Topic: @theymos, we want those sections back to us, new moderators? Updated. (Read 1195 times)

I've updated the OP in hope to get a feedback sometime in the near future.

Keep reporting spam and abuse for almost a year. I am here almost 7 years on BTT from 2012 (my first account was hacked after 2 years) but was afraid to report because my first reports were bad and I got low accuracy.

Lately, the amount of spam grows so much that I just couldn't ignore this anymore.
I like to read this forum and I couldn't because sometimes to find one page with a quality discussion I had to read 4 pages of "great project" kind of posts. Slowly I learned how to report correctly and after some time I had hundreds of reports with 100% accuracy. Actually, I have almost 2,5k posts reported with 100% accuracy and only 14 bad (which I get at the start).

I will suggest adding volunteers to boards which need to be cleaned.
They should be supervised by an established moderator and first report posts for a few days or even weeks in this boards. Moderator will check their reports and if they are correct then assign them for a patrol, junior, ghost or even full moderator. I just think that the abilities of every member who applies for a moderator should be checked first to avoid abuse later.

I would be glad to help but from what I see there is no way to apply for this task only one has to be chosen by staff members.

I think there should be a thread where members can apply for such tasks.
This would be fairer. There are a lot of members like me which are not so popular but here a few years long, know a lot about crypto, post quality content, fight spam and abuse but don't have friends between forum staff members and don't post on every thread in meta, reputation or scam section to be recognized and gain popularity or just to butter up.

I'll try to update the OP tomorrow with all the suggestions.

I think we should also take into consideration of adding another mod in the Trading Discussion section. Because a considerable amount of members here are creating threads not related to the section itself. They often post here topics related to Trading in terms of Buying and Selling cryptocurrencies not trading in the sense of what this section is meant for. Also the topics of trading (buying and selling cryptos, investing in cryptos) already have a childboard under Economy which is the Speculation section.

He's not even on staff any more like MiningBuddy, but neither of them have been removed by theymos from there.


That board has served its purpose long ago and should be locked or archived, or at the very least a thread stickied there that only notable sources are allowed (and by notable I mean no bitcoin-related sources). It's just used as promotion tool for ICOs and people's crappy bitcoin websites and many others just use it as a legalised way to get away with copy and pasting.

This would be the ideal solution, if you want genuine and constructive discussion to start.
Since from what theymos was saying, bounty cannot be cut out completely, as they necessary for the sustainment of the forum, at least they could be restricted to certain boards.

Add the following boards to your list:

- Bitcoin > "Project Development"

- And for Local >

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This:

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I'm pretty sure that's the norm...

Press board should definitely be added to the list. It has assigned moderator, jgarzik who was inactive for a long time and came back just to participate in his own altcoin's thread.

If I understand the purpose of that board correctly - posting press hits from mainstream media about Bitcoin - then most of the content is pure spam: non-bitcoin or even non-crypto related links, links to crypto-related news sites (what's the point?) or some niche blog posts, hardly anyone is sticking to the advised format + there's a spam even in sticky posts.

It's not quite like that - 10k accounts would cost the spammers time and possibly money (what with evil IPs etc). But there are definitely some relatively simple changes that could replace the work of (or remove the need to hire) a few moderators. Newbie whitelisting mentioned somewhere in another thread should be quite effective. There are probably some moderation workflow improvements that could help - I think hilarious mentioned that all mod reports go to all global mods, which sounds like a massive internal spam fest on its own.

I think that the increase in the number of moderators can help the community but I do not think it will change much, even if we add 100 moderators, the spammers can make themselves in a few minutes even 10,000 accounts and spam, so in the end we are in the same situation where a user must report a spam and a moderator must delete the message.

So to conclude with more realistic numbers even if you add 5 moderators we are in the exact same situation.

I sent you a PM regarding an issue with your signature.

Theymos is really like a unicorn, mysterious.
I don't know what he is doing for living, but I'm sure the forum is more like a hobby, and if he is a young man in his late twenties than for sure he has more important things to think of right now because the forum is a big time consumer and responsibility but you cannot give up from your whole career and development just because satoshi choose you to be the admin.

You can't be 100% sure he seen it, but if he's been online he's probably been in Meta and seen a thread that directly addresses him in the title. Theymos' comments are becoming about as rare as unicorn sightings though  .


It needs more than just more mods. Without fundamental changes here nothing much will change despite how much manpower your throw at it. You could have an entire office consisting of mods trying to clean up spam and it still probably wouldn't be enough because there's thousands of spammers spamming and hundreds more probably sign up per day. I agree we do need more mods, but we also need to start punishing those who are paying for the spam in the first place. Tackle the problem at the source.

No there's no setting like that. It's was probably assumed that theymos was online and was answering other threads, so he must have seen this too.

And Bounties? The board consists from posts alike "interesting project". Aren't we tired from this? The forum definitely needs more mods to control spammers and shitposters.

How you can see that theymos was here?
Is there any setting in the forum to check back later who has viewed the topic/post?
I thought it's not possible, but I don't know all the features of this forum....

I see theymos was here but didn't answer the request.
Hope we get a feedback soon.

Off-topic :
@hilariousetc I sent you a PM with a small issue I saw.

Well it's one more thing he would have to deal with and I guess he doesn't have the time to do so.
How about having the current mods do the hiring and rewarding (whichever way it's done) of the new ones ? We would have mods and super mods.

Staff members are volunteers but do get paid also. The issue isn't money as theymos has said numerous times that the forum has more than enough money in reserves, so much so that he's even contemplated getting rid of the forum ad slot which is pretty much the forum's only source of income (which I don't think he should do). There are probably several long-standing and fairly trusted members of the community that could step up and would make great mods and those amongst the highest reporters with several thousands of accurate reports would be on a worthy shortlist. You could also promote some of the existing staff members to dedicated sub board mods but doing both would be more effective.

Mods have to be paid, that might be the issue here. You could find volunteers yes, but volunteers might get overzealous if they don't have the right motivations.

How about making new mods rank up instead of paying them ? And if they do a shitty job, you just fire them and move them back to their former rank.

@hilariousetc thanks for the great analysis. I found some free time to read it all and I'm completely agree with your postion.

I'll just say that theymos is trying to reduce the bad consequences from every move he makes but considering the current forum situation I don't really see how the things can get worse even if you make not so good decisions.

Of course some moves will trigger another problems but with those we can deal later again. There's no miracle solution to all the problems no matter how long you think over the things.

And soon actions will be needed