Bitcoin Forum

I'm thinking of making Games & Rounds not count toward posts or activity. What other boards would be good candidates for this? Maybe Off-topic, though some decent discussions occur there, so I'm not sure about that.

Investor-based games - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=207.0

Why? I don't read that section, but I feel like most of the posts there should be fairly substantial and contribute to a person's "record".

Imho all other boards should contribute to activity.

 Also i think post count should be given more weight over date of membership. I see legends with hardly any posts.  I can't how they are contributing more to the board than those that are active and posting daily. Of course again just my own personal opinion perhaps I don't fully understand the rating system, and appreciate it is hard to know how valid these posts are that are being made - perhaps some code that could measure how many deleted posts or threads they have could be factored into the calculation.

Also please please can you reset my cryptohunter account back to me. I have posted over 6000 posts and now some other pest will enjoy turning legendary on my behalf.

thanks if you can.

Would all posts in these sections be excluded, or posts after a particular date?
Off topic and archival boards can probably be excluded.

Damn it... NO! Calculating potential activity (http://bitcointalk.ninja/account_worth.php) will be very difficult.

For the love of god, yes.
They are going to stay in the "last posts" list though, right?

Dunno about archival. I mean, just because a thread gets moved there after losing its relevance doesn't mean the posts are not worth giving activity.
You would risk someone losing posts/activity for a great/good post, because the thread has been moved to archival.

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Why? It would be 14 times the number of activity periods an account has posted in, excluding those periods it only posted in Games&Rounds (or other excluded boards).
That won't be too hard to change calculators to, seeing that some like bctaccountpricer already give you detailed overviews of the boards someone posts in.

Without knowing what you're trying to achieve with this change it's a bit hard to give a well thought out opinion. I can only assume it's to reduce the spam caused by signature campaigns. That's all fine but it will mean the signature spammers will spread out to other boards and that may increase the burden on moderators. If they're on board I'd say go for it. But it does seem a bit like a small patch, not a complete solution.

I was thinking that making the post count only show up when you're watching your own profile (or even completely hiding it) would make things harder on signature campaigns. But it would be quite a radical change and people might not like losing one of their ego stats.

Why do u think theymos is against signature campaigns?

Post count is the most important part of being active? I believe it should account for the most heavily weighted part of activity rankings.
However alongside this ANY post or thread deleted for being pointless or outright spam should carry a HUGE penalty. Perhaps reduce your ranking by 25% or more - 3 strikes in a month and account deletion or suspension.

Even a ranking other members can give based on answers/help given. I've seen it on other forums and it works out quite well. They can't subtract but can add.

Sig for snr and above only.

Auctions (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=73.0), since bid posts contribute nothing. Maybe even include all the "listing" sections such as goods, services, currency exchange.

Auctions is a good choice. But, goods, services & currency exchange have lots of constructive discussions.

Not really, at least for my site, you just need to configure it to exclude those boards in the counting. Since it already looks for the board, all you have to do is change it so that it checks the board before incrementing a counter.

I think off-topic would be a good choice as well as politics and society.

Theymos, can you let us know when you set those changes to go live so that those of us with potential activity checkers (like me) can update our sites accordingly?

Like what? What's pretty much there:

• bumps
• "be sure to use escrow"
• "scammer!!!1!"
• "sale went smoothly"
• questions related to transaction (who goes first, escrow, counter offers, etc.)
• people asking for vouch copies (in digital goods)
• sig spammers asking questions but have no intentions of buying

Might aswell include Lending (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=65.0) in that list.

You should consider making any post with a Sig Campaign not count towards activity.


~BCX~

That isn't actually possible. You can't distinguish between when a user had a sig on or not and whether that sig is a campaign or not without going in and manually doing stuff.

Investor based games often have threads which the OP of such threads encourage "players" to both post when they "invest" and when they have their "investments" returned (they are essentially getting people to bump their thread for them).

I would agree with the auctions sub not counting, especially posts that are not an OP considering that some auctions are sig spam heaven in that the minimum bid increment is sometimes ridiculously small like 1 satoshi.

I am not so sure about the other marketplace sections though, as even though the above types are posts are generally useless and made by sig spammers, there is somewhat of an incentive for people to warn others about shady dealings, and when things don't (or do) go smoothly if such posts "count" towards post/activity count.

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I suspect the goal behind this is to reduce signature spam throughout the forum, and if this is a true statement then I would suggest that posts throughout the forum count towards a user's post count, but certain sections do not count as posting towards posting in an "activity period". The reason for this is that if a particular section did not count towards a user's post count, but a signature campaign wanted to encourage participants to post in such section then the campaign manager can manually count posts in that thread from a user's post history -- the opposite is true today in that all posts count towards post history, but for example campaigns want to discourage people from making low quality posts in "off topic" so they manually exclude posts made in off topic.

I would suggest finding some boards that should not count towards activity, as I would theorize that the worse of signature spammers both farm accounts (eg collecting potential activity by collecting activity posts by making a single post every two weeks), and spam the forum with paid signatures.

Another potential solution would be to make it so you need more then a single post made in a two week period in order to collect the (potential) activity points. It could either be setup so that you need to make at least 4 (or some other number equal to or less then 14) posts in order to collect the 14 activity posts, or so that you both need to make at least 2 (or some other number equal to or less then 14) posts and be online at least 2 hours (or some other amount of time) during that activity period in order to collect the activity points. Yes time online can easily be faked, however it is at least a small hurdle for people who are spamming the forum in order to collect potential activity points.

why not we just report accounts and ban those obviously posting just to gain potential activity? that could be more effective in the long run

I would agree on this.

Coding that would easy, especially in SMF.


~BCX~

I agree with this to an extent.  Date of registration sometimes means something, often times it doesn't.  There are so many old accounts in old threads that are still Jr. members because they've been abandoned.

As far as categories that shouldn't contribute, yeah games and rounds.  And I have to say, investor-based games is a haven for ponzi promoters and people who just post there for sig campaigns.  Almost like the lending section, but that section is mostly legit.

I agree with this, increase the maximum potential activity per period (maybe 2-4x), and increase the member level requirements the same 2-4x.

As much as OffTopic can be a breeding ground for spam, those same spammers would then turn to the bitcoin forum.
Games and rounds for sure should not count.

Been coming across a lot of posts that appear to be c/p and altered by one or two words. A spam rating might work better if we members clicked when we saw it. Would flag accounts for mods to check up on.
End off, any alteration will force it somewhere else.Wackamole!

That's why we call it with "OUT OFF TOPIC" so people can say anything there  ;)

Well I wonder why no one has replied with the obvious candidate, the Press section. Most of the spammers there were banned but some still seem to post there for sig, repeatedly but just after a few other posts in other section to not seem as a spammer.

Another recommendation is Local board's offtopic section. While you're at it, might think about Politics and society and speculation. Seems like the new breeding grounds for "constructive"/Off-topic sig spammers.

Recommendations that I agree- Off-topic, Games and rounds(obvious choice) and Auction

And well digital goods do have constructive posts, they should not be "deleted"/not contribute to post count for the sake of a few spammers.

Edit: Also, don't the auto-sig bots take the posts from "Last posts" and discard the posts in non-paid sections? Pretty sure Bitmixer and Yobit won't change the script as their signature will still be displayed. Although this will stop a lot of potential activity farmers from making useless posts

It is a nice move to reduce signature spamming as most of the signature spammers hover always over there.
Also I think that there should be a specific rules that should be made which should be mandatory for every signature campaign to have.
Like posting constructive with atleast 70 character or whatever etc. What do you think?

I love the idea of this.  Some  Games & Rounds are a ton of short little post's, it is horrible when you look  at some who frequent it.   It's obvious spamming on some.

Off Topic is hard I avoid it as so many crap posts.  If you can't do it for entire thread maybe mark certain threads:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=551747.0 - 2700 tv recommendations... no way people read entire thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=686828.0 - over 4k posts about Russian pictures.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105136.0 - 3.8 k of Asian girl thread

Those are just a few examples I would love to see off topic as a place that does not count.  Maybe say after 10 or 20 pages in offtopic posts don't count.  It's these huge threads that are just full of utter crap.

signature, low quality/off-topic, and other kind of spammers can be handled by the mods. posting on the Games&Rounds board for giveaways or Auction board to bid is not against the rules so the mods mostly don't do anything about them. just do with those boards.

It depends on the motivation behind the thinking for excluding certain boards.

This is a Bitcoin forum, advanced ranks based on activity should indicate that member's involvement in bitcoin.

There are posters of hero and legendary rank whose posting history is almost entirely off topic.
If activity was related to core coin subject input only i.e. excluding Off topic, Politics and Society and even Meta then any migration of spammers for sig or farming purposes to the "main reason for being here" boards could be dealt with as normal by the mods.
Some thought could also be put into the proliferation of 'opinion' threads which repeat the same theme time and again, "Is cloudmining etc etc", "Is bitcoin going up?" which are spammers' heaven.

That's if you accept that traffic falling is a price worth paying for credibility.

Ack. (am I doing this right?)

I think Micro Earnings (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=212.0) would be a good candidate too (yes I do see the irony, considering that it is where I'm most active in).

Regarding off-topic, while there are some good posts once in a while, most of them are not. Perhaps a reduced rate? Like 0.1x or 0.2x? Not sure if that would make the calculation too complicated or not.

I also agree with tmfp that advancement in rank should be based on bitcoin-related forum activities.

Definitely a yes. Those posts do not deserve to be counted and are mostly what I'd classify as spam (or sig. spam).

This is already a harder proposal. I've seen and took part of some decent discussions there, albeit they are mostly polluted with people that have signatures and do not read any previous replies.

I concur.

I concur.

Surely that's an excellent reason for including it then?
If a genuine contributor wants to make a genuine Off Topic contribution, why would its not counting to activity make any difference?

Indeed. You make a very good point there. A genuine contributor would not care that much about his posts/activity not being counted; he would care more about the discussion itself. I believe that including off-topic will even significantly reduce the spam/account farming that has been going on there.

You guys are optimistic. I foresee there would still be the same amount of spamming, except now there would also be a lot of people asking why their activity is not increasing.

There wouldn't. People would be unable to farm accounts to higher 'levels' in these sections anymore. There are two likely outcomes:
1) They stop posting.
2) They try spamming other sections.

With the second case it will be easier to detect as contributing to other sections is significantly harder (i.e. you have to put in more time for a decent post).

In case you implement that certain sections will not count as activity, will i then work retrospectively? - So previous activity earned in those section will be removed?
Or is it possible to make a cut-date, so from this day and forth will activity in the mentioned sections no longer count?
Personally I think the cut-date is the better choice, if possible.

That would be a big mess I think, because then all the Legendary members will no longer one, because their activity's value would have been decreased. However, if you multiply the actual aticivty, then everything is okay.



I totally agree with that, but I don't think that it will be possible.

If this was to stop potential account farmers, and people who later shit post to claim the potential activity from their newly bought account. Awesome job theymos

If this was to stop spam from yobit/bitmixer/betco/bit-x or any upcoming signature campaign participants, that uses Bot for managing campaigns. This won't work.
1) The bots use Last posts, to calculate post count and pay
2) They won't change it as they are getting their signatures displayed in those sections.
3) If they did want their participants to not spam, they'd rather block the sections themselves.

And this implementation will also have some downsides. Will this have a effect on past posts? I'm pretty sure most users will lose most of their activity. Also users like Xialla, many of the mods and current trusted members will downgrade to a lower rank

naw. any kind of change should affect everyone. old or new. else it wouldn't be fair for the new users (IMO).

also about the activity/rank requirement thing. unless I misunderstood something multiplying users' activity is the same as changing nothing.

edit:
btw I am fully aware that 21% of my posts is on the Off-Topic board.

I myself would. And yet I'm fully for it.

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There's a lot of games&rounds like activity in the investor-based games section, where users have to post txids of their deposits or things like that for a giveaway from the ponzi.
For example here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1365423.msg13910377#msg13910377) or here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1368044.msg13924214#msg13924214).

Cool, but are everyone up for it? A change like this, that would affect a lot of members should be agreed upon by the community. But well this is theymos' property, he can do whatever the shit he wants.

I don't think that this is the case. I mean, theymos could just turn it off from now on and I don't think it should affect the past posts. Even if it does, I still stand by my opinion.ć

No. As long as you've posted in other sections in the time periods you should be fine.

There has yet to be a single valid reason not to do this.

I see no reason why off topic should count as activity.
That whole section is big garbage can of trash.

The root cause of this idea were the signature spammers so why don't just ban signature campaigns?

This is an endless debate. They incentivise people to post, so this get more money for the admins because there is more views. I don't think that they'll ban it. Plus, they couldn't.

Games and rounds, and off topic.

Shit, have you seen all the spam back there? It's a hurricane of spam.


EDIT: Also, add the address staking thread to that list. Full of post count padders.

Off-topic has been cleaned recently, so I think that it is no longer a problem. About Games and rounds, what I see when go there is a wall of giveaways. Why would people don't get activity when they post there ? You just have to lookk at their post history to see what kind of poster it is.

It is a problem. You have not looked at it directly enough. There are all kinds of problems there ranging from 'thread hijacking' to people who have not even read the OP (not to mention the posts from other people).

They are just spamming the section. Those posts don't deserve to be counted nor should they contribute to the activity.

Exactly. Let's not start the debate in this thread.

We can.

The original idea behind the thread was great, but it ended up being abused. I guess there should be at least some minimum rank to post in it (e.g. Hero).

"Off-topic" is the best candidate.

I would like to offer a few Russian subsections:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=91.0 - Пoлитикa
It's "Politics & Society" analogue but only about politics.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=18.0 - Paзнoe
"Off-topic" analogue.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=92.0 - Кopзинa
"Trashcan" analogue.

I think it'd be a nice feature if mods could mark certain topics that turn spammy so that people replying wouldn't earn activity points. This way it wouldn't be possible to make topics in off-topic solely for activity farming.

Shouldn't the trash board for any Local section, not even be accessible to normal members or is Trashcan the word that most resembles the board?

That's what I said isn't it?


I think asking the campaign managers which they think would be good to remove is would be a good start, as they'll know which boards they have to look out for.

That's not exactly what you said. I added that if we do so, the member ranks will be in a way "reseted", except if you multiply the actual activity points.

I don't know why our local trashcan is accessible to any users, including for write, and for what it was created.

Russian government pressure.  :P joking.
I think Russian sub is the only board with a "local trashcan". deleted topics from all other local boards goes to the normal trashcan. ofc I may be wrong.

btw the list of recommended board is growing larger... and I see some people recommend the lending section. I don't agree with this. if you're going to exclude all boards that's prone to spam then there's also the gambling section. better to just ban signature campaign in that case.

Can you write a program to identify all those posts and exclude  them in the post or the activity count?

If could do that I wouldn't be moderating, I would be working on the next google.

That sounds like something I could write the logic for, but in.... English. Maybe the guy who wrote the account value estimator could write something which pings an admin if an account checked with his service meets to many low post quality criteria https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1142314.0.

Well for somethings like bumps and +1's it is fairly trivial. But other stuff like asking questions with no intention of buying, that is harder to determine.

Why?

the boards like the 'games and rounds' which can make you a lot of posts should not be counted, because they are barely substantial.
not for off topic, since that page gone stricter, people could not post useless posts anymore.

IMO, Not all posts in the games and rounds should not be counted in the activity. I mean, I've seen posts that is substantial in there but barely indeed. So if the games and rounds will be excluded then I guess it's fine.
Also for the other posts o other boards, why not just make a rule that these insubstantial posts should be considered as a spam for activity farming and just report it to a mod and immediately be deleted. In that way, the whole board will not be affected but only the shitposts on some threads. Just my opinion. :)

Would add all of marketplace, end of the day some members only come out of there to defend their reputations. Its a nice aspect to the forum but its pretty self serving in many aspects.

I guess it depends on what you think a title should reflect. If you want it to refer to technical competence, then exclude all trading and similar boards. Activity means "activity", and should include all posts if one is being a purist. To take an extreme case, if a guy spends his time selling products, and makes no contribution to any Bitcoin discussions, then do you want him to end up as a legendary poster?

14 posts a fortnight is not a lot, you can hit that just by getting into a single argument about politics.

Why would you ping an admin?

It has not. You're not looking closely enough. Even though a lot of the threads that were being spammed are locked, the situation hasn't resolved itself.

What are you implying here? Automatic deletion? If not, then you're not suggesting anything new.

Posts of barely any to no value should not be counted towards activity. Do you want someone to end up a legendary poster after 1000 posts in the games section? Of course not.

We should also set a limit of posts counted towards the activity. For example, people can post as many constructive post as they want, but only 6 posts a day can be counted towards the activity.

That might make things a little complex, however it is something that I would agree with.

(also very interesting that you created an account to make that very non-controversial statement)

The only people who would be impacted would be the activity farmers when they are trying to catch up with their potential activity. It will take them longer, but they will still catch up, nevertheless.

Yeah, that is a bit of an arbitrary change. I still think the best solution is increasing the activity per day cap such that its out of reach of activity farmers because the 'requirements' for being active are so much higher..

It would cause them to put more effort into accumulating activity points and hence make farming activity less profitable. With farming activity less profitable there would be less of it, and it would be easier to police (moderate, find accounts to ban) and low quality posts would be less of an overall problem.

They will simply start making posts in meta and else .What is the point of this thread ?

Could you elaborate "elsewhere"? How can you make posts of 5-10 characters in the Meta section? Meta section is always on High priority as compared to G & R ,so mostly the shit posts will be nuked by the Mods anyway.Moreover the posts in G & R or Investor Based Games are totally shit which doesn't contribute to the forum or bitcoins,just potential activity spammers.We need the changes indeed! 

loll.. why cant they ? simple example would be "Stake your Bitcoin address here"

I prefer to exclude politics and society (& games and rounds)  and keep counting the other boards including off-topic (i think it is already heavily monitored so it shouldn't be a problem comparing to the previous months.)
Btw maybe a poll isn't a bad idea?

Yeah this guy is right, just look at his own posts here, totally shit so he can increase his post count, however by restricting certain sections it makes it harder for spammers to spam.

Which guy are you talking about here ? Be specific ? Assuming its me :
1.My signature campaign is fixed rate ,only pays for 20 posts maximum per week.
2.They don't pay for posts in Meta section.
3.What is your definition of shit posts ? Please explain.
 However I have listed out a few if your posts which definitely satisfies my definition of shit-posts.




and many more...

@Heutenamos : Okay how much can they spam in the Staked address thread?And how ? Doesn't make sense to me.

Your point being? Meta is carefully watched and they'd expose themselves more easily in such sections. It is much harder to contribute in some and avoid detection/punishment.

Open thread -> Count total number of posts -> Deduce posts made by people in sig. campaigns from the total -> Look at remaining number (percentage wise) -> It should make sense now.

It isn't and no. Off-topic is among those sections that is used to farm up accounts (basically it became a trash section).

Why cant they simply elaborate the post in any of the threads  ?

Why would they spam ? they only need one eligible post to get the potential.That was just an example but in reality there are hundreds of such instances where mods don't delete short posts.

I don't see the point of this thread,my suggestions would depend on WHY thermos is trolling.

I don't think I understand the question correctly. What do you mean?

Off topic is not yet heavily moderated. There is improvent but nothing too big has changed.
Is it possible that posts that'll be included in activity update should have a minimum characters in it? I mean, like a post should have a 150 charaters or more in it to be counted.

If we are talking bout account farmers then they could simply make a long post or ask a question instead in any of the eligible sections. NO ?

Why would we exclude Politics & society ? There's some interesting discussions that take place there. Most of them are well argumented and the posts there are qualitative.

Sure they could. However, the number of posts that they could make would be very limited in comparison to other sections. Unless you think that it would not be obvious if someone asked an unusually high amount of questions via multiple threads/posts. Besides, one could always suggest them to use PM for further questions.

I concur. Considering the suggested sections so far, Politics & Society seems the least likely candidate (quality wise).

I agree. There is nothing bitcoin related in this board, but that is no reason why we should exclude it.
And the amount of spam is also relatively less on this board.

They only need one post,why give importance to the number ?

However, I think this is just useless cause 6 months from now there will be no account market and you will be able to buy a legendary for 0.05.This on an edge already.

You have a very low bar set to qualify for "well argumented" sic.

Politics and Society is a cesspool for serial POV pushers.
Currently a "legendary" member, who I have never seen post anything remotely on the subject of Bitcoin, has eight dubiously sourced and spun POV threads on the first page, sixteen on the first two pages.
 
Take a look thru the threads, the same names time and again pushing the same agendas.
If Theymos is happy to have his forum used as a stage for this continual propaganda, that's up to him.
If people want to talk round and round in ill informed circles on complex subjects they barely understand, that's fine too, but why should they collect activity rating for doing that on a Bitcoin forum when their activity has nothing to do with Bitcoin?

The names given as activity increases, 'Senior' 'Hero' 'Legendary' imply some meritorous aspect to it. How is endlessly creating threads and posting in off core topic threads in any way meritorious? 
What is the point of any activity rating if it doesn't refer to the core reason for this forum, Bitcoin?

Games & Rounds and Off-topic would be fine to exclude from the list. I see many trolls in Politics section as well and they aren't really discussing about anything related to bitcoins which again makes it Off-Topic.

I don't think this would stop spammers as I've seen people just posting without a signature and not even chasing activity points. They just love trolling while others anyways don't get paid for the above mentioned sections.

In 6 months there will have the halving, so maybe the signature campaigns will lower their payout, so that's sure that the price will get lower.




If you think like that, then why not just delete these boards, since they're not Bitcoin-related ? Except Games and rounds, where there is something to say, and even, I would personnaly keep it, the other sections all have something interesting.

Seems to me that section is less spammy because people actually have to read quite a bit of information before making a post and that would point to two things. The spammers are non-English speaking or lazy and just want to type "yes" or "this is very interesting" and be done with it.

If you want to have bitcoin as the main focus and hyper hole it,you will miss the off shoots and creative ideas that are on the fringes.

I don't find the Politics & Off topic sections discussing anything interesting but wouldn't want these sections to be deleted as they must have been introduced so that members can contriubte something useful. Users chasing activity points and misusing these sections would stop to an extent if these sections don't add up any activity points.

Some people does only posts to these sections, or a big part of their posts. Let's take bryan.coleman exemple. Is he considered as spammy ? He post a lot, maybe exclusively, in the Politics & society section. I'm not an expert of this section (I think that I even never posted there), it seems that like Meta, you can't spam like people do in the Games and rounds section.

Also, if we deleted the activity points given there, we would end up with ghost places, with no one in, because they would feel as excluded, and their contributions there would not be recognised.

Off-topic is definitely a section that should get excluded. That section is a brewery for account farmers.

Anything in Off Topic and Politics & Society. Actually, since this is a "Bitcoin" forum, how about anything not relating to the discussion of Bitcoin.

Edit: I wanted to make sure it's understood I mean the altcoin section also. Everything in the master sections "Bitcoin", "Economy", and "Local" should count toward activity. Everything in the master sections "Other" and "Alternate Cryptocurriencies" should not count toward activity. This should also be retroactive, meaning anyone with current activity gained through posting in those two major sections should lose those activity points and their post counts should be reduced accordingly.

When you say activity does that include post count as well? If so, Games and Rounds for sure. I was actually going to suggest we prohibit forum-based giveaways like we did with the alt coin section but this would be better. I would also vote for Off topic. Can't remember the last time I saw a decent discussion taking place in there but even good threads can quickly get swamped and taken over by spammers but this might actually improve discussion since spammers/farmers will hopefully leave it alone.

I don't think that prohibiting forum based giveaways is a good idea. The giveaways are in bitcoins, so this still have his place. Removing the activity points from this section might finally be a good idea. I went there, and what I saw is panicking.

Investor-based games is not one single bit better.
Nowadays, alomst every ponzi tries to attract investors with some kind of giveaways.
In those threads that don't have active giveaways running, you still see 5-10 people posting their addresses, begging for a tip to test the "program".

I don't know about this section since I did not went there for at least 6 months. From what I know, the betting sites organise prediction competitions (that I won yesterday by the way 8)) that we should keep. There's an obvious farming, but what about keeping them without any activity point ? Another problem come to my mind. The betting sites post half of their post in this section. Then, they would become something like Member while they were Sr. Member. I think that this should be taken in account.

Why prohibit giveaways? I don't think the giveaway threads should be considered spammy as users posts their bitcoin addresses to get tipped and some giveaway threads have discussions going on as well like Stunna's threads. That way even Auction and Lending sections have users just posting the template for loans/bids. It makes these sections also similar.

Infact,giveaway's are the most spammy threads that should be taken care of.Have you seen 777COINS giveaway threads? Its the home for Potential Activity hunters.Literally have a look at it.What does give away posts usually have apart from a random digit and a bitcoin address/username ? Not constructive at all.Multiple accounts are made just to participate in the giveaway's with different address.I could talk more but this is just enough.

No-one's prohibiting anything.
Theymos seems to be thinking about improving the integrity of the ranking system. People will still be able to post whatever crap they like (mods allowing), it just won't feed the spam/sig cycle if it doesn't increase their activity and account value.
There is no downside.

Yep. I think this will benefit most of us. This just proves that theymos is a really hands-on guy..

Bump.


Games and Rounds needs to go. There are people farming hundreds of accounts in there with many likely using bots. I've even seen hacked accounts reactivate after years of inactivity just to copy and paste someone else's giveaway address or username from an earlier post years ago.

Off topic should also be considered. It's the go-to board for illiterate newbies who know nothing about bitcoin but have heard you can earn here and shitposting account farmers to spam their way through the ranks. An even better solution though would be to remove signatures from ranks somehow and it'll solve the issue we have with people trying to spam their way to x rank or farm dozens of accounts for free.

Bump. The new Bounties section should also be included with this. It's an entire sub forum consisting of posts like this one after the other:





Just look at siemonangle0007 posts as well. His entire history is almost exclusively saying variants of 'joined the airdrop'. Pointless. Account farmers and sig spammers will love this board.

Fully agree. Nobody are not even required to write such posts.

Yeah, I think most of them are probably just doing it to quickly farm their accounts. I bet half of them probably don't even actually sign up to the bounty. Used to see a similar thing with people saying variants of "I PMd you" when in fact they never even sent a PM and were just trying to boost their post count (telling someone they've PMd them in itself is utterly redundant).

But... I like Games and Rounds! In my Newbie-times, when Bitcoin was worth a lot less, it was a great source of Bitcoins. Nowadays I barely use it though.
I've managed several campaigns for Rollin in Games and Rounds for more than a year, and given away thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins. After half a year, I switched to self-moderated threads only, with much stricter rules. I've seen alt-accounts post 8 different posts in an hour, cheating and spamming.
After I made a self-moderated thread, it was very easy to spot anybody who didn't read the strict rules. I have hundreds of accounts blacklisted, and after their posts got deleted they quickly gave up on my thread.

Instead of closing Games and Rounds, maybe threads could be self-moderated by default. That also requires an active OP.
On top of that, there should be a requirement to have a game element that earns Bitcoins on Bitcointalk, not just link to an external streaming site.

Also, abandoned threads like this one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1602397) should be closed:

While making suggestions to improve the forum: how about a limit on the number of threads anyone can create? I found a shitposter yesterday who opened 6 new threads that day, he just dumps a random question and creates the next one! Very easy to post 30 "ontopic" posts on a day, and a total waste of time to read. I wouldn't want to block any Newbie from opening a thread, but I doubt any serious poster needs more than 1 per day. Maybe make it 2 for Legendary.

I assume the growing signature space with growing ranks was meant to be a perk for active users, and to stop Newbies from having big signatures.

Why don't you ban him?

Disabling post count on games and rounds and off topic is a big help to me when patrolling. I don't have to refresh every 15 minutes to see atleast 100 posts. What more if it includes ANN threads and bounties.

I think newbies should not be allowed to post in ANN threads or bounties, that would prevent abuse.

Something similar happens in Politics and Society.
I don't see how discussing about scientific proof whether a god exists or not should give you activity on a bitcoin forum.

It's not about closing the section, but about removing its contribution towards activity. People could still host and claim giveaways there.

We've discussed that in another thread :)

Instead of ignoring posts in some boards, how about ignoring posts containing few characters/words? People will post thanks, hello, and so on which shouldn't contribute to their activity which these posts are still counted as they are made in relevant sections. It's better to ignore them if possible.

Perhaps accounts that have been ignored a high number of times should be reviewed by mods and banned if the mods are confident that the account in question is merely trying to increase activity?  Maybe display the number of times accounts have been ignored (display ignore count)?

Problem is any method to combat this problem can be gamed, and maybe the market will work itself out.  This is happening to some extent: most decent airdrops are sharedrops, and the good sig campaigns (DeepOnion) reject a lot of people.

I'm talking about it needs to go from post count. The entire board is a spam fest. There's no good reason why it should contribute to post count. The Alt coin bounty board needs to go the same way as well. People are massively abusing it to farm accounts. Entire threads of just 'watching', 'interesting', 'waiting for airdrop', 'joined airdrop' 'received airdrop' type posts etc.  


The sad thing is people used to actually have decent discussions in there. Now it's just been taken over by shitposters because most people who sign up here have little to no knowledge or interest in bitcoin so struggle to talk about it, but they can talk crap about subjects in there all day hence why they just create utter crap threads. Economics is going the same way now as well.  


Ha, nobody is going to waste time doing that. They don't even look after their signature campaigns so they're not going to care about policing their own thread. I wouldn't be against making alt coin devs responsible for moderating their own threads though and if it becomes full of posts that break the rules then their threads should be trashcanned and accounts banned. Spam from crapcoins takes up the vast majority of moderation time and effort and this isn't something staff should be doing for free.


The ignore button used to glow different colours with the amount of people who were ignoring that user but it was removed.