Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: AH27 on February 04, 2013, 05:38 am
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I think that you will find that your new restriction on posting has a very alienating effect on users. Moreover, 50 postings is a huge number of postings, probably more than I would ever post in a lifetime, the unintended consequence is that most new users from here on out will never be able to actively participate in the forums unless they are chatty, garrulous, and post excessively, the very thing that you seek to avoid. I, for one, used to post to the forums under the pseudonym Albert Hoffman, but because of a crash and the consequent loss of all of my keys and passwords, I had to start over. Now I find that I am shut out because of an ill thought out new policy and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It makes me want to look elsewhere, where there is not a two tiered exclusionary policy, and that is not good for business. My feelings are not easily hurt, but I would be open, now, to going elsewhere where there is not this attitude. You have made a mistake, you should re-think your policy before you alienate too many new and potential customers.
AH27
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Anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows about the spam problems we have had with bitcoin scams -- and would know that this 50 post policy was introduced in order to give the moderators a chance to catch and delete the spammers' accounts and their spam before their posts spill over into the rest of the forum, flooding it, and causing people to be scammed out of their money.
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Anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows about the spam problems we have had with bitcoin scams -- and would know that this 50 post policy was introduced in order to give the moderators a chance to catch and delete the spammers' accounts and their spam before their posts spill over into the rest of the forum, flooding it, and causing people to be scammed out of their money.
Agree with scout, all the btkoin postings and messages were making the forum unusable sometimes.
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Out of curiosity, what are you trying to post that can't be posted here? I guess to feedback threads?
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Out of curiosity, what are you trying to post that can't be posted here? I guess to feedback threads?
Yeah, I wonder this as well because if the OP is talking about feedback or review threads, the best thing would be to start a new feedback thread either for his own reviews of multiple vendors, or a thread for everyone to review a specific vendor. That would be a great addition to this New member subforum!
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I can understand the need to weed out the scammers but forcing users into posting 50 times before they can get anywhere else seems to be excessive. Also you would think it adds up to a shitload more spam posts.
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Definitely understand the reason for the restriction, but I wonder if it might not have a few unfortunate unintended consequences -- such as encouraging new people to make more meaningless posts.
Not sure of the alternative though. Perhaps a lower post requirement, but with some sort of minimum time between posts or a maximum of x posts per hour for the first few days? I'm sure some smarter minds can think of other solutions.
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I can understand the need to weed out the scammers but forcing users into posting 50 times before they can get anywhere else seems to be excessive. Also you would think it adds up to a shitload more spam posts.
Yes, more spam posts, but not the kind of spam that attempts to scam people out of their money.
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It doesnt really stop people from scamming, its just a matter of time consumption . Im guessing scammer capable of swindling BTC from honest users has already invested a fair bit of time in gaining the trust of their victims
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On the up side... debating about whether we should have to write 50 posts will help us to get closer to the magical 50 posts. :)
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*Raz peeks his head gingerly into the room, reads through each post like a good boy, and thinks, "may I.....?"*
In typical Raz fashion.........
I think that you will find that your new restriction on posting has a very alienating effect on users. Moreover, 50 postings is a huge number of postings, probably more than I would ever post in a lifetime, the unintended consequence is that most new users from here on out will never be able to actively participate in the forums unless they are chatty, garrulous, and post excessively, the very thing that you seek to avoid. I, for one, used to post to the forums under the pseudonym Albert Hoffman, but because of a crash and the consequent loss of all of my keys and passwords, I had to start over. Now I find that I am shut out because of an ill thought out new policy and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It makes me want to look elsewhere, where there is not a two tiered exclusionary policy, and that is not good for business. My feelings are not easily hurt, but I would be open, now, to going elsewhere where there is not this attitude. You have made a mistake, you should re-think your policy before you alienate too many new and potential customers.
AH27
Sorry to hear Mt Gox has not rectified the matter yet, can't advise on US small claims processing, but I would not give up on matter b/c that is wrong, so GL with it. 50 posts seems a lot at first to go into main section, but remember there's a few "official spam" threads you can merely enter a smilie until you are done. I am unaware of what mods think of this, and will update if corrected, but a lot of new members are doing this. It would be great if we could delete these spam posts and manually reconfigure the post count. I will look into this when I get time (I am on another SMF forum and we have been using 2.0.4 for a time..... we sometimes have trouble with posts auto-updating and admin has to reset it.... can't remember Mod that does this, and I don't even know if it would work here on this version but I'm saying not the end of the world. Karma can be reset to zero or manually recalculated as seen fit as well, it's just finding time to look into this shit.)
You are not the only one to have to make another acc./ though. Razorspyne [edited to avoid any possible confusion] is not my first acc./ as original one disappeared somehow in November, possibly a password fault, and I had to come back Dec 02 so there's a few people here like that. So yes, there's other people who have had to 'start over'. Just gotta move on.
50 posts is not hard to achieve in a lifetime though, I have seen members who have posted tens of thousands (one guy is just under 50 000 posts!); the average per day is typically 8 for a typical member..... I got there in a month I think, though back in those days (December) we didn't have that requirement..... spamming existed, but just got worse and worse. If you were here regularly you would have seen the spam creep in, and get worse and more invasive, it is certainly not a 'two tiered exclusionary policy'. And it would be 'bad for business' if this were not dealt with, as no one here would be on the forums, and that would inhibit effective information flow on obtaining F1 on problems members might encounter on SR that can only be dealt with on a forum. Some use these forums to gossip and troll, but others really do need it and if this was to be effectively curtailed by malicious spam that would certainly have side effects that would be 'bad for business'. There is a lot of bad attitude on this forum but certainly not to do with implementing a policy which has shown itself to bottleneck the spam. The only reason you don;'t see more spam is b/c the mods and/or spam-busters (yep, I'm not admin, I'm out of the loop on precise numbers) are on here constantly, unpaid, and usually 18 hours a day.... who the phuc DOES that these days without pay and having to cop abuse for their efforts? When the mods are not here, and that is rare I can assure you as this site is always monitored and vigilantly maintained, you will see what I am talking about very easily with spam first filling up the Newbie section and then spilling onto regular section as spam acc./s hit 50 posts in inhumanly quick time.
I kind of am a little peed off that you did not know this already before making this thread -- your very first post I notice. If you went through some posts you will these answers to your questions (though pertinent and relevant) pretty much everywhere, just not in depth. If SR reverses this policy I can assure you it won't be like you are thinking. Everyone has been pissed off with this 50-post count and 100-post count minimum (on my other forum the catchpa is removed after 10 posts and people there STILL complain they can't write that much!). It's obvious people around here forget that SR and SR forums have a unique problem..... both sites are constantly being attacked (SR not as much as SR forums but still attacked frequently) and we cannot go to the police to handle it like we would IRL b/c they're probably the assholes funding this to begin with. SR is unable to be exploited by corrupt police officers like they corrupt the drug trade IRL, so obviously they hate us as they are greedy and can't steal from us as they steal from others. Different set up. If you don't know what I'm talking about suffice it to say I cannot F1 you with a more explicit post as this is common knowledge. So......... while you have been polite in your post, I have to disagree on 90% of it and I have just illustrated precisely why that is.
Anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows about the spam problems we have had with bitcoin scams -- and would know that this 50 post policy was introduced in order to give the moderators a chance to catch and delete the spammers' accounts and their spam before their posts spill over into the rest of the forum, flooding it, and causing people to be scammed out of their money.
........ this is the short of it. Mine's just longer lol. ::) I just wanted to say it in depth so that there's no follow up shit on it.
I can understand the need to weed out the scammers but forcing users into posting 50 times before they can get anywhere else seems to be excessive. Also you would think it adds up to a shitload more spam posts.
Definitely understand the reason for the restriction, but I wonder if it might not have a few unfortunate unintended consequences -- such as encouraging new people to make more meaningless posts.
Not sure of the alternative though. Perhaps a lower post requirement, but with some sort of minimum time between posts or a maximum of x posts per hour for the first few days? I'm sure some smarter minds can think of other solutions.
........yep, but I answered that at the same time though. Common question. Uncommon answer.
It doesnt really stop people from scamming, its just a matter of time consumption . Im guessing scammer capable of swindling BTC from honest users has already invested a fair bit of time in gaining the trust of their victims
Oh this isn't about scamming people (even though they have scammed one of us already..... member paid and BTC not given). See above.
I trust this answers most questions on this question, "why do we need to post 50?" It keeps coming up and I thought short answers wouldn't do it. Remember I am not a mod, spam-buster or admin, this is public information that, while older members are aware of, understandably pisses of new members....... as such this post open to further clarifications/modifications where necessary, but this is the gist of it. Hope that assures you that SR forums is not doing this b/c they have got nothing better to do. This is a unique problem to a unique web site and this is a unique solution in order to keep this site up. Have a great day. :)
Piece out. Drive safely. Eat plenty.
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Tis a bitch.
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GOD DAMMIT, almost there boys..
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w/e man!!!
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I DONT LIKE THIS POSTING SYSTEM
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Give it time. Maybe the change is good.
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The other more important sub-forums seem much less active since the newbie forum was created
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its not so bad, if people would actually use this as a learning experience and use their 50 posts to learn or help somebody else learn then it shouldnt be an issue to anybody.
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The forum should cost a few dollars to sign up and post, which would prevent new people from hastily posting threads that already exist or ask stupid questions.
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This 50 min. Prevents bots from spamming up the forums. I dont see it as such a bother.
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I like the drastic reduction in spam.
I would, however, like to request that vendors be allowed to post, and respond to messages in their own feedback post in the Rumour mill.
I don't need to hop all over the forums to defend or promote myself, just make posts in my thread.
One thread surely couldn't be bad!