Bitcoin Forum

I've had some experience with the Bitmixer bot and it definitely seemed that using a bot made things much easier for the operator. Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that almost everything was automated, most of the participants there were quite satisfied with the campaign and everything worked fairly smoothly. Other campaigns (which I won't mention here) also use similar bots but it seems their experiences weren't quite so trouble-free.

Bots are probably cheaper, I would assume, since there is no need to pay for a separate campaign manager. Bots on the other hand are probably easier to take advantage of as well. And even with a bot, a little bit of work might still be required for checking posts, making adjustments to the bot, responding to queries, etc.

Which one do you think is better for managing a signature campaign? And when choosing a signature campaign to join, which option would you personally prefer?

EDIT: Added a poll as per twister's suggestion.

I think Humans are better, Bots rely on rules established in a script and they follow those rules quite well but users might still find ways to abuse those rules and take advantage of them. As you yourself mentioned that a human is still needed to check posts for quality etc. for campaigns managed by bots and it's because they can't manage those things all by themselves, no matter how developed or sophisticated they are.

Plus participants from time to time have lots of queries that a Bot can't answer. And which is why I would prefer to join a campaign that's managed by a human rather than a bot.

PS: you should add a Poll.

why not try to combine both i think it will be good option maybe bots can relieve human work because bot work faster but the bot can't choose the post is constructive or no because mostly bot only count for number of characters and for calculate quality post only human can do it and if we combine both then we will get constructive post with the specified number of characters

combination of both. bots for counting, holding lists and sending BTC and humans for accepting people, checking posts and support in thread.)

I wasn't aware there were bots judging posting standards for signature campaigns, yikes!  I'd say its all well and good but you might actually get banned by the forum mods if your posts are really spammy.

They usually tend to follow a simple script. For example, if a post is under 75 characters in length, then it isn't counted. If a post happens to be located in the off-topic section, then it isn't counted, etc.

A human campaign manager is much better in my opinion. they can filter out bad apples.

a bot only moves depending on a ruleset, which can be gamed. however, it's up to users to point out cheaters (happened already with coinomat)

For the time being, I would say humans. Unless someone make a very good Bot, I will still say humans. Not only this would be error-free, it could also boost the Bitcoin economy by providing campaign manager job to Bitcoiner. Sorry if I sound too.. LoL.

bot and human has anvantage and disanvantage, bot maybe good for who want on time payment. Human is better than bot for me, no error/server down on human... ;D
I'll say human... ( I choose wrong answer on survey :D )

In one recent incident involving a bot-managed signature campaign (Coinomat), it was found that some people were inserting invisible or barely visible characters into their posts to fool the bot into thinking that their posts went over the 75 character limit. This trick wouldn't have worked had there been a human manually counting and checking the posts instead.

Of course, humans.


Hidden characters like the ones on that posts are not easy to detect even by humans.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

If someone posted a 20 character post and appended it with a string of invisible text, a human checker would see that it's too short and disqualify it for payment whereas a bot would think that it's long enough. The human wouldn't be fooled by it, but the bot would be.

I think it is a balance between a bot letting through some spammers or low quality posts and a human having to be there and check every post made by participants.

Economically, you have to say: OK, I lose X coins on my campaign due to low quality posts and tricks if I use a bot OR I lose Y coins to pay someone to check the posts manually, do payouts etc. (or I do it myself, but since time=money, I still lose the Y coins.) Which losses are bigger decide what method would win. A lot of these things have to be discovered by trial and error.

As others mentioned before, it could be a combination of both. A bot can do a lot of tasks quickly, roughly and where human intervention is needed, it can be made. I would use a bot in the first line to check, which would also estimate the validity of a user's performance in a percentage based on a factor of e.g.: number of posts, average length, topics etc. If this percentage is below a threshold, the bot pauses payout and asks for manual check.

(Have to say I don't know what bots are out there, but I think I'll give it a try and look up a few things.)

A bot can be great if he can do all the Job. But is hard to trust in a bot for checking posts, i think that is the hard part.

Is the first time i read about bots on the signature campaigns, i like the concept, could be fun to make my own bot for that.

At last i think is better a bot, but a full implemented one, at the point where you only need to send founds and he do all the job  ;)

It looks like the humans are winning this one!


I'm only aware of two bots at the moment. There is the Bitmixer bot and then there is marcotheminer's bot which was directly based on the Bitmixer bot (link (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=920470)). Marco sells his bot to signature campaign operators who then customize it according to their needs. Stunna's plan to reopen/relaunch the PD campaign was supposed to include a bot as well but I'm not sure what happened to that.


The Bitmixer bot probably comes closest to that description. Registration, counting of posts, and even sending of payments are all done automatically with no input from the owner. In fact, the owner himself rarely posts on the forums but since everything is automated, problems are usually quite rare.

but can't you cheat bitmixer? what bot do they use?

bot all the way, cheaper more efficient, more reliable in 1 vs 1, not ruled by sentiments or angry moments(sometime you can be disqualified for something stupid that has not really to do with your posting)

i find the bit-x bot very good to be honest

...

I vote for the bot, at least in bitmixer's case.  I have not had a problem. 

And if I had to guess, the owner probably does a little bit of spot-checking to make sure posts are of reasonable quality.  Bot to do the tedious work, person to spot-check quality.

*   *   *

I wonder if bitmixer's bot also does the mixing...  The site runs very smoothly.  Automating as much as possible of a website means less work, and once it is shown to be working well, that adds value to them, and to their customers.

The bot was probably developed specifically for their campaign since it appears that they're the only one who is using it. Cases where people have tried to cheat the system are rare. Once it was discovered that someone was copying and pasting the exact same messages across multiple boards but their posts were later deleted by a mod.

And while the Bitmixer account doesn't post very much, I'm sure its owner visits these forums frequently to check threads and PMs in case someone wants to ask him a question or report something.

Also, it's interesting to see that the poll has returned to an almost even 50:50 split.

Humans all the way. Bots are obvious to spot and clearly no one trusts a bot.

In the first place, it shouldn't even be counted as constructive. Humans can count the constructive post more effectively than bots.

Human, but of course not lazy human. Human can choose which a constructive post or not.
You can easy to cheated the bots.

Boots may be good in start but more reliable are humans. Reason is you can make boot to think and act like human if can then maybe i will pick boot.

The opinion would depend on what position I'm in.  If I were a participant of the campaign, I would want a human to run it.  On the other hand, if I were the operator, I would much rather have a bot as for its much cheaper.  IMHO, bots would still make less mistakes than humans when it comes down to counting the signatures.  The coinomat problem, they can code their bot to specifically only detect characters over x font size.

I would think both would go good hand in hand.

but I have to agree bots can and will be faster but also miss somethings that humans cant.  bots cant think logically so an issue could arise and a bot will probably deny it.

so why not use both, the price of maintain the campaign might be more expensive but better to pay for quality posts.

I think human beings would be better than bots, because it is simple bots can not think or bots will do the same thing over and over again

So you are just looking at this to benefit you as a member of such campaign, which is kinda lame.
Bots can easily be manipulated, it's a child's play once you understand the rules they are judging by, and it's not healthy both for the forum, and the service you're promoting.
If the campaign is of larger number of users, then more campaign managers should be hired, and there will be no problems with slow payouts and manual post checks.

cheers

biggest and most apparent fault to using a bot for counting posts; there was a thread about the coinomat campaign being 'scammed' by some users somewhere, but it really demonstrates how big of a fault that is for bots. humans on the other hand, wouldn't be restricted by the rules a bot will follow.

Any signature campaign member would prefer a bot to count and pay for the posts. They don't delay payment and you'll not have surprises about how many of your posts will be counted as constructive. Anyone that says otherwise is lying.

From signature campaign's point of view, I'm not sure. Bots are cheaper but can be abused, but signature campaign managers can do bad things and/or be banned and it will hurt the company's name and cause lots of headache for them(it already happened at least a couple of times). And the company always will have to deal with people complaining that the manager is unfair with them, and if you hire more managers it will be worse because people will claim that one is more severe than other etc...

It is not an easy choice, I must say

i know only human can count constructive post but this time i will vote for bots because can faster counting post
and can paid the users more on time that human because we all know human is very often for delaying a payment

Because that's lazy human or busy human ::) I'm sure if add more staff for monitoring SIG campaign it will be good idea, although the company must pay more too.

The benefit of using bots is not delay for payment, but the post can be manipulate by someone play not health.

in my opinión human is better than bot for signature campaign
bot only do what code written, but human can do more
for example if bot have to count post, bot only count post, but if human count post, human can check which is qualitative post or not