The economics board is terrible too.
The entire board is terrible and the longer we leave things the worse it gets and exponentially so. Signature spam has always been an issue here even back when I signed up, but it was never like it is now. The spam was tolerable and few and far between with only a handful of users that over-stepped the mark and when they did they were usually temp banned by BadBear. Now the signature spam is completely embarrassing with it being endemic and spam being the norm consisting mostly of barely comprehensible generic one or two liners made by people who don't even care about bitcoin and can't speak English very well and are only doing so for payment and likely over many multiple accounts. It's become unmanageable, but the people who need to be punished are the ICOs that are paying them to do this. If you go in Bitcoin Discussion probably eight out of every ten posts are mostly generic nonsense churned out by someone who's on an ICO campaign and doesn't really know what they're talking about. As theymos himself says, this forum shouldn't be a welfare system for people, but that's what it mostly is now. There are ways we can stop this, or at least drastically curb it, but doing nothing is only going to make it worse.
I get that theymos is busy and appreciate coding things takes time and he is probably under incredible stress with all the issues he has to deal with being the defacto executive here and there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that most people probably don't even consider (accounting, dealing with lawyers, the taxman, and all the other issues this forum has which he is probably doing most of by himself), but that's why he should delegate as many things as he can here to others. I get that it's not always easy handing off things that require a lot of trust but there are plenty of things theymos can do in the meantime that will help clean the board up and all it probably takes is a few clicks and minutes of his time and then others can do the work without bothering him and the forum benefits in the process. Theymos must get annoyed at all the PMs he gets about various issues so why not do things that will solve some of the many issues here and cut down the need for users pestering him which will then free up his time to do the more important things behind the scenes that only he can do? I don't even like messaging him about things these days because he rarely replies and I don't want him to get annoyed at me, but should I just give up? If that happens then the worse things get. I messaged him about adding a mod for Bitcoin Discussion on August 7th and got a response the same day with a list of the top reporters there but he never replied to me after that despite sending about 4 or 5 messages about it every week or so. krishnapramod was the top reporter there and he also busts a lot of copy and pasters so he would probably be good choice for a patroller at least (unless theymos knows something about him I don't). He's also apparently Indian so if that Local board needs another mod then that's another good reason.
If theymos or cyrus don't have the time and/or energy to restore accounts, add more mods, add merit sources or even run the forum ad auctions then that should be stuff that gets delegated to others. Adding more mods or assigning sub board mods should have been done years ago and it doesn't take much of theymos' time do so so and that's one less thing he has to worry about and the forum improves at least a little bit in the process. Also, even if theymos does implement the automatic account recovery process eventually there's still going to be people who won't be able to use it or need further investigation so another admin is probably going to be needed anyway, and at least they can help restore accounts in the meantime until that system goes live. There's also all the account and bot farming issues that need to be looked into like this. Theymos himself said more mods and admins (or demi-admins) are probably a good idea, so why not do these things now instead of putting them off?
Maybe it is a trust matters because handing a new man an authority to be near admin level means there is risk for some things, maybe like account security, etc, but i dont know for sure about that. Maybe, just maybe, hiring accountants and professionals means that
There may or may not be trust issues with adding more admins, but there's ways you can limit the power you give people to minimise the risk of potential abuse, but putting off doing things just because of potential abuse doesn't help and in fact makes things worse. If there's no one trustable here to do certain things then look at alternative ways. Hire someone externally like he has mentioned or try get BadBear back since we know at least he can be trusted to be an admin.
If theymos can't or don't want to recruit new moderator, then theymos should do something else such as disabling signature on boards with lots of spammer to punish spammer.
Such drastic measure like this shouldn't be a first option, but doing this would just push those spammers to other boards where signatures are shown. It doesn't solve the problem but just sweeps the rubbish into a different part of the house.
I'd like to help moderating the Economics section but I think theymos wants for moderators people who massively report, and I don’t. I’ve only reported 85 times in one year.
Well I would say keep reporting, but there are users with thousands upon thousands of reports that are not yet mods. I don't think anyone who does just report a shitload of posts should be automatically made a mod, but I definitely think there are some good candidates amongst those that do (unless theymos knows something about them that I don't).
