BitcoinTalk is an important tool for ICOs, better know how to use its opportunities.
Cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) markets are ones of the fastest changing in the world. As soon as the ICO-phenomenon started to gather serious traction at the beginning of 2017, every noticeable cryptocurrency blogger and media mentioned BitcoinTalk as one of the key success components, often referring to it as a source of the most desirable and target audience for any ICO project out there.
All ICOs make announcement posts (ANN-posts) about themselves and majority of them launch their bounty campaigns on BitcoinTalk, while all trustworthy ICO listings require hyperlinks to ANN-posts when onboarding the projects. Thus, it can be said that at the moment, BitcoinTalk is a mandatory de-facto standard for any project doing or planning to do an Initial Coin Offering.
What is BitcoinTalk?
Modern BitcoinTalk is the largest and one of the oldest message boards dedicated to Blockchain and cryptocurrencies on the Internet. It was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto on November 22, 2009, and is a direct successor to his first SourceForge forum, which is now lost.
Initially, BitcoinTalk was a forum where people interested in technical details and everything connected to Bitcoin software could communicate with each other. Now it hosts a lot of different sections covering all the major areas of cryptocurrency world, including one made specifically for ICOs. Thanks to its huge user base (more than 464,000 community members) BitcoinTalk soon became a valuable traffic source for everything connected to cryptocurrency.
Story of a startup
We launched its ANN and bounty campaign posts on BitcoinTalk on Monday, Oct. 2. We’ve decided that during the first two weeks of our ICO campaign, we won’t be doing any user acquisition activities besides BitcoinTalk. We wanted to talk to the community, gather feedback and receive a full understanding of how BitcoinTalk works and how it can help us grow the project.
Before we launched our campaign, we did a lot of research on the subject, read all the information we were able to gather and found out that there was practically no serious work covering this subject thoroughly and completely. The purpose of this material is to fill in this informational gap.
Table of contents
ANN-post and everything connected with it
- Mobile layout
- How to mark up and test your post
- How to extract the BBcode of the ANN-post you like
- Images
- Image optimisation
- Pros and cons of different ANN post types
- Nuances
- Conclusions
- Publication of ANN post
- What to do right after your post has been published
The setup
In order to be able to publish announcements and bounty posts, you need to have an account on the forum, but if you plan to do a beautiful “branded” post with images, your account should be at least in a rank of Jr. Member, which means having at least 30 activity points. In order to get that, you need to participate in forum’s life – communicate with other people in various forum threads.
BitcoinTalk assigns points using the following scheme:
One publication or comment = one activity point, but as soon as you reach 14 points, your score stops growing for the current two-week period. Despite this fact, your activity is being tracked and your points are being registered, but not assigned to your account at the moment.
At the beginning of the following two-week period, the process starts again – your activity points continue to grow (even if you didn’t do anything during this new period, your previously registered activity points are now being assigned) until you reach next +14 points. This way, in order to gather the aforementioned 30 points you need to actively communicate on the forum for at least four weeks and two days. You need to keep this in mind if you plan to launch your announcement post by a certain date.
Bans
You also need to note that your account might get banned along the way if you do a lot of off-topic posts and change your geo-IP often and inconsistently, so we suggest you start with at least five accounts that you plan to bring to Jr. Member rank. We had four, three of them got banned.
Besides the in-house leveling up of BitcoinTalk accounts, there are two possible solutions to this situation:
- Find someone who has an account of Jr. Member rank or higher and ask him to publish your ANN/Bounty post for you, but keep in mind that you will most likely need to update your posts during the campaign, so this person should be eager to help you out all the time;
- Buy an account. This method is not forbidden on BitcoinTalk but is not encouraged. You should remember that there is a risk (a rather small one) that your newly bought account can get banned soon after the purchase. You can get banned for a variety of reasons:
– change or regular Geo-IP
– a complaint that accounts that you just bought was stolen
– because some of the forum dwellers are inspecting users who actively communicate in the threads they are interested in, with the goal of finding high ranking accounts with unnatural behavioral patterns (e.g., account was inactive for three months and then started to positively comment in your thread only) in order to report them for unfair thread pumping.
Usually, bans on BitcoinTalk are temporary, but receiving one may hinder your campaign a lot.
In order to minimize the risks, we advise you create your own accounts and grow them till Jr. Member rank. You should start doing so at least one month and two days before your planned ANN-post release date.
Here you can find the complete list of features and restrictions applicable to each account rank.
In case you still want to risk and buy an account, we’ve studied the matter for you. Here are the prices you can encounter on the forums in late November – mid-December*:
- Jr. Member – from 30 EUR;
- Member – from 56 EUR;
- Full Member – from 90 EUR;
- Senior Member – from 120 EUR;
- Hero Member – from 195 EUR;
- Legendary Member – from 310 EUR.
* Note: prices vary a lot, they depend on the vendor and account history, not solely on account rank, but given numbers do provide an actual understanding of the current market state.
Escrows
When buying an account on BitcoinTalk, it is strongly advised to use an escrow service. Escrows are experienced and respected high ranking forum members that act as the third party in your arrangement and guarantee that your deal will be concluded without fraud. Below you can find a list of BitcoinTalk members that could be contacted on the matter of providing escrow services. The list is descending – the man with the highest trust rating is displayed above. The structure is as follows: nickname, commission escrow takes from the deal, minimum reward sum escrow receives in any case*:
- OgNasty – 1%, min. 0.01 BTC;
- Tomatocage – 1%;
- Blazr – 1%, min. 0.01 BTC;
- Lyth0s – 1%, min. 0.01 BTC;
- bitpop – 0.001 BTC;
- Anon136 – 0.9%, min. 0.01 BTC;
- TwinWinNerD – 1%, 0.01 BTC;
- Dabs – 1%, min. 0.03 BTC.
* openly available numbers, you can try to lower them by contacting any of the mentioned users in personal messages.
ANN-post and everything connected with it
It’s a well-known fact that beautiful imagery sells better than naked text, it engages the user and holds his attention, it can bring additional value and help to favorably position your product against the competition.
On BitcoinTalk you can create both simple and discreet posts, as well as rich and beautiful publications full of images, but there are many nuances that you should know before deciding which type of ANN-post you should go for.
Mobile layout
BitcoinTalk is not a mobile-friendly platform. There is no direct option to make an adaptive ANN/Bounty post design for mobile devices, but default layout is fluid, meaning that all your text and imagery will be scaled down to meet the current resolution requirements. You may take that into account when preparing your design and make the content of your images bigger than needed so that it would look better on mobile phones, but it’s totally up to you.
During the first two weeks after our initial launch, we didn’t do any advertising or bring additional traffic to our website, receiving only what BitcoinTalk has to offer and that what came organically. We saw that most of the traffic came from desktop (more than 85 percent), that's why we dare to conclude that trying to make your ANN-post “mobile-friendly” is an ineffective approach.
Another feature of BitcoinTalk’s fluid layout is that elements that are specifically positioned in a single row. For example, [img][/img][img][/img], when viewing on a mobile device, can break this row and create a second line, despite the fact that there is enough horizontal space for them in the initial row.
How to mark up and test your post
BitcoinTalk, as many other forums use BBcode to markup its content inside the publications. Implementation of BBcode is a rather standard one but restricted. We would even say old to be precise. Working with multilevel ordered and unordered lists, for example, is a more complicated process than it is on modern phpBB/IPB forum-boards.
Post should be marked up and tested in personal messages (My messages → New message). You should send your post layout to yourself or your other account so that no one would complain about you sending spam in personal messages.
Before sending your test message, you can look at its preview-version, which might show you how your post would look like once published, but unfortunately, it’s not completely true. In preview version of the post, CSS styles that are applied to pictures with hyperlinks are different from the ones applied in real post. This can trash your complex layout if you don’t know about it in advance. When a post is published, all pictures wrapped in links receive an additional margin-left: 4px (four transparent pixels are added from the left side of the picture), but you can’t see this effect in the Preview mode.
Here’s an example of this effect in ELIX’s ANN-post:
Now that you know this nuance, all iterations of your post layout should be sent to you in personal messages and afterwards examined in My messages →
Inbox (sent messages do count as published posts and BitcoinTalk uses same CSS styles on them).
During this step, additional nuances that slow down your working speed appear. If you mark up and test your post layout with a freshly registered user, then each time you press Preview or Send Message, you’ll need to enter a captcha (fortunately, it doesn’t change for a few hours, so you would be able to remember it by heart). For new users (<16 activity points) these personal message sending restrictions apply:
- One message in six minutes;
- Not more than five messages per hour.
Based on this information, we once again strongly advice to create several accounts on BitcoinTalk and in case of encountering this limits, start doing the same thing, but from different account.
Nota bene: Unfortunately, recently BitcoinTalk forced same image-posting policies to personal messages that it uses in publications. This means that if your account rank is lower than Jr. Member, you can publish only text (image tags will be converted into hyperlinks), even in private messages.
How to extract the BBcode of the ANN-post you like
In order to simplify the ANN-post markup process (i.e,. not to make everything from scratch), you can take any post markup as a basis. It’s very easy to do, but generally, people who don’t work with forums don’t know about it.
Let’s say you like the UTRUST post. In order to see its BBcode markup, you need to log in to BitcoinTalk and press the quote button:
As soon as you do that, window with reply comment will appear, where in the body of the text message a BBcode of UTRUST’s ANN-post will be “quoted.” Everything you need is located inside the tags [quote] and [/quote]. Just copy this code and continue to work with it locally:
Images
BitcoinTalk doesn’t host your images, i.e., you can’t upload pictures to their servers when designing a post, like you can on Medium. You can refer to an image that is already uploaded to a server, preferably your own (with the same domain name as your website), using a hyperlink. If you don’t have a personal dedicated server where you store images, or for some reason, you don’t want to do so, you can use image hosting services such as:
This is where another nuance appears – BitcoinTalk Image Proxy. Theoretically, it was designed to block the loading of the images that exceed 2.5 megabytes in size, but in practice, it periodically blocks the rendering of images from different hostings for no apparent reason, showing you the following message: “bitcointalk.org image proxy: invalid image.”
The main problem here is that your ANN-post images can trigger Image Proxy not when they are rendered for the first time, but three days after the publication, making your post look broken (this is exactly what happened to us).
It is advised to upload your complete image set to different hosting services from the very beginning and prepare several BBCode copies of your post with different image links. In case you encounter this Image Proxy behavior, you will be ready to react to this situation by editing the post and instantly changing all broken images to new, working ones – this way you will minimize your reputation risks. In our tests, we found out that it is safer to use Imgur hosting services. This is probably so because Imgur is most popular image hosting service right now and a lot of companies host their ANN and Bounty post images there, so hindering it with Image Proxy is disadvantageous for the forum in whole.
Another thing to note: you can encounter a situation where you open your published post (or sent personal message) and find some images not being rendered at all. This is a standard situation – no need to worry, just refresh the page a few times. This happens a lot and most of the BitcoinTalk commoners know about it, so they will easily refresh your page if needed.
Image optimisation
All beautiful, selling ANN-posts are made of images – some projects use small amounts of pictures, but very large ones, while others use a lot of small images. Because all images are examined by BitcoinTalk Image Proxy, their loading speed isn’t something to be desired. The general rule of thumb here is that the lesser the size of your images, the faster they load and less Image Proxy related problems are encountered.
In order to decrease your image size – they should be optimised, preferably using lossless algorithms.
These services can help you to achieve this goal:
- TinyPNG (very easy to use web service that provides good compression results for PNG and JPEG formats);
- PNGyu (Windows program that brings good results when dealing with PNG images);
- ImageOptim (Mac OS app, works great with PNG and JPEG formats, in majority of cases performs better than all above-mentioned services).
For anyone who wishes to dive deep into this topic, we advise to take a look at these materials:
- ImageOptim-CLI – comparative performance analysis of image optimisation tools;
- Working with images (RU) – set of articles with detailed instructions from Art. Lebedev Studio employees are describing how to get maximum image quality while achieving minimum size.
Do you really need to bother, how effective this can be? Let’s compare ANN post of our project – Forty Seven Bank and ANN post of Tokenbox. Our image canvas is a lot longer than one of Tokenbox. We have more graphical content.
Forty Seven: 38 images, total file size – 824 kilobytes;
Tokenbox: 8 images, total file size – 2.26 megabytes.
Pros and cons of different ANN post types
In terms of markup specifics, all posts can be divided into four distinct types. Each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages.
Text ANN post
Example – Ethereum Blue.
Ad
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