Bitcoin Forum

Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=266490

I noticed something weird in one of his posts when i was going to quote him and it seems like after his last word in any post there are a lot of spaces, white spaces. All his last posts have less than 30 characters but if you go to coinomat bitsig web to check his post count, he has 60, is he making his posts have more than 75 characters with the spaces?

Who would have thought that it isn't a good idea to use a bit to count posts?

Using a bot is fine... as long as it actually works, but there needs to be some occasional manual checking. Making a post 75 characters long doesn't mean the post isn't spam, and can be abused in several ways to get around it like this and the Malin Keshar situation. That user should obviously be kicked off the campaign for making poor posts alone.

I looked at his recent posts and almost all of them are in chinese.  I certainly can't judge the quality.  It's cool to know that you speak Chinese tho, hillarious.  For some reason I thought you had told me you were Candian (not that there aren't candians who speak chinese, but that's certainly not the stereotype).

I see it may be hard for you to scroll down, like just a little but here im going to quote his last posts so you can judge:






All of them have poor quality + the spaces i was talking about earlier, you can just see it when quoting

that user will probably be banned for that low quality posts he made. and some user can report it directly to coinomat so Ingatqhvq wont be paid for his cheating

Coinomat is using the bot hosted by marcotheminer so this bug probably isn't unique to their campaign. The bot shouldn't be counting spaces over two characters in length. Unless the bot is customizable so that Coinomat can choose unique strings of characters to ignore (a quick look at the bot's official thread here (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=976910) suggests that no such feature exists but I could be wrong), it's probably best to contact marcotheminer directly via a PM and ask him to update his bot or submit a feature request on his thread:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=147773

Its not only about the bot that can be bypassed its also that coinomat seems not to care too much about what users in their signature campaign post, this user its obviously posting trash and insubstantial posts not to mention the fact that he is cheating the system, coinomat should either pay more attention to that or hire someone to do it for them

I've already told them that but surprise surprise no response. I sent multiple messages to him about problem users but he only responded to the one informing him about users cheating and hasn't responded to any of my other PMs since. This is why I suggested there needs to be some pressure on campaign managers or business owners to actually do their job or face some sort of consequences.

He hasnt responded to my mail yet but yes you are definitely right, there should be more pressure because they are pretty much attracting users to spam or post useless shit like this guy, if it wasnt for their campaign there would be no reason for him to post what he has been posting, maybe if ''x'' users are banned wearing the same sig campaign the campaign manager should receive like a warning and if it happens again, ban.

another joke ;D
he still spaming with less caracter  ::)

Well the bot in question was marketed as something that would completely automate the campaign process so they are not going to want to do any kind of manual work regarding the campaign.

I imagine that the cost of the bot is likely only marginally less expensive then it would be to hire a signature campaign manager so it may not be economical to both pay for the bot and pay someone to do manual checking.

It can't be that much to purchase the bot, and people can quite easily have their own created but if they're not willing to pay for both then they should pay someone to actually do the job properly as there's no way a bot can spot certain abuse or spam. The bots are fine for counting posts and deducting ones from certain sections or don't meet the criteria etc but there still needs to be a human involved just actually checking over stuff and willing to act quickly to abuses. If there's not then people will quickly find loopholes where they can abuse it as we've seen recently.

But the problem is that the bots are not even fine on counting the posts as seen here and before, people can bypass easily the character limit that any campaign has which makes the bot useless, its not a big deal to count an user's post count at the end of each week and calculate his total posts instead of getting a bot to do pretty much that since it cant detect when an user is abusing the system.

Of course the spam and insubstantial posts cant be detected either and really coinomat has no limits, you can almost post in any section which makes it even easier to spam the forum.

The 75 character minimum was likely instituted as a way to prevent people from spamming their signature with a lot of insubstantial posts. It was probably not anticipated that people would try to cheat the system (or maybe it was and the parties didn't do anything to prevent this).

I think it is interesting that bitmixer has almost the exact same rules, yet they have not encountered similar problems. People have complained that they were "unfairly" banned/removed from their campaign so it should be clear that someone is watching in the background even though they are not active in the forum.

I can't figure out why people feel the need to be assholes just because it's the internet.
Jeesus dude, I guess it must be hard for you to click "next page", but if you do, you'll find pages and pages in chinese many of them very long winded. I have no idea what he's saying and my point was merely that it looks like English is probably not his first language.  I don't know what quality of posts you achieve when writing in a language that you don't know too well.  But either way, there's no need to get all snippy.  Pull your panties out of your butt and relax.

I think it speaks to the quality of the counting script, clearly the one coinomat is using has some serious issues.
I agree with hillarious on this, it only makes sense to use a script to do rote (and concretely defined) tasks like counting posts and excluding certain sections---robots do a much more accurate job than humans an this kind of work.  But when it comes to understanding context and making judgements about quality, robots are not even close to what a human can do. To not use a human for this latter job is to deny its importance.  And I agree that folks who are advertizing on here and not caring about the consequences of how they go about this should have to answer for this.

Hello, guys!
First of all, thanks XinXan for the message and this topic.

hilariousandco, sorry, if nobody responded to your first messages about cheating members. Now they will not be without replying, you have already got replies to last messages, for example, about those 4 cheaters. It's already time to forget, that smb didnt answer somewhen :) Now there are some people writing from this account. And there is a person, which manages with Campaign. And actually this person exists already for some time.
We are with attention to quality of posts, which our participants write in our Campaign. Why do you think we don't care? Why do you think, these small cheaters got paid?
Cheaters can not exist for long time and write a lot of posts, because community of forum notices everything. It's like alive system :)
And yes, posts are count by bot in general, but in random order we check quality of posts manually, especially it concerns new participants.
But most part of our members are already our friends and we know quality of their posts. They are part of forum' community and we are glad to be in the same community.
And cheaters are just small cheaters, which often don't get even 20 minimal posts... Actually, it's not so easy to cheat us :)
Especially with our friends-members and participants of our team, which give us additional information about such members.
So...  :D Thank you, friends, for your attention, topic and this discussion  :)
And note - today is Monday. Pay day for our Campaign. Payments will be today during some next hours :)

You are missing the point, it's not only are they paid or not, it's about you and your "manager" who are not stopping them. Leaving them to post and just not paying isn't doing anything for the forum,
posts are still there, and you make most profit because your advertisement still gets exposure , plus you don't have to pay for it.
I believe you are well aware of this, and are in fact exploiting it.
Instead of taking this serious, you are using this chance to promote your campaign talking about payments, and this just proves how you manage your business.

cheers

Out of curiosity, who is managing the coinimat campaign? I don't think they are doing a very good job.

Their owner runs it, I think.

I told him to hire a campaign manager but he refused because he thinks the site have been around for a long time. can't say I object

He is not doing a good job indeed, i mean i spotted that randomly with no intention to catch him cheating, a manager would have spotted that days ago easily if he was really looking for their member's posts besides this guy's posts were absolutly trash and he should have been kicked out for that anyways

Why he is not being called scammer and receiving red trust too?

Is it something personal or what?

EDIT:

he got paid: https://blockchain.info/pt/tx/058c01f14fb7ca1c670126a46da8b94aa6b575df37f0981f0371f0fde4baf352

1E9gUv3UHcEkV1h7p67VYoLbMxbWEcJmha is the address used for Coinomat's payments

As easy as this sounds, its very hard, almost no-one here has time to go through the posts of all the users of a campaign, not will it only take alot of time but they will have to know multiple languages to efficiently judge spam, you should think about things like those before criticizing their campaign

the quality Post is very poor, why coinomat pay him ???
more of her post is less than 75caracter also he spaming and Out Of topic, i think this is serious concern for manager sign campaign, spaming post is shows about her mindset and brian also signature campaign make to promote that service, if person who advertise is nood smart why must he pay it ? 

As I understand it, both the Bitmixer bot and marcotheminer's bot are already able to distinguish text in quote boxes from normal text. With just a few modifications, it should be possible to change it so that it automatically ignores all text that isn't clearly visible. For instance, text that is under a specific size should not counted, as well as spaces over a certain length. I'm not sure if there are any other tricks that could be used other from those two (e.g. there doesn't seem to be a way to change the font color to one that is invisible or to hide text behind a picture).

EDIT: Are embedded images also counted as characters? How about URLs? If they are counted then it's possible that someone could insert 1x1 pixel images or single character hyperlinks to their posts to make it look as though it's longer than it actually is.


The rules for the Coinomat campaign were directly copied from/inspired by Bitmixer's rules which I agree has worked well so far.

However, Bitmixer's campaign has a lower payrate (except for full members), a lower maximum post limit (50 posts), and doesn't count posts made in the alternate cryptocurrencies and games & rounds sections (in addition to the off-topic section) so it's possible that spammers might find the campaign to be less appealing.

commencing Image test

https://bitcointalk.org/useravatars/avatar_219961.png


edit:

yup, it does count. and url does get counted too

btw is it just me or did this thread got tossed around all over the forum?  :P

The thing is that people who do this aren't really going to last long at it.  Sooner or later someone is going to hit "quote" and then "WTF are all these images?" and then busted.  And then you're going to be in a lot of shit because you're clearly trying to game the system.  It's really pretty foolish, IMO.  I mean you may get away with this silliness for a little bit of time but in the long run it's clear that it's going to cost you a lot when you consider all you could have made by not getting negative trust and removed from the campaign and labelled as a cheater.

Any technique that relies on putting weird stuff into a post so that a bot will read it is going to fail in this way as soon as someone clicks the quote button.

Most campaigns only allow english language and i can tell you that some of them like bit mixer have really good managers and they never had problems with their users, there is people who have time to search trough all posts if he is hired to do it(campaign manager) if they cant hire a manager and they dont have time to do it themselves then they shouldnt start a campaign

Edit: why the fuck is this on service discussion?

Sig campaigns are a service, asking if someone is defrauding a service=service discussion, or maybe scam accusations if it were a statement. Doesn't have much to do with the forum itself.

That's why use bot for manage a SIG campaign is more lack than using humans, two humans is better for manage although must pay more.

I see, well now that you responded to the thread and i dont know if you allowed to tell but i noticed the user has not connected in 3 days, did he got banned?

It's hard to understand you completely, but there were several messages you never replied to going back a couple of weeks. You replied very late to the users abusing your campaign and in the meantime the others continued to post rubbish and some are still seemingly getting paid.


You may or may not have a campaign manager, but if you do then they're not doing a very good job and/or are not very active.


When you don't respond to my messages it looks like you either don't care or are too busy to act swiftly and appropriately. If you cared you would get on top of it. Having users spam looks bad for your business, reputation, and most importantly has a very negative effect on this forum.


Yes, they might not exist for long but they exist a lot longer when there's an unresponsive campaign manager and they shit all over the forum in the days it takes you to respond. If you were keeping an eye on your campaign you would likely be the first person to spot abuse.


I'm not so sure about that. I could probably find plenty of users right now that are still getting paid for poor quality posts.


That's great and all, but friends don't cheat or abuse their friends. If you're glad to be a part of the community do your bit to help it get better. Signature spam is a real problem and it's the campaign managers fault because you are actively encouraging people to spam by paying for posts with no quality control or consequences for spamming. When a user realises he can get a way with making poor posts what do you think happens? Their posts get worse and the quantity goes up and you keep paying them for it.


That's all arguable. It seems very easy to cheat your campaign actually.


I'm glad they are, but that doesn't mean you should be relying on others to do your job for you. You are very slow to respond to warnings of spammers and troublemakers and I know this first hand, not to mention other users have said the same thing after they reported users to you.


He's probably banned, though his abuse is harder to verify for certain. Although it's likely he is trying to cheat, it's impossible to say for sure.


Some jobs are hard and require you to actually put in the work. If you're not willing to do it yourself either hire someone, cut your campaign down to a manageable size or cease your signature campaign altogether. You could purchase forum ad slots if you wish. Running a signature campaign is hard work if done properly, but people like guitarplinker do it right. If you're worried about multiple languages don't pay people for posts in local boards.


9/10 they will get caught eventually and likely ruin or have their account banned all together, but it doesn't stop people trying and shitting up the forum in the meantime. People are getting sneakier at cheating as well in multiple ways, especially by copying and pasting relevant responses from google or earlier on in the thread. These are harder to spot but they're getting more common.


That's arguable. They have had cheaters and they still have a lot of shitposters but most people are moving from bitmixer to others though because other campaigns pay a lot more.


Agreed. There are plenty of people who would look after the campaign and actually do what a campaign manager should do (myself included). It would be better to kick spammers off your campaign and get it down to a manageable level and use the money saved to pay a campaign manager than just let it run wild. Most will do it for 0.1 a month but bigger campaigns should get paid more than that.

unbelievable. looks like even [siz3=10pt]insert whatever here[/siz3] <-- will work

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199415.msg11707478#msg11707478
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=254871.msg11707368#msg11707368

try quoting those posts

Well it looks like there is another person cheating the campaign and making the forum shitty

Seriously what the fuck? People is fucking desperate, then again this wouldnt happen so often if the managers did their job and the 75 characters restriction is stupid, his posts are trash anyways, he should have been kicked for that long ago

I'm quite surprised that their bot counts the markup nodes as text.  That seems quite broken.  Are you use this person is actually getting paid for these posts with extra markup?

Omkifuse is going to end up ruining his ability to participate in ad-campaigns if he keeps it up---and a hero account at that, no less?!

Surely, such posts are not counted.
And can not be paid.
And they are less than 75 letters.

Surely you should know? He's adding hidden junk to them to it looks like they are counted. --Encrypted-- seems to confirm this:

Posts in off topic are not counted by the rule, so add style or make then long is useless, because bot won't count them.

I just messed up when I tried to add style to my posts :(

Sorry :(

I don't see any reason to add that BB Code to those posts as it did exactly nothing for the appearance of your posts.

Edit: one of those posts was in games and rounds which is not excluded per the rules stated in the signature campaign thread.

Assuming the bot actually works and discounts the posts it's meant to. Can someone check?

I wanted to change the font size because all the posts in the topic are so equal, but I forgot to change the default values(I didn't know the defaul size = 10 would do nothing to the size of the font), and looks like for some reason more than 1 modifier has been added.

Sorry, I will avoid at all costs change font style from now on :(

Hm, that's right.

You were "changing" the font multiple times within the posts, sometimes without any text between the size "changes"

I never tried many of the commands that can change font style. The bot was not meant to recognize style things as valid characters(I know bitmixer's bot don't, at least), so I just let them as they are.

Sorry again :(

I was not meant to cause such trouble to everyone :(

the bot never discounted any post in off-topic or local as long as it's 75 symbols in length. everyone participating in coinomat sig campaign knows that.  :P

So the bot essentially doesn't work or do what it's supposed to?  ::) Does Marco know about this? It works fine on his campaign doesn't it?

See the rules:


(nothing is said about local boards, so they are meant to be accepted)

If "everyone" knows that off-topics posts are paid, then "everyone" is cheating coinomat(or at least those who post in off topic). My two posts have less than 74 characters length, with some leftover of some BB code playground I made.

Are you sure they are not removed just right before the payment is sent(looks like, unlike bit-x's bots, coinomat's one only count posts, and coinomat manually do the payment)?

ok. my mistake, I guess.


you can't just avoid posting on off-topic forever  :-\ save the excuses, btw


I'm sure those posts aren't removed right before the payment. because I made 102 posts last week (a quarter of them are in the off-topic) and still got 0.1BTC

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't think marco know about this but I'm not sure.

I just notified marcotheminer and coinomat about the bot.

If the bot is really broken then Coinomat has the right to demand his money back and maybe open a scam accusation against marcotheminer.

I got hurt by this too, being called cheater and receive negative trust from Quickseller is not exactly the most pleasant thing I could get from this forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=976910.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1007178.msg11714351#msg11714351

how about this ?


some member wth negative trust still get paid

What member with negative trust still is being paid?

And I think coinomat that should remove the users with negative trust, it is not bot's fault if is really happening

It should not happen to a bot that has often been used, but the machines did often have errors when data is entered incorrectly, perhaps coinamat manager of the campaign should be frequently checked

UPDATE
looks like Bitcoin_BOy$ (marco's colleague) will be helping coinomat with their signature campaign now. quoted and spaces and whatnot will be discounted from now on.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1007178.msg11716966#msg11716966

Well that doesn't seem regular and who would have thought that signature bots have this kind of flaw? I'm glad yobit doesn't work that way.

Im locking the thread since you guys started talking about things that dont have to do with the thread.