Topic: Ideas and plans of theymos for the forum improvements (Read 784 times)

I’m most excited about number 6.)

I've thought that it'd be interesting to publish an adblocker subscription for signatures. You can block individual users' signatures with eg. bitcointalk.org##.sig186520, and/or you can try to block signature ads generally with filters like bitcointalk.org##.signature table.

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Userscripts are a good idea. Let me know if some small change on my end will help your userscript a lot.

Badges for good reporters are not bad ideas. However, to prevent any kind of abusements with report badges, all badges should not give any kind of benefits for reporters, whom qualitied report enough to earn such badges.

It's terrible if new staffs abused the forum, and scam others. Fortunately, merit system maybe helpful in such screening procedure to find new staffs.

Agreed I don't know what the budget looks like for moderators but for a forum of its size we need more moderators. Whether they are paid or volunteered positions. Bitcoin Discussion is overrun by spam and a few other more niche sub forums like project development.

I have always loved such ideas but the coin must be in a digital form.

What is the benefit of reposting ideas that may be implemented several years later and discussed several times? As long as there is one developer I do not think that such topics will change anything.
If the topic is about the changes that have already taken place, that may be meaningful.

-snip-

Reporting badges are a good idea in my opinion because they encourage those that are already reporting to make more reports, but also rewards them without monetizing it.

Here's a draft of a welcome message for new users. The user will see it on the screen confirming their registration, and it'll also be available in the help center at any time.

Some text in the intro was obviously inspired by xtraelv's signature, which I really like.

Please provide your suggested additions/changes. However:
 - I don't want to put in a lot of exact numbers such as all of the merit/activity thresholds, since then I need to remember to update them.
 - I don't believe in creating definitive rule lists.
 - There's no need for this to be a complete explanation of everything on the forum. It's just the basics.
~snip~

The reason behind potential abusements on report badges is: If there is financial benefits with those badges, people might abuse it. They can create 100 account to spam, then use their main one to report all fake spams. In the second scenario, even real users might become report hunters, and might make their low quality reports. Some time people read fast, and don't care about general aspect of the forum.

Grin is new and clunky to use. I don't expect many people to use it, honestly. But I needed to rewrite the forum payments system anyway in order to support LN in the future and to fix some longstanding issues with the old code, so adding grin support worked out nicely.

Appointing of new moderators should be in the to-do list right now. We can somehow manage the forum with current moderation, but having additional moderators appointed would make the work a lot more easier.

I am close to 1000 reports and would hit that anytime in a month or 2, but should that really be popularized by having a badge? Reporting is not a job, to reward the reporters for what they do. Funny thing is that, even if I don't post in a day I report a spam whenever I browse through the forum. I don't think this is really important to implement such kind of an idea right now.

-snip all badges discussion-

Epochtalk has been in development for lot more years than expected, so I don't think we would be seeing them quite sooner in this Q2-Q3 probably.

Appointing of new moderators should be in the to-do list right now. We can somehow manage the forum with current moderation, but having additional moderators appointed would make the work a lot more easier.

New batch of moderators are needed, it was already suggested and even hilariousandco is open to that, especially on bitcoin discussion and altcoin board. Beginners and Help is a good starting point on building new moderators, at least they can be a patroller since I can see B&H is no longer the same shit when I first check that board and to be honest some newbies are complaining why their post are being deleted there, it is not iron hand, it is just what a reporter thinks we read every day. Quality posters are evolving, spammers too.

Bump for visibility of theymos' To-Do List.

This thought occurred to me recently:

If you wanted to implement Merit in a decentralized forum (ie. one in the vein of Freenet's Frost or FMS), you could do it in this way:
 - Everyone can, from their own perspective, give unlimited merit to posts, and these merit transactions are put into files which each user publishes via the decentralized system. (Like a merit.txt.xz which every user publishes.) Unlike on bitcointalk.org, you can also give people merit without an associated post.
 - For everyone who has merit, you download their merit-transactions-list, but scale down/up all of the numbers so that the total merit that they send is equal to the actual sMerit that they own. It might or might not be useful to do this via some sliding time frame scheme so that merit transaction amounts aren't just continually diminished over time as they increase in quantity.
 - Apply the above step recursively, creating a web-of-trust-style merit network

Then every user has a subjective merit score for each post (sort of like the bitcointalk.org trust system, which was inspired by FMS). And if you wish, you can assign people to be merit sources from your perspective by sending them large amounts of merit directly; these might or might not appear in the merit-transactions-list which you publish.

It's a good idea, already on my to-do list, but it requires other changes as well. If the person who made the rating can delete it as they can today, then they can also delete the response, which isn't good. My current tentative thinking on how it should work is:
 - Raters can retract ratings, but not totally delete them.
 - Raters can add a short addendum to their ratings, and this can be freely edited, but the original rating can't be edited. (The point is to prevent conversations via rating edits. A rating should be one particular issue, and the response should be a response to this issue. Not 100% sure that this is necessary, though.)
 - Additional limits on how often you can leave ratings may be needed.

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.

I can't reproduce this on any of my devices, so I can't effectively investigate it. But I suspect that it's a recently-introduced bug in Chrome's hardware-accelerated rendering. Disabling hardware acceleration might fix it; maybe chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-2d-canvas ? (NeuroticFish reports this isn't it)

If anyone can figure out exactly what causes it or whether I can change anything on my end to fix it, let me know.

For bitcointalk.org's 10^th anniversary later this year, I was thinking that it might be cool to produce a limited run of 50-300 coins and give them out (maybe all-expenses-paid or maybe at cost) to users who meet some to-be-determined criteria. I'm not a collector, though, so I'm not knowledgeable about this stuff.

 - Does this sound like a good idea?
 - What features would make the coin especially interesting?
 - What's the best way to get a coin like this made?

I think that I'm going to add some badges for people who report a bunch of posts. Maybe one for 300 good reports, one of 1000, and one for 5000. Does anyone want to make or find these images? They have to be exactly 16x16 px (like ), and if you find them online, then they must be copyright-free.

There's a strong incentive to spam replies to topics in altcoin announcements and a few other sections because there's a lot of activity and competition for eyeballs there. This spam should just be deleted, but I'd also like to remove the incentive by changing the default ordering of topics in those sections from "last post" to something new. (You'll still be able to click/bookmark something to get the old ordering.)

What are your ideas for new ordering methods? My current idea is:
 1. For each topic, get a list of the distinct users who posted there in the last 24 hours.
 2. Give the topic a score equal to the sum of each such user's total earned merit.
 3. Sort by topic score descending, and secondarily by the usual last post time.

With that, you still have topics with recent conversation listed first, but it requires more resources to manipulate, at least, and newbies have no influence. Maybe it'd give certain users overwhelming influence, though.

I want to think about it quite a bit more, so I probably won't do it soon.

Grin is new and clunky to use. I don't expect many people to use it, honestly. But I needed to rewrite the forum payments system anyway in order to support LN in the future and to fix some longstanding issues with the old code, so adding grin support worked out nicely.

I posted in that topic in 2010. Still haven't given up on the idea.

The specific idea in that topic was basically Namecoin, but implemented sort of like a naïve colored coins thing on Bitcoin. Eventually it became Namecoin. In any case, it has the censorability issues I mentioned in my OP.

I've thought that it'd be interesting to publish an adblocker subscription for signatures. You can block individual users' signatures with eg. bitcointalk.org##.sig186520, and/or you can try to block signature ads generally with filters like bitcointalk.org##.signature table.

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Userscripts are a good idea. Let me know if some small change on my end will help your userscript a lot.