I used to have all the altocoin forums on ignore, then I found syscoin. But the utter scams that take place in the altcoin section come to find out is HORRIBLE. Not only that when people get scammed in altcoin it gets tied to bitcon."looks bad for the community" I think they should have there own forum and I am a active member of the syscoin community and and all 85 people in our IRC agree. We are moving away from using bitcointalk in general cause of the HUGE cesspool of scams that go on there and we do not want to be associated with it.
I get messages everyday asking me to find the guy who start poopcoin, hotdogcoin, beercoin, yadda yadda cause people follow the crowds just like they did with pirate40
Theymos is profiting in some way off alt-coin boards popularity, so any discussion in its removal will be just that. Discussion. If I knew those funds were going towards the community I wouldn't mind so much. Consider the amount of money that's been donated to these boards and what we have so far got in return though. This is the only reason why I'm a little bitter, as I wanted to support this community and Bitcoin, not those who would debase it and taint bitcoin's name and its technology.
No reasonable person could look at those boards and say it has a place here on bitcointalk.
The altcoin sections are very popular, so I'd like to support them.
What is in it for this community by supporting them? Why do you think its worth the bandwidth and risk to new users?
I don't think that they do anything to hurt the other sections.
Their mere presence here hurts the community's and bitcoin's credibility. Why should new users believe us when we tell them Bitcoin isn't a scam, but we are gladly party to alt-coins which are?
I'm not usually interested in altcoins myself, but I can see how people can enjoy them.
They're popular, so you wanted to support them I thought. That support I would figure requires active interest and a clear benefit to these forums or yourself.
Most altcoin "investing" is a lot like gambling. I can see how trying to navigate and manipulate these tiny markets could be fun for a lot of people.
Why are we even about facilitating this activity here. I could see how it could be fun for people too, but why is this an argument for keeping them around? Whats in it for the rest of us? If the alt boards are generating traffic and helping to support the site just say so.
These pump-and-dump altcoins aren't really competitors to Bitcoin: they're really a way of using your bitcoins to gamble. There are also a handful of technologically interesting altcoins like Monero, which I think are very useful for testing new ideas that might one day be incorporated into Bitcoin.
But naive users don't know that. They come here to learn about bitcoin and instead are blasted with a huge amount of BS they have to sift through. It makes knowledgeable users job of educating that much harder.
And any technologically interesting coin capable of succeeding doesn't need to use bitcointalk as a launch platform and should be expected to stand on their own merit...
edit: hmmm so looks like new users aren't blasted with alt-coin propaganda as much as they used to be. At least that's changed for the better since I've been gone. And apparently new forum software is coming out... honestly I didn't ever see that happening.