Business professionals -- the people we are trying to convince to accept bitcoins -- are very turned off by the forums.
We are hoping to swap this forum with weusecoins, prefer a "professional code of conduct" and make that the primary forum.
There is nothing better that can be done to attract business professionals. Even the most cleanly accurate IRC chatter is still a huge turn-off to the large majority of business professionals that come there to get accuracy about Bitcoins. This forum's divergence from the main bitcoin.org site is in name only, and everyone already knows that. It's too late to do anything but employ the ban-hammers with fascist-like authoritah and eliminate future trollery.
The reason why business people are turned of too quickly may in part be the crushing unprofessionalism of the large majority of forum troll douches; but the bigger reason is that Bitcoin itself is a turn-off to traditional money-making people. It scares them. Worse, people without a clean comprehension of what money
is and how it spontaneously arises, nor how special the crypto that backs Bitcoin is, nor that virtual goods without the backing of strong crypto are traded every day on eBay, see Bitcoin as a sort of virtual nothing that can crash to nothing, is held up by greedy speculators only, has no inherent value, and otherwise is a scam that enriches the first-movers.
These facts are half-truths, which makes them perniciously hard to stamp out.
Forbes is viewed as some kind of holy-word by people with large sums of money who can't be arsed to actually look into it themselves, so when even Forbes is incapable of comprehending even the simplest details of how gold spontaneously becomes money, or when the last Bitcoin will be mined, the misinformation spreads.
Come to think of it, I've never seen any widely-read article that actually states the truth about when the last Bitcoins will be mined. They all think it's somewhere around 2033, probably because they zoomed into that irritating graph and eyeballed it.
The imperfect comprehension of even the most erudite forum/IRC-goer also gets in the way of spreading the accurate word of Bitcoin to those who would be capable of understanding what Bitcoin is but don't have the time to learn the entire system on their own. Highly technical questions have worn out the old IRC-goers (like ArtForZz for example) because of their incessant years-long repetition.
But this is the main point of my post here: The project has already reached the open-source equivalent of project immortality. There is an immortal set of developers capable of working on the source (many who are not currently doing so but are maintaining private patchsets and watching development very closely.) The use of Bitcoins has reached a critical mass: the continuation of the project no longer relies on getting enough of the word out as fast as possible.
And therefore its longevity and first-mover advantage will, in the end, crush all misinformation and all direct opposition. This is the reason why I no longer bother to correct anybody about their mind-bogglingly ignorant misconceptions. It.. doesn't.. matter. At all. Bitcoin doesn't need a PR rep who can do damage control. MtGox passwords get released? Doesn't matter. Bitcoin trojans appear? Doesn't matter. Silk Road attracts the attention of senators and law enforcement? Doesn't matter. The project is immortal. Cat's out of the bag. The only question that remains is how long it will take to swallow up enough economic activity to attain true general-use status amongst the public at-large who truly don't care how or why Bitcoins work.
