How can a forum survive if all good knowledgeable members leave and its only shitposters and bots that are left(with a few members here and there)? theymos himself said it, managing this forum is more than just a headache. Like it or not, the forum is getting worse by the day. And we are sitting here with our hands tied and not able to do anything about it.
Of course it will survive. I'm not sure survive is the right word you're using here. The forum isn't going to 'die' when the traffic continues to grow due to bounties and sig campaigns. The majority of traffic will be trash and the forum will become even worse than it already is and unfit for it's true purpose in the process, but it wont die.
It surprises me that there are only 26 staff members. In other forums(like reddit), there are like 8-10 moderators per board(subreddit). We need like 2 mods per sub-board, and one Global mod for entire board,if that makes any sense. It doesn't have to be a Global Mod, but a new type of mod just to handle an entire board, and helping other mods of that specific board.
The forum is badly understaffed in my opinion, but I honestly don't know whether theymos prefers it that way with minimal moderation and rules etc. It doesn't make for a very usable or user-friendly forum though and you can see that from the number of complaints about various issues.
We don't need more admins, but the admin power certainly could be little delegated. I don't think theymos will ever delegate things like running ad slots or responding to emails or restoring accounts. He'd be potentially putting a lot at risk.
Semantics. Either more admins need to be added or more people doing admin duties. Doesn't matter what title you give them. If theymos doesn't trust some of the current staff members with some of this then they probably shouldn't be mods in the first place. You could have people running the ad slots without them even having to hold any money if that was something he's worried about. Theymos could continue to hold the addresses and the staff member is just in charge of making sure the money gets paid there. Sure, a staff member might try divert funds to addresses owned by them but is that worth ruining their account over? They probably couldn't get away with that much for a monthly ad slot anyway and there are probably easier ways a staff member could make money or even scam someone here.
theymos doesn't want to remove signatures, because he encourages people to earn from this forum, but he also said that people shouldn't shitpost to earn. I am starting to wonder if theymos gets pissed everytime someone says "theymos said this." "theymos said that."
He also isn't happy with the spam just like everyone else, so a compromise needs to be found here. You don't have to remove signatures either but the culture needs to change and only those making quality contributions should be getting paid here. If this forum is going to continue as it is then it is no longer fit for anything other than being a welfare system for those who will just continue to find ways to cheat and abuse it.
People think this forum is decentralized because one, it has bitcoin in its name, and two, it was created by satoshi.
Well that's a misconception they're going to need to get over or actually think about what they're complaining about. Just because something is decentralised doesn't mean there are no rules. Bitcoin has rules. You can't complain that there should be more bitcoins in existence or bitcoin should be the run the way you want it because decentralisation.
We already know who the good campaign managers are. That's not the problem here. The problem is that anyone can be a campaign manager, and the people behind the funding of the advertising don't care who the bounty manager is, and whether there's spam or not. Okay, not entirely true. Some projects do tend to hire more trustworthy, and ethical managers, but the majority won't.
ICOs tend to not bother because they don't really care. They're not business that are here for the longrun; they want to take in as much money as fast as possible then disappear and paying someone to run their campaign properly is both needless, counter-productive and an unnecessary expense to them. Bitcoin paying campaigns tend to have proper business behind them that care about their reputation and actually want to build something. That's the difference. There needs to be some standards here. Imagine a society without rules or regulations. There's a reason why a civilised society has things like building regulations because people would just cut corners and do a shitty job as cheap as possible and and put lives at risk in the process.
1. What will be qualification to even apply for the licence?
2. What will be the category of licences that will be issued we know there are different levels of campaign participants while some would be 50 participants, others might be as much as 200 participants.
2. Who are those that will issue the licence? This is the key part and we should be ready for round of name calling, attacks, allegations of favoritism and abuse of power.
The current situation is not the best but we are better of and I think campaign managers especially in the bounty section of the forum should be made accountable for the attitude of their participants.
I don't think it'd be easy to enforce who can and can't run them, but it's easy to police when they're doing a shitty job. There's new campaign managers who do a great job, but there's plenty more who don't and those are the ones who we should go after.