Topic: @theymos, can we do something for you?? (Read 650 times)

I'm locking this thread as theymos already implemented some big changes here : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/enhanced-newbie-restrictions-requirements-5030366

I'm not doing all this to annoy theymos. I know everything takes time but as i said in my previous tread about the issue with the forum, we can start with those solutions that take almost no effort to implement.

For moderators/patrollers the trust issues is almost nonexistent. Those positions are with limited rights, and if they don't do their job as they should be, the community is here to help, many people investigate the staff's attitude anyway.

I have more than 1800 successful reports /besides the lists with abusers I do/ but this does not change the current situation, a simple example are the hompgraphs.
I got many of the accounts banned but they just coming back every day. LoyceV know well the situation and can confirm it too.

All those abusers are checking frequently the Meta for blockers and are finding solutions really quickly. So the plans and strategies to fitght them have to be discussed on a place not acceptable by them.

I think taking one month to find a moderator for one section should be a acceptable time for theymos. That's why I suggested to have some timeframe to do the small effort tasks. Just to keep something happing.

Don't won't to push anyone,  just to have some systematic approach to the problems and focus one one-by-one solutions, so we can have actual results at the end.

That's all.

Sorry, iasenko - you've done some excellent work here and I appreciate your motivation to, "be the change you wish to see in the world," to use a tired old cliche, but I have to agree with pugman on this. Any change that requires more time from theymos is likely not going to fly. Any change that reduces forum traffic also seems unlikely to pass muster, even though I mostly agree with hilariousandco/etc's suggestion to do away with signatures for newbies and Jr members (I'd merely get rid of sigs for newbies and allow Jr.'s to have what is currently allowed for newbies - something like 50 characters of unformatted text or whatever it is).

That said, I like reporting shitposts, spam and plagiarism, even though my 220+ reports and counting are metaphorically equivalent to trying to put out a raging inferno with a garden hose. I think many of us who report posts do it for the therapeutic value, and not just for the good of the forum (and that, btw, is the key to making effective incentive structures...).

Bend over.  _{jk or... not.}

So long as he has trust issues, not really.

Lol. No. Its Slim Shady theymos. He'll disappear for a while and come back,and cause some immense panic amongst shitposters.

Here's the thing with reporting, hardly people report, and even if they do, they give up. I know for a fact that most of them do, so did I(after 100 reports). There is more spam than reports. For every 1 report, its safe to assume that 10 shitposts are made if not more.   

And how would you implement those suggestions without theymos's right(or left) hand?


Conversation won't do much or you know anything. While he can give reasons why an issue can/cannot be solved, action needs to be taken. I know that action is sometimes taken, but its always too late or never.

Please don't. Its unnecessary.

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Everywhere who cares about the forum, comes and says that theymos doesn't do this or that: Just imagine for an admin, who's given an unasked responsibility , who hardly has time, has trust issues for various reasons,and other things comes to his forum to read what's going on and all he sees is: theymos said this or that,and on top of that complaining about it, its just too much handle for one fucking person.

If theymos needed our help, he'd have asked. In fact he did ask,right before the merit system was implemented. He is open to suggestions, but not to those that restrict users in any kind.

Yours sincerely,

theymos' advocate,_{[not really]}
pugman.

Removing signatures from Newbies/Juniors is essential in my opinion. It effects their ability to post here zero, just earn, but someone who can't speak English very well and has little to no interest or understanding of bitcoin shouldn't be able to get paid to post here and it's crazy that they can. Requiring users to get ten merit and become a Member can be some sort of aptitude test for them and once they pass it by getting the merit then they can start earning via posting. Newbies and Juniors barely have a signature anyway so it's not a huge issue to remove it completely anyway.


A youtube channel should be very low down on the list of priorities right now, especially if it's going to consume more of his free time which is already obviously limited. If he's going to delegate this to someone else then fair enough, but then there are also a lot of other things that can be delegated that you and I have mentioned numerous times before.

Dang, I missed his response in that thread.  Theymos posts so infrequently that if you blink you can miss his posts, and it's not like they're unimportant.

A lot of the suggestions I've seen are fixes for relatively minor issues, but the major ones and the ones I wish he'd really consider have to do with the shitposting situation.  I agree with him that even small changes can have huge (and probably unintended/unexpected) effects, but things like adding more moderators ought to be a no-brainer.  Things like adding a merit requirement to rank up to Jr. Member would at least be a good experiment to see what happens, and it isn't like that kind of decision would have to be set in stone.  Hell, Theymos could do away with the merit system if he thought it wasn't working and there would be nothing any of us could do about it.  There would be no shame in doing so, either.

And yet it seems like most of the community suggestions aren't priority for him.  His priority is apparently starting up a youtube channel for whatever reason.  I don't actually think that's a horrible idea, but it just shows you how different he views the state of this forum.  There are a number of members here who would probably suggest that he try to fix some of the glaring issues with his limited time instead of doing the youtube thing.

The other thing I have a concern with is his reluctance to delegate any of the major responsibilities, account recovery being one of the obvious ones.  Vod has suggested at least once that there could be volunteers for that job, but as far as I know that suggestion fell upon deaf ears (or I could have missed the reply).  In any case, there are certainly people here willing to help with things and I don't think they're trying to usurp Theymos's power here.

Yes, those are 2 of the few remaining boards that haven't yet been infested by spammers. But the whole forum should be like that. Interesting topics, people discussing back and forth rather than just firing out generic one liners, and free from spam.

With hundreds of new spammers joining daily, and theymos refusing to appoint new mods, it's only a matter of time before these boards fall too.

Poor Drake  


It's clear that the forum needs more stuffs perhaps more admins or demi-admins, the forum needs attentions to recover accounts, the forum needs attention for account security(i.e: password recovery, account locking from secret question etc), the forum needs attention stopping spam bots, the forum needs more merit sources, the forum needs to do something for the genuine newbies who are coming here to embrace their crypto experience, the forum needs sub boards, the forum needs few additional features (i.e: stopping multiple report for one single post) etc etc.

Talking about developer team? How it's possible not to have an in-house IT team for a forum which has over 300K active users? Theymos always says money is not issue by the way.

This forum has a lot more to offer for the cryptospace. It has served the community very well so far and I hope it will keep serving the same. Or Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com will keep leveraging the brand image of Bitcoin. Blockchain technology, Bitcoin still has a long way to go and it needs this forum (the community).

I did read what you wrote. I don't think you read what I did. Nobody cares about traffic when it's full of rubbish. Theymos himself has said he cares little about forum income and has even thought about getting rid of the ad slot, so what good is traffic here? What good is a forum where 99% of it is utter drivel? This board is no longer a place to discuss bitcoin. It's a forum to earn from posting and most people post pure crap. I wouldn't have a problem if people only got paid for great posts but that's not what happens. Signatures have ruined this forum and it would be better off without them and without them people would still be able to get answers to their questions so don't act like signatures are some great thing that are the only thing keeping the board alive because they're not. We could come to some sort of compromise if theymos was willing to do something like removing signatures from lower ranks and punishing ICO campaigns for the spam but when is that going to happen?


Whoop-dee-doo. All this info can be found by googling. What about all this drivel that is everywhere else:







That's what traffic and content signature campaigns bring you when you allow anyone to do whatever they want. Just farmers posting generic nonsense that is being 'text-spun' over multiple accounts.


I don't pretend to know everything, and all I can offer is my opinion, but I don't think pretending everything is A-OK isn't the way to go. That's just ignoring the problems we have whilst keeping our heads in the sand.

Hilarious sec.

If you read what I wrote, you would have understood in what sense the forum is good.

Also, if you have any interest or questions regarding bitcoin, you can go to Technical support or technical discussion boards. Go there and ask something like how to recover a wallet, how to choose a wallet, whatever, which are very legit questions that get quickly answered everyday. And they are answered very well in most cases.please look for a question made this week that was not satisfied answered and post the thread here.

I just made a topic there that was answered by gmaxwell. I had other legit questions that were quickly answered by nullius and other great supporting members.

Maybe you know everything, but this forum helps a lot of people, and helped me a lot already, before I even created an account.

Who is he Drake?





Wasn't he talking about the people he hired to for the new forum software development or hiring someone else to run the forum? I can understand that, but if he doesn't trust existing staff members with certain things here then I'm not sure what we're doing on staff in the first place. How many of us are going to jeopardise our position here and for what? The longer we don't trust others with certain things the board continues to go down the toilet and if theymos isn't going to be doing certain things then somebody needs to be doing them.


You can make changes here without effecting the traffic at all, but there needs to be some compromise. Removing signatures from lower ranks doesn't effect anybody's ability to post here and they can still collect bounties, they just can't earn from posting until they've got ten merit. That's a small price to pay and if you can't earn ten merit then you probably don't deserve to earn from posting here in the first place.  

I don't agree that there's no profit in that case... Campaigns won't stop, because the forum would still be the first among others, because of the high traffic. I think there will always be some (or a lot) newcomers who would fall for the advertised ICOs and would invest in some shady ones, because they expect quick bucks without hard work and without their own research... You can't protect these people from themselves... there will always be people like this, you can't help it.
But I agree that when that time will come, there will only be scammers and spammers here, but I hope it won't ever happen...

It's clear he doesn't want to make any of these changes because he likes the traffic that bounty spamming brings. The irony is that as all the real members get bored and leave, all that will be left is spammers spamming other spammers. There's no profit in that, so the campaigns will stop paying for it and then the traffic will really fall.

You don't remember? He has trust issues!

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Well it's acceptable for him! Who are we?(!) I am a Sr. Member with two red tag, you are an alt of a global moderator, iasenko is a Sr. Member trying hard to keep the forum clean, pugman is a Legendary feed-up with having his points out to theymos. There are many more members who really has concern about the forum and willing to volunteer to improve the forum experience. Don't forget there are also some other members who has yes boss, yes boss attitude towards theymos coz he is the ADMIN!

Guess what - I read a newbie or Jr. Member once wrote - theymos do not give a dime about us. If I start to believe that guy then will you blame me?  


Wait patiently until you die! Theymos is working on it! Damn!!!

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May be I am talking too much. God knows how many angry faces I will have to face after this.

Are you on the same board that I am? Very good in what sense? That you can get paid for shitposting or copy and pasting over your 200 accounts? If so, they yes, it's very good. Great profit. Much spam. Tell all your friends.


Most accessed by shitposters.


Yeah, they'll be answered almost immediately. Often by someone who has no idea what they're talking about. Then you'll get ten pages of responses saying the same thing reworded slightly or just plain wrong. Without signatures here you would still get the answer unbiased and not done so with the motive of profit.


And what about every other board? It's practically impossible to have a meaningful conversation about anything in bitcoin discussion these days. All it is is farmers and sig spammers churning out their generic one liners over account after account thread after thread.


All you care about is protecting your little cash cow, because you are clearly blind to all the bullshit that is going on which is 99% of this forum, but hey, if you can keep getting paid then it's all good in the hood and we shouldn't do anything that might jeopardise that.  There doesn't need to be drastic changes like banning signatures but a compromise needs to be found because the spam and low quality content is out of hand.


Theymos barely doing anything is why the forum has become so unfit for purpose. Should we just remain silent and not say anything whilst the forum continues to circle the drain in the process? Many mods are just giving up because they know it's futile trying to do anything. If theymos doesn't have time to do certain things (which he doesn't in his own words) then start delegating the workload otherwise more and more work keeps getting pilled up on him and the rest of staff. How difficult is it to add more staff or assign some dedicated sub board mods? Takes minutes of his time and it's one less thing to worry about and the forum benefits in the process. How difficult would it be to either make more admins or give certain staff access to restore accounts? That would solve the account backlog problem very quickly. The best stuff we get is things like the merit system but it's not enough and has made some things worse. There's not enough merit sources for a start and hundreds of great posts likely go unmerited and because there's no merit requirement to become a Junior that is forcing people to farm thousands of them and they're doing so with copy and paste bots and text spinners. Because there's no quality checks or punishments for badly run ICOs they pay them continually for this abuse. You can literally get paid a lot of money to have two hundred+ accounts copy and pasting someone else's content and in some cases even garbling it up in the process so it becomes even more unreadable. That shouldn't be allowed. The culture needs to change here and theymos ignores 99% of suggestions good or bad. The best we get from him is a 'maybe' then no explanations or follow ups to any questions.  People have been waiting a year to get their account back. Is that acceptable? No, it isn't. Things like removing signatures from Newbies and Juniors seemingly have the backing of the majority of the community and would put a stop to people being able to get paid for shitposts or copy and pastes straight away without them earning ten merit which is going to be very difficult for them and nigh on impossible for the worst of the worse of posters and bots. Punishing ICOs who pay for garbled spam and copy and pastes should also be implemented and the culture of spam would quickly change around here, but the best we get from theymos is still a 'maybe' then silence or no explanations for the 'no's' or 'not yets'.  Meanwhile, people are getting paid by the hundreds to farm accounts and there are multiple example of this that have been spotted the past week or so and they never get looked into:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.45430341
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.45434800

I mean, what else can we do? Just wait and hope theymos has all the fixes up his sleeve? I get he's swamped and I certainly wouldn't like to be in his position but ignoring things doesn't make them better or go away and there are quite a few things that could be done in the meantime that make the forum a much better place to be and remove the stress and workload from him and other staff members as well.

What iasenko means, is a thread to discuss spam, like [CLUB]The SpamBuster!4 Cases open,over 3000 accounts, Reviewed:5000+ [11.09]. It's better if spammers can't read what's being done to fight them. Bump bots are a big business that earns thousands of dollars per week from spamming this forum.

Maybe we should give the merit system more time, valuing and then adjusting it "add merit to Jr Member rank, min merit to post in some boards,...etc" to be perfect.
theymos presented the idea of merits on Dec. 18 and was implemented on Jan. 25, so a month was not too long to worry about it.
In addition, he noted that any modification takes time.

Of course, theymos should make decisions based on his own considerations, but I think his goal was to create a communicative fellowship capable of offering and arguing new ideas related to improving the situation on the forum. And it seems to me that theymos succeeded, since a huge number of different proposals in the Meta branch from the side of the participants are proved by the fact that this forum has a large number of not indifferent users ready not only to offer qualitative changes but also to participate in their implementation.

I don`t think that bitcointalk members are pressuring theymos by generating new ideas. On the contrary, they are all eager to help him make the forum even better. In addition, theymos makes decisions as objectively as possible, analyzing the situation "from above," while user suggestions are based on an analysis of the situation "from within", because users are directly identified in the community, they see the forum problems from all sides, they better know and understand them. Theymos should be glad and proud that the forum has become a place where people want to come, where they want to communicate and share their thoughts. And users want not only to preserve these dignities, but also to multiply them.

I think that any changes have to be considered quite carefully. In my perception, there are a couple of things that could be done immediately, but I don't have an informed overview of the boards, and I don't know the secondary objectives of the forum. The multi-account spamming and bot signups don't seem to have any perceived advantages, but they do create massive amounts of traffic, and also discussions in Meta. I think this is probably of low value, and the unused ad spots would seem to confirm this.

.

Why would people with low rank be restricted from joining a forum discussion?
Not everyone was privileged to join early on, that doesn't make you more crypto savvy.


I believe writing restrictions are better than reading restrictions
[/quote]

I think there should be heavy moderation to delete nonsense post from people of lower rank, as well AS PEOPLE FROM HIGHER RANK.
That would keep the thread clean.

I think theymos should continue to roll things out at the pace he feels comfortable and not be pressured by community members to make changes. I also think his time is likely better spent elsewhere then doing a newsletter.

It would be cool to have something on the line of a newsletter or at least some status update once a month, to have an idea about what is happening, what is being worked on at the moment, issues and ideas. In general anything that is worth to know for the community.
That would be quite a good starting point to address the community for something like iasenko is proposing

This thread might not help theymos to solve the problems of our forum quickly but if you read and understand the content of this thread clearly, you'll found out that the thread is created to somehow offer theymos the help of this Forum's community. Anyway, how if you're the one who should just mind your own business, its not your time that will be wasted trying to help the forum so please don't act like you're concerned.

Also, please don't quote the whole thread next time.

Agree.
As someone with low ranks, it's beneficial for me to read thoughts and ideas of those in higher ranks and I don't mind having dedicated board exclusive for them to comment but please make it still accessible for us where we in lower rank can still read it.

How is this thread in any way going to help theymos... just mind your own, let him do his thing, and stop wasting your life trying to help when in reality you're making his life worse.

Personally, I think the current forum situation is very good.
Bitcointalk.org is one of the most accessed websites in the world. Look here

https://www.similarweb.com/website/bitcointalk.org

It's 3300 top website in the world.

If anyone ask anything crypto related, he will be answered almost instantaneously, thanks to signature campaigns and many active members like moderators and devs.
A lot of very knowledgeable people are in good campaigns like chipmixer and they need to post something useful, so we always have good answers and new topics.

Forum is already being monetized and theymos seems to be satisfied with the returns.

I think this spam asylum in economics, announcements, altcoins etc boards are not a so big problem.
If you remove spammers and spam boards, forum traffic will be much smaller.

So, I think forun is going very well. Drastic adjustments may change that.



I believe he wants more reports, as he will be making badges for them soon.
I really wanted some direction here anyway. I don't know what he wants to be reported.


I believe writing restrictions are better than reading restrictions

It's been one month since hilariousetc collected the Community generated suggestions to improve the forum.

For this one month all we got was the OK and Not OK[/i] list.

A few direct questions:
- Is there anything the community can do to help you with the current forum situation?? /Except the reporting/

- Will you choose new moderators /add more patrollers??

- Shall we continue reporting?? Hilariousetc doesn't see much of impact of the reports, mostly waste of time. Even if we ban them but they keep coming back.

- Can we start taking one by one the suggestions marked as OK, maybe one in a month for the easy ones and one in two-tree months for the other that takes more time.

- Can you share one or two hours per month to have a conversation with the community on the current issues??
It can be motivational for the both sides.
Don't take it as a report from your side, no. It's your forum, your rules, but the valuable part of the people here need some interaction with you.
Just one,two hours per month. That's it.

- Can we have a dedicated board for discussions with reading restriction for people with low rank and low report score???

I know you probably already hate me for my whining about it, but someone has to push the things to go forward,  and I see no one else doing it /some try tho/.
It's a heavy load you have on your shoulders, let the community help you with it, that's why is a community.