Middle click or right click and Open link in new tab.

Use your middle mouse button to open a tab in the background. I wish Merit would work the same as "Report", with Report I can choose to open it in the same tab if I want to.

None of these ideas are new to me. Even if I don't respond to suggestions, I do read them, and they float around in my mind going forward. If it's not already done, then there's some reason why. A big possible reason is that I'm the only person who does development on the current code, and my time is limited. Another big reason is that this is a huge forum with complex dynamics, and even small policy changes can have big effects which need to be thought through very carefully.

An example: a bump button sounds good as a fix for certain very visible problems, but it also codifies a broken system. People would use bots to bump all of their threads constantly, giving "industrial" posters a huge advantage over casual posters. A captcha could maybe help a little, but there are services where you can pay a tiny fee to have captchas solved for you. (Which opens another question: maybe a comparatively tiny fee should be allowed as an alternative to having you solve a captcha.) A better solution would be to replace the concept of traditional bumping with something quite different, with different bumping models for different types of sections. But that requires further thought. If implementing a bump button was free, perhaps it'd be worthwhile to at least do it for now and fix a few minor problems with bumping today. But since it's a clearly-imperfect solution, this isn't even on my miles-long to-do list.

I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no:


OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance.


Maybe.


No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified.

Could you elaborate at least on the "No" part a little bit? Some of it I could guess but e.g. displaying the banned status sounds like a simple feature with no downside so I'm curious why it's on the "No" list.

So, after reading the post from Theymos, i think that there is one main problem that needed to be solved by the administrator side, before they can start with the forum problems, which is this
Even if we have and suggest a great suggestion, it would take a long time for it to be implemented because the lack of person in charge of coding. This is a hard situation and hard to be solved because finding a partner who is honest and devoted to this kind of job is hard, and if admin pick a wrong guy, it could destroy the forum and all of us in many ways.

Kind of dilemma though.

I'm not saying all of these are good suggestions and some probably won't help much if at all to combat certain issues, but I'm just brainstorming here to try plug some of the holes of what I believe to be a sinking ship. I'd much rather you just say my ideas were crap or just a simple 'no' (as you have now done) than remain silent for years on them because everyone is in the dark. At least I know I can drop certain suggestions if they're unlikely to ever be implemented and move on to trying something else.



Everybody knows and respects the fact that you're busy and making changes isn't always as easy as clicking a few buttons or writing a bit of code and requires future thought of how changes will effect things in the grand scheme of things here and it's good you do that, but when there's just silence for years things just get worse and worse and nobody knows what to think or whether something is a good or terrible idea or not. It's incredibly frustrating for both staff and members alike when we can see the forum crumbling before our eyes being overrun with bots and spammers and we're making suggestions to try prevent further deterioration and we're just ignored. Years pass and the forum just gets exponentially worse with each passing one and that's only going to continue the longer we leave it.


A bump button is the least of our worries to be honest. Putting a warning when they go to post to maybe follow the rules in the Marketplace and/or a reminder to only bump once every 24 hours and remove the bump when they do would be a quicker/easier fix. Linking the rules to users upon sign up would also give them the information as many just aren't even aware of the rules here.


This could be done very simply and quickly, right? Can we do this ASAP as soon as we've got it ready? New users would then have no excuses for not reading the rules.


Same for this. You sent me the list of highest reporters in Bitcoin Discussion a few weeks ago and there was a clear standout. Unless you know something about him that I don't then I think he would make a good sub mod and patroller. Other staff could volunteer for other boards, but I think one or two of the users who have reported thousands of posts have probably also earned or are deserving a place as mod by now. We've lost far more staff over the past few years than have been replaced and the forum only continues to grow so we need to occasionally add them to meet demand. More staff = less workload and stress for other mods and the board improves in the process.


Why don't you add another? This seems like a quick fix for a few things. If there was more staff and admins added you and cyrus would be bothered less and less. You would be less annoyed by the barrage of PMs and users would be less frustrated and every other Global will then stop being spammed with the same questions for things they don't have the authority to do. It's pointless you two even being messaged about certain things like account restorations if you're not doing them at all which currently seems to be the case. I could even do admin duties full time here if you wanted and I'm practically on the forum all day anyway, but something tells me if I was going to be made an admin it would have happened by now. If you don't trust me to do it for whatever reasons then fair enough but there must be someone else who can do it on staff - Mprep, rickbig, Mitchell or one of the other long-standing mods. Maybe even ask one of the veteran/trusted users here like vod or whoever (in b4 quickseller complains). If none of us are suitable have you spoken to BadBear recently? Maybe try email him asking if he'll come back. You mentioned a while ago that you've considered hiring someone to run the forum so why not hire BadBear? It makes sense for him to do it over some Marlon Rando. BadBear was a great admin as you also said and he knows how the forum works, which would make sense rather than hiring someone external who has to learn all the ways of the world here which wouldn't be easy or something you can learn in a short time.


This needs to happen asap as they're the ones causing the rapid deterioration of the forum in the first place which makes it unfit for purpose and enforcing this would have a tremendous knock on effect on the quality and usability of the forum. I've banned at least 50 users (mostly Juniors) who were copy and pasting content on the Elon City campaign the past month or so. I've no idea how many Rickbig or mprep has banned and could be even more than I have. Elon City accept anyone with no checks and this is why it's exploited by copy and paste bots and spammers. This can't be acceptable. I say we set up some sort of rules where if 5 or 10 users are caught copy and pasting on your campaign or the same amount of users are banned for low quality posts then your campaign gets the ban as well. If this starts happening then campaigns will start doing their job and it will become less common that we have to issue bans because the culture of campaigns doing nothing will change very fast. This forum is too valuable for them to not be able to advertise here for free so they'll start playing by the rules very quickly. If they can hire people to spam for them then they can hire people to manage their campaign as well.


Can this be done soon? People are getting annoyed at all the alt coin spam in Bitcoin Beginners. The Alt coin marketplace is also unusable as it is because it's being used as a catch-all for everything and not for trades/services as intended.

Can you comment some short reasons to some of the No's?


This is already shown to staff, but is there some issue in making this public? I don't necessarily think we should show temp bans but if a person's account is done here then I see no issue in that.


Can you elaborate on this one? To me a merit requirement to become Junior or their signature removed completely is essential and I think most of the community agrees. It can't be acceptable for bots to be able to earn from signature campaigns and wasn't the merit system introduced to curb account farming? It stops spammers from moving up to higher ranks but doesn't stop them from farming hundreds of Juniors and spamming and earning from them which people are now doing and this needs to chnage. One merit to become Junior isn't a lot to ask and most people seem to agree it should be higher. Removing signatures from them completely shouldn't be a big issue either as you did so for Newbies and Juniors barely have anything there now anyway, but this doesn't stop campaigns from paying them for it and that's the whole crux of the issue. People can still purchase Copper Membership to get a limited one anyway.


That's a shame, though I hope someday they will be implemented like Copper was. I think it will severely deter account farming or people trying to purchase merits just to move up ranks. I hope they'll be on the new forum at least.


A new rank obviously isn't essential right now but I think a new one will be needed eventually or the forum will just be full of Legendaries. A new rank with a very high merit requirement would mean only the best posters achieved it. It would be a nice thing for Legendaries to aim to achieve once they've hit that rank as there's nothing after it.

Also, you forgot to comment about Lambos for staff?  Yes/no/maybe? 

@theymos
Once you have some free time, please elaborate the No part a little bit especially for the permaban tag + 1 merit (at least) to become a Junior Member.
This will help us improving our suggestion in the future.

SMF is open source, right? Have you considered soliciting help from the community in the form of patches peer review testing?


This is probably more complicated than PHP code but perhaps if you could make more data available publicly you could get help from the community here as well.

This one falls into the "regulations" category and I don't think there will ever be a forced action. What's far more likely is the easy thing of removing/banning paid signatures.

For now I would say this falls onto the DT network to tag managers who allow spammy shitposters to clog up the forum. While also reporting and tagging said posters.

E3 NSA like that.
Theymos want to see the hell freezes before doing so...luckily for us.