The Cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) markets are the fastest in the world. As soon as the ICO phenomenon began to gain momentum in early 2017, all crypto-currency bloggers and notable media mentioned BitcoinTalk as one of the key components of success, often calling it the most desirable target audience

All ICOs advertise (ANN-posts) about themselves and the majority of them launch their bonus campaigns on BitcoinTalk, while all Reliable ICO listings require hyperlinks to ANN-posts when integrating projects. Thus, it can be said that at the present time, BitcoinTalk is a de facto mandatory standard for any project making or planning to make an initial offer of parts.

What is BitcoinTalk?

Modern BitcoinTalk is the largest and one of the oldest forums dedicated to Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies on the Internet. It was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto on November 22, 2009 and directly succeeds its first SourceForge forum, which is now lost.

Initially, BitcoinTalk was a forum where people interested in technical details and everything related to Bitcoin software could communicate with each other. Now it hosts a lot of different sections covering all the major areas of the cryptocurrency world, including one made specifically for country offices. Thanks to its huge user base (more than 464,000 community members) BitcoinTalk has quickly become a valuable source of traffic for everything related to cryptocurrency.

History of a startup

Its ANN messages and bounty on BitcoinTalk on Monday, October 2nd. We have decided that during the first two weeks of our ICO campaign, we will not be doing any user acquisition activities besides BitcoinTalk. We wanted to talk to the community, gather feedback and fully understand how BitcoinTalk works and how it can help us grow the project.

Before launching 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 virtually no serious work completely and completely covering this topic. The purpose of this material is to fill this information gap.

Table of Contents

The Assembly

ANN-post and all that related thereto

To be able to publish advertisements and bonus messages, you must have an account on the forum, but if you plan to make a beautiful post "branded" with images, your account must be at least in a Jr. member rank, which means having at minus 30 activity points. In order to get this, you must participate in the life of the forum – communicate with other people in different forums.

BitcoinTalk awards points using the following pattern:

A publication or comment = an activity point, but as soon as you reach 14 points, your score ceases to grow for the current two-week period. Despite this fact, your activity is tracked and your points are recorded, but not assigned to your account at this time.

At the beginning of the next two-week period, the process starts again – your activity points continue to grow (even if you have not done anything during this new period, your points of activity previously saved are now assigned) until you reach the next +14 points. In this way, in order to collect the above 30 points, you must actively communicate on the forum for at least four weeks and two days. You must keep this in mind if you plan to publish your ad by a certain date.

Bans

You should also note that your account could be banned en route if you make a large number of out-of-topic messages and change your geo-IP often and inconsistently, so we suggest you start with at least five accounts that you plan to bring to junior rank. We had four, three of them were banned.

In addition to the internal level of BitcoinTalk accounts, there are two possible solutions to this situation:

Find someone who has a Jr. or higher member account and ask him to publish your ANN / Bounty post for you, but keep in mind that you will probably need to update your messages during the campaign, so that person should be eager to help you time

Buy an account. This method is not prohibited on BitcoinTalk but is not encouraged. You must remember that there is a risk (rather low) that your newly purchased account may be banned shortly after the purchase. You may be banned for a variety of reasons:

– change or regularly Geo-IP

– a complaint that the accounts you have just purchased has been stolen

– because some of the users of the forum inspect users who are actively communicating in topics of interest to them, in order to find high-level accounts with unnatural behaviors (for example, the account was inactive for three months and started to comment positively only) in order to report them for unfair thread pumping.

Usually, the bans on BitcoinTalk are temporary, but getting one can be very annoying to your campaign.

In order to minimize the risks, we advise you to create your own accounts and develop them up to the rank of junior member. You should start doing this at least a month and two days before the planned date of publication of your ANN-post.

Here you will find a complete list of features and restrictions applicable to each account.

In case you still want to risk and buy an account, we have studied the question for you. Here are the prices you can see on the forums end of November – mid-December *:

Jr. Member – from 30 EUR;

Member – from 56 EUR;

Full member – EUR 90;

Senior Member – from 120 EUR;

Hero Member – from 195 EUR;

Legendary Member – from 310 EUR

* Note: Prices vary a lot, they depend on the history of the supplier and the account, only in Account rank function, but the given figures provide a real understanding of the current state of the market.

Escrows

When buying an account on BitcoinTalk, it is highly advisable to use a service. Escrow is experienced and respected senior members of the forum who act as third parties in your arrangement and guarantee that your deal will be concluded without fraud. Below you will find a list of BitcoinTalk members who may be contacted to provide escrow services. The list is decreasing – the man with the highest level of trust is displayed above. The structure is as follows: nickname, escrow commission takes the case, the minimum amount of escrow reward 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.

* freely available numbers, you can try to lower them by addressing yourself to one of the users mentioned in the personal messages. a well-known fact that beautiful images sell better than nude text, engage the user and grab his attention, he can add value and help to position your product against the competition.

On BitcoinTalk you can create both simple and discreet publications, as well as rich and beautiful publications full of images, but there are many nuances you need to know before deciding on the type of ANN-post that you should use.

BitcoinTalk is not a mobile-friendly platform. There is no direct option to create an adaptive ANN / Bounty poster for mobile devices, but the default layout is fluid, which means that all your text and images will be reduced to fit current resolution requirements. You can take this into account when preparing your design and make the content of your images larger than necessary to make it better on mobile phones, but it's entirely up to you.

<img alt=" BitcoinTalk "src =" http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/1fda77fee28ae74ea22cb22b95a288e5.jpg "title =" BitcoinTalk "/>

In the first two weeks after our initial launch, we did not advertise or We saw that most of the traffic came from the office (over 85%), that's why the post "mobile-friendly" is a Ineffective approach

Another feature of BitcoinTalk's fluid layout is that items that are specifically positioned in a single line. [img] [/img] [img] [/img]when viewed on a mobile device, can break that line and create a second line, despite the fact that there is enough horizontal space for them in the initial row.

<img alt=" BitcoinTalk "src = "http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/fdf62406a78c977bc8ae5502d776e6 e3 .jpg "title =" BitcoinTalk "/>

How to tag and test your message

BitcoinTalk, as many other forums use BBcode to tag its content to the Inside the publications. The implementation of BBcode is rather standard but limited. We would even say old to be precise. Working with ordered and unordered multilevel lists, for example, is a more complicated process than on modern phpBB / IPB forums

The message should be tagged and tested in personal messages ( My messages → New message ). You should send your layout to yourself or to your other account so that no one complains that you are spamming personal messages.

<img alt=" New post "src =" http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/2ea20a77a521ada0512ac3e182357bf0.jpg "title =" New post "/>

Before d & # 39; send your test message, you can check out its preview version, which could show you what your message will look like once published, but unfortunately this is not quite true In the preview version of the publication, the CSS styles applied to images with hyperlinks are different from those applied in the actual publication, if you do not know.When you publish a post, all the images wrapped in the links receive an extra margin: 4px (four transparent pixels are added on the left side of the image), but you can not see this effect in Preview mode.

Here is an example of this effect in E L & # 39; ANN-post of LIX:

<img alt=" ANN-post "src =" http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/4b7354a3f941af570cbc5e8bd876a58e.jpg "title =" ANN-post "/>

Now that you know this nuance, all the iterations of your bet on page should be sent to you in personal messages and then examined in My Messages →

Inbox ] (sent messages count as publications and BitcoinTalk uses the same CSS styles)

In this step, additional shades that slow down your work speed appear. If you are annotating and testing your layout with a freshly registered user, each time you press Preview or Send Message, you must enter a captcha (thankfully, it does not change for a few hours, so you would be able to 39 in memory by heart). For new users (<16 points of activity) these personal message sending restrictions apply:

A message in six minutes;

Not more than five messages per hour.

Based on this information, we recommend once again strongly to create multiple accounts on BitcoinTalk and in case of meeting these limits, start doing the same thing, but different account.

Note: Unfortunately, BitcoinTalk recently forced the same image publishing rules to use the personal messages that it uses in publications. This means that if your account is less than the Jr. member, you can only publish text (the image tags will be converted to hyperlinks), even in private messages.

How to extract the BBcode from the ANN-post you like

To simplify the ANN-post markup process (that is, not to do everything from zero), you can take any post tag as a base. It's very easy to do, but generally, people who do not work with forums do not know it.

Let's say you like the post UTRUST. In order to see its BBcode markup, you must login to BitcoinTalk and press the quote button:

<img alt=" Quote button "src =" http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view / 8b471caab74e04cc33f167d9b7ac50a7.jpg "title =" Quote Button "/>

As soon as you do this, a window with an answer comment will appear, where in the body of the message a BBcode of UTRUST's post ANN will be" "All you need is located inside the labels [quote] and [/quote]. Just copy this code and continue working with it locally:

<img alt=" Poster answer "src =" http: //cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/f43477368306382524b49a28ca77447d.jpg "title =" Post an answer "/>

Images

BitcoinTalk n & # 39; not host your images, ie you can not upload images to their servers lor s of the design of a post, as you can on average. You can refer to an image already uploaded to a server, preferably yours (with the same domain name as your website), using a hyperlink. If you do not have a personal dedicated server on which you are storing images, or for any reason, you may use image hosting services such as:

That's where another nuance appears – BitcoinTalk Image Proxy. Theoretically, it was designed to block the loading of images that exceed 2.5 megabytes, but in practice, it periodically blocks the rendering of images of different accommodations for no apparent reason, showing you the following message: "Bitcointalk.org proxy image: [image incorrecte]. "

The main problem here is that your ANN-post images can trigger Proxy Image not when they are rendered for the first time, but three days after publication, is exactly what we are arrived.)

It is advisable to download your complete picture set to different hosting services from the beginning and prepare multiple BBCode copies of your message with different image links . In case you encounter this proxy image behavior, you will be ready to react to this situation by editing the post and instantly changing all broken images to new, functioning – this way you will minimize the chances of reputation. In our tests, we discovered that it is safer to use Imgur hosting services. That's probably the case because Imgur is the most popular image hosting service currently and many companies are hosting their ANN and Bounty post images there, so it's bothering them with Proxy image is disadvantageous for the forum as a whole

Note: You may encounter a situation where you open your published article (or sent a personal message) and find images that are not displayed. It's a standard situation – no need to worry, just refresh the page several times. This happens often and most BitcoinTalk commoners know it, so they will easily refresh your page if necessary.

Image Optimization

All pretty ANN-posts are made images – some projects use small amounts of images, but very large ones, while that others use a lot of small images. Because all images are examined by BitcoinTalk Image Proxy, their loading speed is not something to be desired. The general rule is this: the smaller the size of your images, the faster they load and the less Image Proxy related issues.

To reduce the size of your image, use it preferably lossless algorithms.

These services can help you 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 it comes to PNG images)

ImageOptim (Mac OS application, works fine with formats PNG and JPEG, in the majority of the cases, works better than anything

For all those who wish to deepen this subject, we advise you to consult these materials:

ImageOptim -CLI – comparative performance analysis of image optimization tools

rking with images (UK) – set of articles with detailed instructions of the l-39 Art Lebedev Studio employees describe how to get picture quality m maximum while reaching the minimum size.

Do you really need to bother, how can this be effective? Let's compare ANN post from our project – Forty Seven Bank and ANN post from Tokenbox. Our canvas is much longer than Tokenbox's. We have more graphic content.

Forty Sept: 38 images, total file size – 824 kilobytes

Tokenbox: 8 images, total file size – 2.26 megabytes.

the difference is 2.74

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of ANN Publications

In terms of markup specificities, all messages can be divided into four types distinct. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Text ANN post

Example – Blue Ethereum.

Advantages:

This type of publication is faster and easier to take than any other text because it contains only text

This type of publication can be published without having a Rated account which means you will have to spend less time preparing it, you will not have to buy an account or ask for help. someone & # 39; a;

This type of message can be translated very quickly in other languages ​​(eg bounty campaign), which will offer you greater audience coverage in much shorter time frames. Translators will not have to play with your Photoshop files and change the texts on the pictures there:

This type of publication is very easy to edit as there is no need to change images in graphic editors.

The translators and community managers responsible for the ANN and Bounty localized messages in your campaign will be able to update their feeds with your changes more quickly, so the new information will be spread more quickly.

Text messages look as good on mobile devices as on the desktop;

Text messages are loaded faster than all other types of messages.

Disadvantages:

Simple Graphical Ann Post

The term simple term graph implies a canvas that consists almost entirely of a few or even a single image, which is created using a kind of graphic tool. This type of message is presented using a rule "one image per row."

Example – UTRUST.

Advantages:

As the graphic images are not related to the rules and formatting capabilities of the forum elements, it is possible to 39; display your product as you wish without encountering any restrictions of structure and color. You can highlight important things and shape your elements freely.

This type of message makes it possible to effectively use storytelling techniques and to properly inform users of your project, even if they have begun to "read" your message somewhere in the middle

With this type of message, you can show the audience the skill level of your design and product teams as well as the seriousness of your approach to BitcoinTalk as a media channel;

This type of message is automatically better than most items created by the competition. It is also easier to remember than an ordinary text

This type of layout does not break down on mobile devices as it only has one image by row

Disadvantages:

ANN ANNULAR complex

A ANN ANNULAR complex is an article cut out and marked out so that all Images NOT covered by links have four transparent / background color pixels on the left side and all images covered by links are not. This type of article can have multiple image links placed on a line (for example, you can place image links of your documents on a horizontal line)

<img alt=" ] ANN ANNULAR complex post "src =" http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/3b1bb156f43c9ce49493d4f6f5f05393.jpg "title =" Complex ANN graphic "/>

Examples: Forty Seven Bank, eGold

Advantages:

Almost all the advantages of simple graphical annunciation

This type of article can serve as a mini-website in a forum, where each image is a hypertext link leading to where you want to go. The horizontal layout of the images wrapped in the links can help shorten the length of the canvas while at the same time making it bigger.

It is easier to optimize without loss large amount of small images and receive a significant reduction in size than to optimize less, but very large images. the higher your charges are, the faster this load is, which is why this type of workstation usually loads faster than simple graphical support;

There is no visible "ladder" on the edge of the canvas. images wrapped in links.

Disadvantages:

Almost all the disadvantages of a simple article ANN chart;

Even more time is needed to prepare this type of message than is necessary to prepare a simple graphic post

You will have to work with the color back BitcoinTalk plan (# ECEDF3), whether you like it or not.

On mobile devices, horizontally placed image links can sometimes collapse and create a second row of images, which breaks your layout.

Ann Hybrid Message

Hybrid message in a subject that uses a combination of images and richly formatted text.

Examples: Sintez, BPC, Tokenbox.

Advantages:

May seem as good as most graphic messages are there if you want to take it seriously like VIBERATE, which means that this message type can be sold

This type of message helps to effectively use storytelling techniques and to properly inform users. started to "read" your message somewhere in the middle

This type of message is easier to translate for participants in the Bounty campaign because most of the text is not in the mages (less work in image editors). Localized versions of your ANN message will appear more quickly. It is also much easier to manage this type of publication because changes in workflow are usually similar to text.

This type of publication looks as good on mobile devices as it does on desktops

Disadvantages: ] Create You must have people on your team or freelance who can create a product of high visual quality



It is harder to create beautiful post hybrids rather than create simple graphics because you will need to use popular fonts, default line heights that can not be edited, a BitcoinTalk background color, and so on.



For translators and community managers to create their own localized versions of your ANN or Bounty messages, they need up-to-date, properly edited versions of Photoshop files with your graphical content openly available to them.

Nuances Time Most people who will participate in your translation bonus campaign are professional bounty hunters, whose goal is to deliver their work as quickly as possible and receive their promised steaks (bonus campaign points). They do not care about the visual quality of their work if it slows them down. For example, you ran your ANN and Bounty graphical messages on the first day of the month, but you were able to prepare properly cut Photoshop files with graphics only on the second day. Most bounty hunters, in this case, have already started translating your messages the first day. Because they did not have the Photoshop source files available to them the first day, they would work with what is – raster images of your messages. They will be able to change the texts of your images, but the quality of these changes will be questionable, which will result in localized messages worse than the original ones. These situations can be resolved later, but it takes time, which is essential during the OIC campaign, and that is why it is extremely important to have all your Photoshop files properly cut out le premier jour. Simplicity La plupart des chasseurs de primes connaissent les éditeurs d'images et les installent sur leurs machines. Principalement ceux d'Adobe, mais souvent les versions des programmes qu'ils utilisent sont très obsolètes (Adobe Photoshop CS2-3, Adobe Fireworks CS5-6), c'est pourquoi lors de la préparation des fichiers Photoshop tranchés, nous vous suggérons de fusionner autant de couches que possible, ne laissant que le texte modifiable. Nous vous suggérons également de ne pas utiliser les nouvelles fonctionnalités Adobe CC telles que les effets de calque double ou triple, les plans de travail, etc. Plus votre fichier est simple, plus le résultat d'un chasseur de primes est prévisible ] Ce n'est pas un fait communément connu, mais il est possible de placer un modèle d'e-mail complet, avec l'adresse du destinataire, le sujet et le texte du corps définis à l'avance dans un lien "mailto:". C'est très pratique pour une personne qui a décidé de vous écrire un email – cela lui fera gagner beaucoup de temps s'il rencontre un tel lien. Voici un exemple qui propose à un visiteur de devenir le conseiller du projet. Ces types de liens fonctionnent également en termes de BitcoinTalk, mais vous devez les placer en utilisant [email] [/email] tag, pas le [url] [/url]. Vous pouvez également placer des balises dans des balises [email] de la même manière qu'avec [url]. Limite pour les symboles Les messages sur BitcoinTalk ne peuvent pas être infiniment longs. , mais si vous le rencontrez, le forum vous montrera juste une erreur à propos du fait que vous avez une étiquette mal fermée quelque part dans votre message, c'est-à-dire qu'elle vous désinformera. Officiellement, la limite de caractères pour un poste est de 64 000 symboles, mais dans certains cas, cette limite a tiré à plus de 63 000 caractères, tandis que d'autres ont indiqué qu'ils pouvaient publier des messages de 65 535 et 68 575 caractères respectivement. En outre, cette restriction est flottante. Cela varie d'une section de forum à l'autre. Dans Tokens (altcoins) et Bounties (altcoins), il est à peu près le même que mentionné ci-dessus, mais dans la section localisée russe, par exemple, le nombre de caractères autorisés était deux fois plus petit. Vous ne le ferez probablement pas rencontrez cette limite lors de la publication de votre message ANN, mais cela vous sera utile lorsque vous ferez un post de primes. Conclusions Basé sur l'expérience du lancement de nos propres ANN et Bounty de changements à eux, la conclusion serait qu'il est préférable de faire des postes ANN hybrides, parce que: Ils peuvent vendre (même si elles le font un peu pire que les messages purement graphiques) et peuvent avoir l'air bien



Ils sont beaucoup moins chers en maintenance



Ils sont faciles à utiliser pour les participants à une campagne de primes



Ils prennent moins de temps à préparer parce qu'il y a moins d'images à créer, et ces images sont généralement plus simp Les messages ANN hybrides hébergent généralement moins d'images que d'images, et ces images sont généralement de plus petite taille, ce qui en fait de meilleures cibles pour une optimisation d'image sans perte, ce qui peut aboutir à de meilleurs temps de char gement. Il est préférable de ne pas utiliser de liens image pour les messages ANN dans différentes langues, mais plutôt de les faire en texte, sinon cela pourrait créer beaucoup de travail supplémentaire pour le créateur ainsi que pour C'est beau, mais comme il y a environ 16-20 langues principales pour lesquelles votre post ANN sera traduit, vous et vos chasseurs de primes devrez créer ces 16-20 images pour chaque langue, résultant en environ 256-400 images. Publication de l'article ANN Avant de publier votre article ANN, il y a plusieurs choses que vous devez savoir. Nom de votre publication Each day dozens of new ANN posts appear on BitcoinTalk and dozens of “old” ones ascend to top positions of the section because of the active discussions happening in them. Tokens (altcoins) section is somewhat similar to very dynamic Featured section of some kind of popular App Store – all market participants want to get their place under the sun, because it provides visibility to the project, which in return gives free traffic. It would be discussed later – how to get to the top of the section, but right now we will speak about how to get noticed when you’re already on the top. All headings in the section are made of text and mostly all of them have blocks in brackets, such as [ANN][ICO]. In order to better distinguish your post you can use ASCII symbols and emojis – you won’t get banned for this: Using these symbols, you can better draw attention to your post and easier onboard new visitors to your topic. For example, instead of using normal square brackets [EXAMPLE]you can use these symbols【EXAMPLE】that by default have thicker lines to them and are better drawing attention. If to wrap this example in emoji, then your heading will distinct even better, for instance 🚀【EXAMPLE】🚀.

That’s it, but it is important not to overdo it. <img alt="Name of your post" src="http://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/8867d4b2168b6d594a1c55fe2849f64d.jpg" title="Name of your post"/> The most often encountered emojis on BitcoinTalk are: 🌟 ⚡🚀🔥✅💥⭐ Reply reservation Tokens (altcoins) section is always monitored by bounty hunters, especially by translators. As soon as they see new post appear, they jump into it and instantaneously leave a reply message with text stating something similar to “I reserve the Indonesian translation.” This is all good and well, despite the fact that it’s better to be able to reserve the first reply message for yourself – you can use it for thread updates or at least have an opportunity to divide your main post in two if it gets too big. After the publication of your ANN post, the tab you’ve publish ed it in usually loads slower than the entry appears in the altcoins section, so in order to reserve the first reply for yourself, you need to do:

Open two separate tabs in your browser, each on Tokens (altcoins); Have the “Reserved” text copied to your clipboard Use one tab to publish your ANN post As soon as you’ve pressed the “Post” button, switch to the second tab and continuously hit “Refresh” button until you see your post Jump into the post and immediately hit the “Reply” button, paste the “Reserved” text in and then hit the “Post” button.

If you’ve done everything fast enough, first post reply will be yours and you will be able to use it as intended (by editing its content). In case you weren’t able to make it (bounty hunters are very fast after all), you’ll have to use your main post’s footer to publish the updates.

In order to reduce the risk of losing your first reply message to bounty hunters, we advise to publish your ANN post when there are less people on the forum. BitcoinTalk is an international platform, meaning that there are always users online, but we definitely recommend avoiding publishing your post from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. EST.

What to do right after your post has been published

There are many things you can do right after publishing your ANN post, depending on how well did you prepare for the guerilla community management, but there’s a minimum program you should do.

If you’ve made a high-quality attractive ANN post, you will start receiving your first comments about participation in bounty program, language translation reservations and general questions about your project within the first minutes. It is very important to respond to those comments promptly and in full while staying polite and positive. Keeping your FAQ close to increase your answer speed is generally a good idea. If you manage to respond to people’s questions while offering them a way to continue a conversation with you, you will get into victorious situation. Every time someone leaves a comment in your post, it jumps up to the top of Tokens (altcoins) section. There it receives visibility, that’s why the more discussion is happening in your post, the more popular it gets. You have to remember that BitcoinTalk moderators are working for a salary, not for free, so they do their job well – all off-topic posts and pointless comments are quickly deleted.

Even participating in topic discussions, you need to keep an eye on personal messages – a place where you’ll receive offers of paid help from different forum dwellers. Some of the offered services may be of use to you, but in any case, you should always be wary and check the reputation of users who are offering them.

During the first few hours after the publication of your ANN-post, we suggest you keep at least two people watching the thread and answering user comments and questions.

When launching local ANN posts in different languages, prepare that some people may be very salty and even poisonous. You still need to behave politely with them.

This is where this article comes to an end. Next one would be about specifics of bounty campaigns on BitcoinTalk. If you found this article useful, please share it with your friends. If you want us to clarify anything or propose a subject for another article, please leave us a message in the comment section below.