Topic: Newbie, Jr Members, Members suffering from merit-phobia: Explanations and Advice - page 2. (Read 1234 times)

good point, most of the newcomers aiming for the required character in their participated bounties, they post lot of words but the main point of the post is summarized only in a short sentence, honestly it also happen to me. this merit system is an eye opener to us in this forum to be more informative with our post so that others can benefit with our shared knowledge in this forum.

As a newbie, I don't feel disparaged.  The merit system is a great concept.  I have spent time so far educating myself on BTC and the crypto community.  If I feel I have something of value to offer, then I comment.  This forum, just like everywhere else in the world, expects you to EARN your rank.  I didn't read anywhere in the rules that this was going to be easy!

I would not use the spreadsheet script for Mass data scraping - theymos' data dump is much better to use, albit more complicated. My spreadsheet thing was intended as a quick "hack" to scrape data before the dump existed, and for purposes such as campaigns.

Yes this is a great thing merit phobia. Everybody has the fear to get merit points anyhow. Some of them are getting good merit points. But the majority always complains about. It is the wreckage of their dreams of getting rich by signature campaign . Haha they always criticize the merit system. Because they never want to learn things. Just want rapid quick rich way. But they will know their is no shortcut to the success.

Step 6 (Most Important): Do all of the above with a sense of purpose and interest rather than just money as your sole motivator. For money, get a real job. We are still far from changing the banking and economic system.


Personally, I really like this line but Most important is not the most important! Sense of purpose is not actually right but it could be sense of sincerity.

Sense of sincerity of what we are doing is the most important at all. We can easily perform our purpose to post and comments according to what the campaign required.

Sense of sincerity is from inside to outside without any form of requirements but rather it is all about I put my thinking and heart toward my writings just to say that is how the way I do it.

Sincerity can push everyone to learn English to make sure that whatever they contributes in discussion can be understandable by the readers.

Sincerely yours: @art27

I can contribute with better analysis than zentdex, bit I can not have data. Your raw dataset is not enough, and I don't have skills to get more detailed data from the forum base on your rw'aw data. If you can publish more detailed data, I can help make my analysis. I have asked zentdex but he didn't share data which he used for his topic.
Thanks, Theymos.

This is true. On top of that, some of those "newbies" were just alt created to create a new thread for their alts account to post for their sign camp.
Mods have done a good thing for that, many useless threads were locked or trashed. A lot of them. Some members were also trying as best as they could to report spam.


So far, this is what has been done by some Indonesian member in the local board.


About the beginner section, it has been mentioned recently by cissrawk and we will discuss it sooner or later.
Right now we've already discussed some point that hopefully makes those spammers, alt farmer, cheater stop.

Errmm... anyway, Indonesia Board have many post because Tons of Newbie come everyday and ruin everything. Keep posting without discussion, copy-paste from others. SPAMMER!
Maybe reason why no Beginner Board because many of them Lazy to Read, They dont have much time to read tutorial or rules, just go directly Find Bounty. Moderator and some Member work hard to make Indonesia Board have good name in Global.

I'm happy to see that you think this way. Often these topics that start a discussion about how to improve the quality of posts in the forum, receive a large number of people whose only aim is to strengthen their biased and racist position on others.

The latest modifications, merit system and the creation of exclusive sections for serious discussions where signatures are not allowed, can contribute a lot to increase the quality of the discussions.

But it is important to note that the niche sections where technical discussions take place are not populated with messages from people seeking posts for signature campaigns.

And excessive use of these more formal treatment occurs when an argument between a person who is in a power position, a campaign manager or a forum staff member, and another person who seeks for help or a service.

I was addressed as "sir" more times whilst I was in America, than I am in England.

As I pointed out in another thread. "sir" doesn't derive from English imperialism, but comes from the diminution of the word "sire" which was the form of address for a Baronet or Knight.

A lot of English words come from the days of the Normans. For example, most of the words referring to edible meat come from the French ( beef from boeuf ), because the Normans were the only ones who could afford to eat it. The words for animal husbandry such as "cow" come from the Anglo-Saxon language ( which is Germanic in origin).

Personally, I don't have a problem with people using "sir" on the forum. I think it is redundant, but it doesn't slow down or mess up a post in my opinion.

I completely agree to this. We should not give all value to English and grammar used by a member. If someone is weak in this aspect but is still trying to compensate with some extra effort in researching for the content , we should appreciate it. No doubt, having excellent writing skills will always give an advantage to a member on a forum like this where most of the members are educated and using a latest technology like bitcoin.

Whenever I see a stat like that, it makes me wonder why someone doesn't just hire a ton of these people. You'd think that even totally-unskilled people could be made productive enough to support paying them $3/hr or whatever. I'm sure there are real government-related and cultural barriers or someone would've done it already, but it still seems like a shame.

The vast majority of great things in the world, including things in the Bitcoin ecosystem, were created by a community consisting of maybe 15% of the world's population. It'd be truly fantastic if the remaining 85% of the world was made generally capable of similar achievements. If this somehow happened overnight, it'd be the greatest-ever step forward for humanity. So I am very happy to see people from poorer countries on this forum and in the Bitcoin ecosystem generally, acting with ambition. IMO Bitcoin was created in part to help break down the artificial barriers which are keeping these people from prosperity. Though no amount of this sort of thinking excuses those who choose to post garbage posts, for whatever reason. I hope that we can eventually reach a balance on the forum which will satisfy the forum's primary mission of enabling real discussion while also continuing to create opportunities for many people.

If auto-translation was allowed, people would be posting auto-translated ads all the time. Though if any of the local sections want to try out allowing it, I'd be OK with it.

This has always really annoyed me because it just comes across as insincere and it usually comes with some sort of begging or pleading when they've done something wrong. Please sir hilarious unban me ten accounts sir. I won't do it again sir. Please sir.




Well put. You don't need to call people Mr or Miss either. Just call people by their username.


This is when it goes too far and people start to show their true colours. Shitposting is annoying but it's unnecessary to start getting derogatory in racial terms.

You'd probably be surprised to know but there is hardly an equivalent to "Sir" in most native languages. There are of course salutations but they are mostly brotherly. Widespread use of honorifics like "Sir", "Saahab" etc. are completely imperial vestiges. "Sir", particularly, is not a shortcoming of translation tools.


That is why there is a lot scope for the locals to take the lead here and establish a truly healthy community. Its hard to believe there's no beginner's section at one of the largest community boards. I'd say again for the local members:


But this should be done as an initiative by the speakers themselves. Doing it as a translation service would probably defeat the purpose.

Haha..This actually is such a ingrained thing that if a person in, say India, was to address his boss by his last/first name (as is the norm in western work environments), he'd be met with disbelief and it'd be taken as an offense.

Blame it on imperialism. The post-independence elites in most of the eastern societies made sure that the exclusivity established by British-era (Also fondly remembered as 'The Raj era' by Anglophiles.. ) was continued to ensure a level of supremacy and control. The British themselves were inspired by the fabled pomp and grandeur of the Eastern Courts/ Durbars i guess.

The atmosphere at several MNCs out here has started to become much more liberating as addressing someone as "Sir" isn't encouraged anymore. The problem is that when dealing with any kind of public service or Govt. Machinery, you have to massage fragile egos by calling people with authority as "Sir".

I think the use of things like "sir" is the result of poor translation tools, and the writer using a specific word in their local language that does not translate well without proper context, which translation tools usually cannot do.

The association of people using the word "sir" with those who do not know what they are talking about is the result of a number of things:

1 - There is an extreme gap in the standard of living in places like Indonesia and affluent neighborhoods in the US. This means that not only is the $0.55 or so a low level member can earn from making one post is a lot of money (in terms of his standard of living), but also the time spent not posting in either learning about Bitcoin, the subject topic, or in making an english post in proper english is worth a lot in terms of what could have been paid for if this time was spent posting.

2 - We have rule 27 that says:
This with the fact that there are a disportionate number of english speakers (as their primary language, and their 1st language), who have an in-depth understanding of Bitcoin, and actively contribute to Bitcoin (there appear to be a small number of people who speak Chinese who actively contribute to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, however the problem does not appear to be cause by those in/from China), means it is more difficult for non-english speakers to learn about Bitcoin. If this rule was removed, some users who spend a lot of time helping others might be willing to spend time in some of the local section, using translation tools, to help people learn about Bitcoin.

3 - The Indonesia local section is the 2nd largest local sub behind the Russia local sub, as measured by total posts, yet it does not have any kind of "beginners" nor "technical discussion" section (many other local subs do have these kinds of sections). This means that Indonesians who want to learn about Bitcoin do not have a forum to do so in their local language. It would probably be a good idea to add some kind of beginners section in Indonesia.

Oh, is that a cultural thing? 75% of my inbox at any one time is full of people calling me "sir", but I'd assumed that these people were just taught to be ultra-polite when they were learning English (maybe due to a delay between the real world and instruction vis-à-vis shifting politeness standards over the last ~century).

The first few times people used unnecessary politeness like this on me, I found it amusing. I was thinking, "who do you think I am, the president? LOL." But I've now grown to associate it with clueless people...

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As jackg mentioned, English is a fluid and forgiving language. Even on a pretty global forum like this, I only rarely see English so bad that I can't understand it at all. As long as you actually have some ideas to express, you should be fine. You should keep in mind that poor English is more difficult to read, though, so if you know that your English is imperfect, it'd be courteous to keep your text to-the-point, and to do some extra checking to minimize errors as much as possible. (I do the same when writing imperfectly in my second languages.)

A good recent example which comes to mind is zentdex's Where the merit pours. He made several English errors, but he was entirely understandable, and the post was overall a very good contribution.

The real problem is people posting nonsense just to post, with no real contribution to make or ideas to express. That's bad enough as-is, and poor English makes it even worse.

Very well said. Good command of the English language would really go a long way in this forum nowadays. I think the racial overtones (or undertones) in this forum by long time and/or hero/legendary members are one of the barriers facing those who are not good in English. Most new members are in this for the money, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as forum rules and etiquette are followed. Begging for merits is kinda low for me. How you gain merits and increase your forum rank is fair game for everyone and I still believe, that in the bigger picture, most of the members here really give merits to those who deserve it.

Quoting views of some members on the language issue



Those views should be encouraging for any new member who wants to contribute to the forum. I am sure most users on the forum feel the same way too. There aren't many grammar nazis here. People who post useful content, even if their language isn't perfect, have always been appreciated.

It has only become a problem after the spam and repetitive threads running into 100+ pages. As a thumb-rule, those 100+ pages of repetitive bitcoin discussions is something every new member should avoid.