Epochtalk, which is problematic.
- The current PHP software, while ugly and sub-optimal in many ways, performs well, especially since I have extensively modified the backend to add features and improve performance. So I don't feel much urgency.
- The data-transition procedure still has a few known minor bugs.
We continue to work on these issues. I think that ultimately I may need to hire one or more full-time people, since a big problem is that the full transition is likely to create a ton of work which I won't be able to effectively handle alone.
The software is not vaporware (it's long existed in a runnable state, and is currently basically feature-complete), and is not abandoned (look at the git commit log). If anyone is unhappy with the progress, I invite them to take the Epochtalk code and create a competing forum with it; since they won't have to worry about the transition issues, they'd have a much easier time, and their testing will also end up helping us.
In short: If you want the software quicker, go run your own forum with it, and work to get any problems or missing features you find resolved via bug reports, etc. This would increase public interest, provide much-needed testing, and I might even hire you to work on bitcointalk.org when we're ready to do the final transition here.
Regarding the Merit points system >
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Regarding the Trust system >
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Infographic - Merit & new rank requirements, all the credit goes to
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Q/A on basic use of the forum.
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Additional useful and entertaining threads
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Q/A on basic use of the forum.
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Additional useful and entertaining threads
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