Hi everyone!
I think that I have some pretty big news here. Forgive me if I am posting something that you already know, or have already figured out.
I think that I've figured out why the original Unobtanium thread got locked. Out of caution, I won't name any names.
A global moderator locked the original forum thread, but we never knew why. Today, I did some research. I found a comment that the moderator made regarding a major problem on the forums in general: paid signature links. The signature links in and of themselves do not seem to be the main problem. The main problem appears to be that people post meaningless or non sequitur posts just to get their signatures seen. Obviously, someone is paying them to make the posts as a form of spam advertising.
Armed with this information, I went back and analyzed the original UNO thread. It is literally infested with spam links. I am now almost 100% certain that this is why the thread got locked. I suspect that the global moderator probably tried to contact some of the UNO developers to get them to fix the problem, and got no reply. With thousands of forums on BTCtalk, the global moderator has no desire (or time) to micromanage each forum, so it was far easier just to lock it. I suspect that there is little chance of getting it unlocked since all contact has been lost with the developers.
Interesting research. I only had a cursory glance over the thread but didn't notice much out of the usual. Any pages you can point me to?
On another note, the full source code for the Unobtanium.io website is here:
https://github.com/icanprogram/unobtanium.io Could we rebuild a new version of the website that we control? What do you guys think about creating new Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and Google+ feeds?
I'd love to hear any opinions...
As can be seen on github icanprogram is still active on other projects. IIRC FallingKnife said he's one of the few people previously involved in UNO that were somewhat responsive recently. Maybe he'd be willing to give us FTP access to the site. Who's currently hosting the site anyway? Would suck for it to suddenly go down because a prepaid hosting period ran out or something...
I'm a web dev so I could take a look at the code and do some updates. I think it'd be fine to keep the site mostly intact as it looks pretty slick. As time progresses we can see if any major updates/rewrites need to take place. What do you say?
Hey learminer! The really spammy posts seem to have started around the time of Wolong's big pump, which makes sense because that is probably when the forum was getting the most traffic. For example, look at this page:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313126.860It is really subtle, and hard to notice, in fact I never noticed it before. But if you look at a lot of the postings where people have signatures at the bottom, they are announcing new UNO pools, but the announcement does not really make sense in the flow of the conversation that is going on. The signatures tend to have multiple links in them, and I could see how this could be viewed as spammy From Bitcointalk's perspective, I can see how they would want those people to buy ads on the site instead of filling up their posts with signature links.
Not they are breaking any posted rules or anything, but I think that the global mod does not like that behavior. He sees it at guys filling up the forums with what basically amount to meaningless advertising for their websites, rather that meaningful, well-thought out forum postings.
I agree with you about the web hosting. I personally would feel a lot better if we hosted it with FallingKnife's company because he is committed to UNO. If we decide to keep the site design as it is, I'm in full support. If we decide to switch to a content management system, I know A LOT about Drupal, and I could provide expertise if needed.