Topic: WTF! with this board? (Read 639 times)

Yes, if they are unsure with what to do with the report they usually leave them unhandled, which can happen if you report very old threads prior to 2014 and for me 10 of these unhandled reports are from the very early threads in local boards which i thought should be removed to archives rather than cluttering up but the mod thought otherwise   

Mostly those unhandled reports are really old reports and hence i forgot the exact threads but mostly those were threads where i asked them to move to archives and all the old threads which i thought was spams were taken care.

Doesn't unhandled reports mean mods were not sure what to do with post so they left it as it was?

I can tell from my experience, i have 10 unhandled reports overall and those unhandled reports are from years ago and that too from topics that were created during the initial stages of the forum and other old posts and the rest are taken care. You should not discourage from reporting spam and you should not worry much about good or bad reports as it is not a competition and the reason we are doing is to clean the forum and nothing else.

I think it's lack of knowledge about crypto and grey laws in India for crypto, majority of crypto users might not want to reveal their country. Or it's possible that simply they just want to participate in bounties to make quick cash and not really want to engage in the forum.

I think, if there's a discord server (there's already one for the bitcointalk) but more like Indian-Bitcointalk discord server then we can find most active Bitcointalk users from India and engage in conversations.

Another reason is language. While you see in other local boards, they speak in languages of their locality but in Indian board most users speak English because India has one of highest English speaking people. So when there's no language barrier, these group of people simply migrate and mingle with the international section. I think we should also focus on speak our local languages on this Indian board.

I don't agree to that (not posting in Local board because of monetary benefits) because if it were so then the Indians would definitely take part in the Raffle.
Heisenberg has been organizing Raffles since so many months now but it takes quite a lot of time to fill up the spots.
Everybody know's it is free. Why would anybody not want to grab the opportunity to win 0.001 BTC ?
It's free money and no KYC. So according to your reason the spots in Raffle should be taken almost the same or the next day but it instead takes about a month.
You can check the lastest Raffle below. It's been 5 days since it started but not even 50% of the spots are taken.

[GUY FAWKES DAY RAFFLE] #8 - Pick a lucky number and win 0.001 bitcoin

Matter of fact, even you have not applied on it yet. No offense but it is what it is. (Also, I don't know your reason not to take part in the Raffle. Is it because you're not an Indian or something. You can share your reason if you are comfortable with it. May be it would help us bring more members to the Indian board)


Okay that seems quite logical. But yeah, I would recommend adding a rule that posts in regional languages should have the language in their title.
Sometimes I just open a thread and wonder what language it could be. Adding a language in title such as [Hindi], [Tamil], [Bengali] etc... would help the reader identify the language of a thread before opening it. If a reader doesn't know any language he can simply choose not to open that thread at all.


Yes a poll would be a good idea. One thing I would like to ask is I have noticed few times that posts reported in this board often goes unhandled.
I had reported few posts earlier but I guess those are still unhandled. This discourages me to report posts. It should either go good or bad.

Luckily I managed to nuke atleast 4 spammers and plagiarists yesterday : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.55551237

Since the plagiarism happened in English topic, the mods were able to verify easily and were able to nuke these newbies based on the reports. But what if plagiarists get into the regional languages and start spamming there? We need a mod of Indian origin to understand the language and nuke the plagiarists. Regarding pinning of  @amishmanish topic, I am just getting additional suggestions so that we can create a topic in Meta requesting for one.

Well, if the ANN for an altcoin is in English they don't deserve a place in our local board. But if the ANN is for a service related to our country is in English, they deserve to be placed in the main board. Other than that, if the ANN is for an altcoin in regional languages they should be created in Announcements child board which we would be requesting soon.

The regional languages board should be used for discussion related to bitcoin and other bitcoin related news in India (but in regional languages). Since we have too many languages, I think famous languages like Hindi/Bengali and Tamil/Telugu should be created in regional languages board.

Willing to know the opinions on my above mentioned idea ^^^

We need the reporter count stats for that to happen and those stats are with theymos. The top good reporter can have the ability to handle spams AFAIK but that alone isn't important and they can range from trustworthiness and being neutral. We can also keep a voting for that to happen may be? See this : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53390773

This is another valid reason but there are good number of bitcoin signature campaign accept posts from local boards as well or atleast limited amount from the weekly quota so if there are Indians in certain campaigns can make use of it while gaining monetary gains.

Thought of another reason why there are many Indians on the forum but they refrain from posting in the Indian board. And I think it has to do with the Signature ... job? that they are doing.

Because the posts they make on local board is not counted towards the posts that pay, they don't see any reason to post here. They'd rather spend the time and effort to post somewhere on the forum where it pays.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Monetary compensation is a great motivator. Tell a kid to go to the store and get you some bread and they'll be like "My legs are hurting", then tell them there's a 20 in it for them and wham! and it is like you were never out of bread.

Agree with most of the stuff. Reshaping the Indian board might help us bring back activity in the board.
Also, since it seems like a bull run has started, we might actually expect new members to join the forum.
We did see some good traction in the last bull run lets see how this one goes. Below is my opinion on reshaping the Indian board.

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1. Renaming of Buyer/Seller Reputations board :

It is quite logical to rename the buyer/seller reputations board to Scam accusations. We can use the same board to report against buyer/sellers as well as companies/websites.
May be using a different format for reporting both of them can help us differentiate the accusations.
For example using a "[Scammer]" in the title or something alike can tell us that the post is related to buyer/seller scam.

2. Creation of Altcoin Announcements Child board within the Altcoins (India) board :

I just saw the Altcoins section and yes the board is mixed with ANN threads and discussion threads.
I saw ANN threads in regional languages both in Altcoins (India) board and in Regional Languages (India) board.
We should do something about this. Where should the ANN thread in regional language go ? Regional or Altcoins board ?
May be we can implement the below solution

If ANN thread is in English - Post the ANN thread in the Altcoins (India) board or Altcoin Announcements Child board if we get this added.
If ANN thread is in Regional language - Post the ANN thread in regional language since OP wants to attract that particular userbase.

3. Pinned topics :

That's accurate. No debates on that part. No point to pin a post if OP is inactive.
Getting it replaced would be the ideal choice.

4. Moderation :

We can make a consolidated list of changes to be done on the Indian board and ask Theymos to assign a moderator for this board.
Better than that would be if we ourselves suggest a common name acting as a mod for our board.
We can then have that person to post in Meta with the consolidated list and ask Theymos to make him the mod so that he can regularly clean up the Indian board.

5. Addition of "Bitcoin : Development and Translation (India)” board ( got this one from one of your other threads)

Sadly there are not many people interested in development discussion in the Indian board. Even I feel bad about it at times.
It would be better to have the development discussion in the global "Development and Technical Discussion" board where the developer could get more insights from other developers who are active there. It would also provide a faster resolution in the global board in my opinion.
Besides that there would be rarely any developer not knowing English. Most developers would be speaking English ( at least in India that's the case).

I am in support of these changes, indeed there are many things that are not working on this board, and some changes that you are suggesting will certainly improve the way this board is functioning.

I'll be honest, I come here daily to complete my bounty posts and India sub is well within other 11 sub boards list, plus this sub tends to have less number of 'fresh' topics so it's low on my list. I open the list and complete my posts, move on to next day.

Totally agree with all those points mentioned in your post, and most important one is the moderation and pinned topic because it makes the loacl board to be in kind of mess.Even if we dont have dedicated mod still I report some of the threads and it has been handled as well by global mods.So I guess we need to report until we get the moderation done by global mod at least.

Sometime back I created a few topics to highlight the issues which we are facing currently in our local board

- Brainstorming various ideas for Reshaping the Indian Board

- Thoughts and Suggestions on unofficial rules being followed in Indian board

I would like to remind these and willing to summarize a few key points to reshape our board.

1. Renaming of Buyer/Seller Reputations board :

I am still not sure for what purpose we are having a child board titled Buyer/Seller Reputations (India)


I would like to hear additional response on this renaming idea so that we can atleast talk about our current situation in Meta.

2. Creation of Altcoin Announcements Child board within the Altcoins (India) board :

The Altcoins (India) board is utter nonsense and garbage is piling up at a whole new level. Newbies are discussing about bitcoin prices in Altcoin Sections  and Announcements are being posted along with discussions thereby making the whole section a complete shit. Hence I would like to propose an idea with the creation of Altcoin Announcements child board within the main Altcoins board.

3. Pinned topics :

Pinned Topics should be written by a person one who is able to moderate the topic for longer run. Welcome to Indians author @dishwara is highly inactive to manage the topic. Hence I would suggest that topic should be replaced by NEW PEOPLE JOINING INDIAN SUB: INTRO AND MERI written by @amishmanish who is very well active here and can moderate the topic.

4. Moderation :

If we have cleaned up our local a little with some help from theymos like creation and renaming of child boards, pinned topics etc we can request him to appoint a moderator for further cleaning of the board.

P.S I would like everyone reading this post to chime in and give your thoughts on these ideas and suggestions. If you have any additional interesting ideas, please post them here and we can discuss regarding the same.

We have banged our heads against this problem for quite sometime now. The sub had become almost defunct after Benson't exit and the tragedy with his startup (His co-owner ran away with the funds, some Amitabh if i remember correctly). I had complained about this in some earlier threads and then @Heisenberg_Uncertainty joined in. Having Mr. H has led to quite a bit of action. He started the raffle, managed to get @Darkstar_ as escrow, somehow got this very informative post pinned with the help of global mods. The problem of merit too has been solved for quite sometime now as there are 2-3 merit sources in this board itself.

What you see now is far better than how it had been for a much longer time. I feel things have gotten a lot better now. The problems for further engagement are structural. We do not have enough people who are putting an effort to create some real-life commerce activity. Most of the commercial activity in crypto is disconnected with the Indian crowd on BCT. The Indian crypto-twitter is filled mostly with shills and traders. Communication may be one of the issues like JSRAW pointed but I don't think anybody minds in what language you are writing.

We just don't have people with enough people interested in using the Local sub as a platform, Yet. What we need is just one or two such instances where people can put effort to earn money online by providing honest services and software. Some college going kid who feels inspired with Satoshi and this forum's history. Till then, Lets just enjoy the raffle. We could also try to bring the IPL specific pool discussion to the board here as its about to come to its grand finale in a few weeks.

We are not english speaking country but we have people who can understand english than any others, yes this is the ground reality and unknown fact.Probably we unaware of this because we never visited other countries where they are well developed but they don't even know the basic english words like right and left even the numerals. Well we are not restricted to post anything in Hindi here we have childboards as well right.

VeerJi tusi in abroad country and talking about this here in my street if we talk in punjabi many peoples don't like this sometime I love to talk in punjabi but peoples feel I am really uneducated and have no manners its really disgusting we still as you saying in colonial era and as you saying many Pakistanis really doing like this because they feel shame to talk in punjabi but my first love is still punjabi and urdu never been any other language.

Paaji we are still living in colonial era. in subcontinent people don't understand that language is just medium of expression. Unfortunately in Subcontinent it became sign of elite... no matter if tatti gal karo it considered as entitlement... for example use "tatti" instead of "shit". its same but one is considered backward and one reflects swag.

And not going to lie to you but Pakistani are worse, Fair amounts of Pakis lives in my building, fukers hesitate to talk in Punjabi.

Really sad things we mostly going with wikipedia not ground realities which are completely different from this because no one want to face reality we are also facing this issue as English no not good enough for many but sadly mostly have to compromise with this going with Hindi is not bad at all for many local members here.

So we are English Speaking country eh? Yeah 5-10% represent Whole India, Poor Kiwis must be quacking now in Indian accent and we should ignore the fact that almost 50% or may be more than 50% Population can speak or understand Hindi.

Well,Wikipedia says that India is the country which got more english speaking people than any other country in the world, even though the reports are bit old still we are improved from what we have seen in the past.So I don't think english is really a big barrier for activity in our local board.And I don't know Hindi rather.

Start using Local language like Tamil/tinglish and Hindi/Hinglish on main board, you might be surprised how many users might stop to drop comment here.

PS : Please don't get pumped up with the language war, we need to stick with the language which majority are comfortable with.. English isn't one of them that i am sure and Hindi is not my mother tongue if any fucker start complaining about force_language_drama.

I believe there are considerable amount of Indians who are regularly active on bitcointalk, probably they are not living in India but they are Indians for sure.

IPL discussion didn't get the attention, maybe next year we will have some more members there.

Their could be various reasons for everyone why they may not be able to post here or not many Indians overall on this forum I guess who are regularly active.

Just one thing which surprised me recently was of the IPL discussion. Knowing Indians generally love cricket, so atleast in that thread could have seen some discussion happening or opinions being shared as many are very passionate for cricket as far as I know but that too dint happened and it was good atleast akram143 created the thread and me and him were just updating and discussing regarding it.

Thanks pakhitheboss for creating this thread and I am sure we may see more people being active on our local board as well and actually we all should be so proud like dedicated we have our local board and many countries do not even have  dedicated board to them and might be deserving it. So let’s not waste the opportunity which we have in front of us.

We don't have specific child board for politics but you can use this INDIAN ECON, POLITICS, SOCIETY + BTC PRICE thread.

There are some good news as well for crypto community in the recent times. Like this one : https://www.coindesk.com/india-will-soon-have-crypto-banking-at-22-physical-locations?amp=1

I can't speak for others but I can tell the reason for me not being too active on Bitcointalk in general and it is because of work. Things have been hectic, I am currently working almost 14-15 hours a day/7 days a week and after I am finished for the day I just pass out as soon as I hit the bed. I don't have energy to do anything.

Do we have an Indian Politics and Society section? I think we all have a lot to say about how things are going in our country and it might make board more active?

Also, maybe there aren't a lot of good things happening with Bitcoin in India, I don't have time to search but all I run into is bad news, such as the one I posted in the news section few days back and then today I saw this, which I decided to not post.

We have press and news section in our local board, I am also trying to post recent news related to cryptos but still don't find people get attracted to it, I will continue to do until people will find it.

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Appreciate your effort bro, hope everyone will try their best to create more useful threads which is much needed for the future of Indian crypto community.

Pretty interesting. Even I didn't know the story with such great depth. But I think problem of inactivity by people is because of the inactivity itself. Lately I have been quite active in this board. But often see my own posts at most recent even after couple of days which is pretty disheartening obviously. I think the fact that you get a few merits by posting good in this section should have acted as a bonus for people to post here but that didn't work too. Well I would do the best I could do in this section. i am not going to get some time in November so I promise from December I take up the responsibility of creating 5-7 diversified meaningful threads in the section each month. I hope such threads could initiate habit of discussion among the members on varied topics.

You are correct that yes there are many active members on the Gambling board and yes those campaigns do restrict them to be active on the local board.

But, you will find a lot of Newbies pretty active on the Bounty board. I am sure half of them are not aware of this board and I am planning to personally send them DM and invite them here.


Thanks, @Heisenberg_Hunter for the invite I have joined the group.

Not really. Most of them are very active in the global English boards and Gambling Discussion but have never participated in the discussions present here for a while, that's probably because their signature campaigns restricts them to post here or they aren't willing to get their feet in this local.

Since we follow a diversified culture and language, we are restricted to go along only with English discussions. This basically prevents people from creating helpful topics here as they might be receive higher merits in global boards than creating the same topic here in English. Sadly we don't have a solution for this.

This might initiate better discussions as well.

P.S If you haven't joined our unofficial local telegram community still, feel free to do so : Bitcointalk (India)

Thanks,@Heisenberg_Hunter for explaining the situation and making me aware of the past. I know there are many Indians in this forum but most of them are avoiding this board.

One reason might be that they are not comfortable with English.
The second is that there are very few ANN threads here.

As @akram143 mentioned

I am planning to start a topic where I will adding weekly news related to cryptocurrency in India. This might boost the confidence of Indians in this forum who are uncertain about its future in our country.

Let's see if it works or not.

Why people are not having much interest on Indian board could be not enough interesting topics to discuss here.If there are some important news or threads about crypto India which is still discussed in the main board and got enough activity there but nothing here.IMHO solution to increase the activity into our board is to create more interesting and useful threads here which can lure people to be active here and also reward the good posts with merits in our board which encourages the people more to be here.

Hmm, another member who is being fed-up with the large inactivity prevailing in this board!  Everyone should be knowing well about the history before going further with this topic discussion. These are some random important snippets from the forum history which happened a few years ago for everyone to know why we are facing such a situation currently. The following snippet is written from my point of view along with the research which I undertook for a couple of months last year to know why the board is being left rotten alike

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Introduction :

It all started in 2011-2012 era when Bitcoin was pumping higher from the $1 to $30 and many Indians got to know about Bitcoin. At that time our forum was one among the most important communities available on the internet to discuss about Bitcoin. We the Indians came to this forum to transact, discuss and understand about bitcoin and its principles. The early INR-BTC transactions dates back to 2011 in the now famous Marketplace section of our forum if I am not wrong.

Creation of Local Board :

With the Indian topics rising up in numbers in the Bitcoin Discussion board, one fine user knight22 came up with the idea of requesting for a separate local board dedicated to India : India sub forum


satoshi timers like dishwara supported the idea for creation of a separate local board dedicated to India and immediately theymos created a local board. September 11, 2012 marks the official birthday for our board. Then, Benson took over the moderation on March 20,2013 and was on charge until his removal on April 2018.

Scams / Spams and the uncertainty :

So, 2016 marks the year at which spammers and scammers started registering in large volumes along with their alt account to rake in huge profits by misusing bounties and signature campaigns. These scammers and spammers went on to become Full, Sr members by the mid of 2017 and the board became uncontrollable by Benson who was busy with Coinsecure back then. Our local board saw the influx of scams and spams like never before at the end of 2017 and at the same time Benson started ignoring the board with reports becoming unhandled. With the introduction of merit system and the alt pumps, spammers became millionaires with bounties and abandoned the forum altogether. I would call this to be the day when we came back to normal. With the removal of Benson and unhandling of reports, our local board became more and more unreadable with only quite a few participation.

The old era fled to Telegram or became quiet with the rising prices of bitcoin and uncertainty of Bitcoin in India. With uncertainty becoming a major hurdle back in 2018 and 2019, many of our Indian forum members were afraid to reveal themselves by participating in this local board. So these were the major reasons for our board reaching the state we are currently experiencing and I believe this wouldn't change in the future as well.

Moderations and Merits :

I would call this to be another core factor for the participation in any local board. AFAIK, there are atleast 2 merit sources dedicated to our local board with adequate source merits so I don't think ranking up is a problem if there are good posts btw. Moderation is taken care by global mods and theymos isn't interested in appointing a dedicated local mod for a board which has far less activity.

So,

I have been checking this board regularly and I am amazed to see only a few members active here from India and the rest active on the Bounty board or the other, My question is to those senior members and those who are active here?

• Why we are not interacting on this board?
• Why members here are not so committed and rewarding?
• What is the reason that only a few members are active?

We Indians are fortunate to have a complete board dedicated to us. In here from South Asia, other countries have topics and those are very active.

Is having a single board dedicated to us is the reason?

I had put a post to award Merits to those deserving topic created on this board by fellow members and to date I have not received a single request, Why?

If you have any suggestions to engage the Indian community in this forum on different boards then do tell me. But, it should be within the forum guidelines.

I have a few Merits that I can award to anyone who can provide a solution to this issue

Thanks.