Bitcoin Forum

It is beyond doubt that the quality of posts has massively gone down during the last few years primarily due to the influx of shit posters and the insane amount of spam they produce. It is no secret either that most (if not all) users heavily spamming here are spamming because they are being paid by the signature campaigns they are enrolled in. As I see it, banning individual spammers won't help much since the advertisers these users are posting for seem not to be so much interested in the quality of posts as in the amount of exposure their ads get. So banning one spammy user may actually lead to his slot being taken by an even more spammy individual. Instead of banning individual shit posters, I suggest punishing the managers of signature campaigns these posters are enrolled in. In my opinion, a threat of, say, a monthly ban will make most if not all of the campaign managers more careful and less promiscuous in the selection of new participants for the signature campaigns they happen to manage. Obviously, the unofficial forum rules should be amended with a special section concerning campaign managers and their responsibilities...

I would like to hear your opinion as well as constructive criticism if there is any

I will mention that the Staff is also having this discussion right now. The general consensus is that something needs to be done. The means of doing that is what is being discussed.

Good point where I have nothing to add beside giving a thumbs up to SFR10 for how he/she is managing the BIT.AC campaign.

A lot people that are trying to enroll there are being denied which makes SFR10 not a good guy in their eyes, but this is the best way to run a campaign.

That's how you avoid spam on a massive scale, and encourage people to up their quality to a decent level.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1545652.0
It was already introduced as concept in this thread.
I'm not entirely sure what is the status of this action but one thing is certain,
it is a good idea... One thing only bothers me, unofficial  group (signature managers) holding
power... soulless creature with more influence than it can handle, may end in disaster.
(I know, I'm paranoid) :)

A thread is going to stickied very soon with rules/guidelines for both managers and signature campaigners and punishments for people who run the campaigns very poorly.

Easiest way is to disable all signatures for all users and that will repel 99% of the signature spammers. No incentive = no hollow forced posts containing 100 of characters saying basically nothing. Actually I am kinda curious how the forum would look like if no signatures were allowed. I have stopped reading threads past the head post because I know what is waiting for me underneath. How much traffic would the forum stand to lose if there was no more incentive for posting? 50% or more?

Well, that's the only way to solve the problem for sure and I'm not against it. If these new guidelines don't work then I can't see any other option really. Campaigns that do little to nothing to monitor/curb spam after a warning will be having their signatures barred from the forum by an admin so we're halfway there to that. Hopefully campaigns will just start only accepting quality posters but for those that don't they wont be allowed to advertise here in such a way any longer.


And that's the dilemma here. I'm sure it would be much more than 50% but 50% of people who are only here because of campaigns wont be missed, but even 'great' posters may eventually dwindle and leave as getting some money for being here is still a massive plus and will inevitably be what keeps some of them as active as they are.

It is easy to be a "bad" guy when the campaign you are going to manage has only a very limited number of slots available. As of now, SFR10 has to choose just 20 posters, so he can allow himself to be picky about whom to accept and whom to reject. But what would he do if the number of slots was in the hundreds? Would he be as choosy as he is right now?

Anyways, SFR10 himself said that the BIT.AC signature campaign would be his last campaign that he would manage (due to his tight job schedule)

If signature campaign is completely disallowed I think 90 percent of posts and users will gone. And 70 to 80 percent of forums earnings will be gone too. And less salary to mods. And users with multiple accounts with no earnings would spam some affiliate on their posts or scams. They would become desperate for sure.

I've already mentioned this at least once. Imagine a crime where 3 entities are involved, and only 1 always gets punished for it. That's what has been going on BTCT for a while (albeit even less effectively in 2016). What should be done is, punish everyone involved:
1) Ban the spammers themselves.
2) Ban the managers.
3) Ban the service.

If the service does not care about the spam, then it should not be allowed any kind of back-linking from BTCT period.

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That's the last and most drastic solution to this problem.

No. That project never took off (i.e. has failed) and even some of those managers are inadequate (e.g. yahoo62278).

I think we need more mods and more good mods that deserve better salary. Banning by association is like North Korean Laws. Your banning the managers, but what about those members that follow the rules? They will be ruined too without doing any mistakes. This a conflict of interest on your part because you have own signature campaign firm.

False. There are enough moderators, and the report list is usually empty (at least under the global rank).

There is no salary, there are contributions that you receive depending on how much work you've done. Anyhow, who's going to finance this salary? You?

False. They won't be ruined. Find another campaign and stop complaining about trivial side-effects.

No, there's no conflict of interest. This was created so that we can get away from campaigns filled with spammers.

If there are enough mods why there still many spams?

I have no money. I would if I have. But many times theymos said the forum has no problem about money. Theymos can create another rank and like donator sell it for 1 btc hundreds would buy.

Everyone will be ruin except your group of advertisers.

I think the best thing to do is _ban_ all the signature campaign, it will resolve the problem (I'm sure).

Why not try for 1 month?

There are plenty of moderators, however global moderators and administrators are the ones that can ban your standard signature spammer.

It doesn't. This does not mean that it has money to keep upping salaries.

Not true. There are likely some campaigns that are acceptable. Managers would get punished only if they ignored the warnings by the staff members. Similarly, you can apply this ruling to ACE as well (if you view it as a campaign).

Banning signature campaigns would have big consequences to the forum and also to the bitcoin adoption as well. Signature campaign have created a micro economy for new bitcoin users who don't money to buy bitcoins. Signature campaigns is their only means to acquire bitcoins.

I predict only nerds and geeks would remains and noobs would come occasionally if bitcoin talk disable signature campaigns. Bitcointalk would be replace as number one bitcoin forum in 1-2 years. Theymos would lose his monopoly. This would give a chance for bitcoin classic to win.

I suggest a mandatory tax to every signature campaigns. I suggest for every btc spent on signature campaigns 10% would be given to the mods.
 

 

Even if all they care for is only exposure, this still doesn't mean that they are deliberately encouraging spammers. I think that any service would prefer good posters to spammy ones. There may be just not enough good posters currently looking for participation or the payment is too low that only compulsive spammers get attracted by such a campaign. But in any case, it is a campaign manager who first agrees to manage a signature campaign for the service and then indiscriminately accepts participants into it...

Therefore, the campaign managers are the ones who should be dealt with and where it will be most effective

No, this does not hold true. There are some services, which have been contacted several times by staff members in regards to the problematic spam generated by their participants. Those services have completely ignored these messages. In addition to that, there are some that use bots to manage their campaigns which is horrible.

Disagree. It's going to cause a even more complex environment with likely the same amount of spam.

This had to be expected. How can they be held responsible for some users posting shit? Did they enroll these users themselves? No, they didn't. It is a campaign manager who accepted such posters, and he is in most cases not affiliated with the service. He typically has free choice in selecting users for the signature campaign he is going to manage, though...

Apparently, you are hitting the wrong target here (and missing the right one)


Why so? If a few indolent managers get banned eventually, the wannabe ones will be more careful and particular in both picking up the job of a signature campaign manager and accepting new participants into the campaign

Do you even properly read other input before thinking about your own method again?


Mitigation 1: Campaigns run by bots. Mitigation 2: Sign up for campaigns outside of forum. While they keep figuring out ways to mitigate this, we've lost a lot of time and effectively accomplished only minor results.

"What do you think about personal responsibility of signature campaign managers in regard to the quality of their members posts?"

They must carry some responsibility, but surely the mods/admin are more responsible for stopping organised spam posting. I thought spamming was an offence in the "rules", and sig spammers were going to be looked upon harshly-ish. No sign of any of that happening.

I like that Lauda is trying to think of the bigger picture, but i'm a bit worried by hilarious saying "punishments for people who run the campaigns very poorly." - is just poorly ok?

"It is beyond doubt that the quality of posts has massively gone down during the last few years primarily due to the influx of shit posters..."

And they are mainly "mass farmed" accounts. Without addressing this issue, spam cannot be tackled effectively.
Of the 400 accounts i have identified, probably 90% can be assigned to 1 farmer.

"banning individual spammers won't help much..."
Agreed. It doesn't matter if say, zalucia (265) is banned, Zaducis (132)*** is still here spamming, if he is banned, Zacudis (168) will carry on, or Zicadis (24), Zocadas (25), Zulucia (28), Zosuda  (22), Zadicar  (860), or Zudalar (22), or 391 other accounts. (my farmed list of 400 is not complete - there are hundreds more) All the same person.... But taking action against blocks of "mass farmed" accounts would make a difference.

I would like to see a clear statement on this subject from global mod/admin. But... if no one else thinks so?
Of course macwika (20) will disagree, as will madwica (612), mandica (295), mastica (39), molsewid  (22), Malsetid  (22), Mastsetad  (1344), michkima (28), miakama (24), misakama (23), mistanama (23),  mitkala (20) and miayama (125).
They outvote me 12 to 1. But they are just 1 person.

Signature campaigns are not started by bots. There is always some user who fires up a signature campaign thread. That user could be deemed as a campaign manager and should be dealt with appropriately...

As far as I know bots only count posts


Could you please reference a campaign which had a sign-up process outside of the forum? Anyway, in this case the service is out of reach while spamming users should be handled on a person-by-person basis

I don't think that *poorly* should be acceptable at all. They are taking the advertising on BTCT via signatures for granted, which should not be happening. They need to prove that they are competent and willing to strictly manager their participants IMO.

The list is hefty as it is, but still has to be completely handled.

So exactly what happens when the campaign manager is banned? Nothing. Bot keep counting for the existing members, they keep participating. The campaign manager goes off to create another account, or buys another one and contacts the service discretely to become their *new* manager. We'd be playing whack-a-mole with manager alts.

In this case you have only one entity left out of the three you started with, i.e. spammy and non-spammy users. And the spammy ones should be dealt with as with any spamming users out there, with or without a signature...

As you can see, it still boils down to either taking out the manager, and if this doesn't work out banning the spamming users

Bitmixer.io's signature campaign is the perfect case study of this. Their thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=425135.0 was started by the service themselves. It is wholly managed by them, and their bot.

They accept, check posts, and pay out, via a bot on their website. The BITMIXER.IO user has not been online since September, and he last posted in July. He has been PM'ed warnings multiple times by the mods but he has never responded. They are doing absolutely nothing to curb spam from their sig campaign participants. Even punishing the BITMIXER.IO account wouldn't do anything because that account is not really used and everything is done entirely through a bot.

The only thing that could really be done with bitmixer is to completely shut down their campaign by trashing the thread, blocking the bot, and forcibly removing their signature from all participants.

I don't think that shutting down the whole campaign makes sense since that would in effect be equal to cancelling signatures altogether in the most indiscriminate way. It is obvious as well that not (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=533006;sa=showPosts) all users enrolled in this campaign are evil spammers, but this doesn't in the least mean that there are no spammers without any signature, either. It might well be the case that this service attracts the greatest number of shit posters across the forum, but this alone doesn't make it anywhere near guilty for them posting outright spam. Since you can always find a number of die-hard spammers who wear no signature at all. On the other hand, nothing prevents all these Bitmixer.io spammers from starting posting sense (or at least refrain from posting garbage) if they really wanted to. As you can see, their failure to comply with the quality standards of the forum is not Bitmixer.io's fault...

Given that, these spammers should get banned just like any other spammers here

Ever hear of the saying "A few bad apples ruin the bunch"? That is exactly what is happening here. If those users who are not shit posters actually post with decent quality, they should have absolutely no problem finding another signature campaign willing to both pay them more and accept them into the campaign.

It is entirely bitmixer.io's fault for paying the shit posters and not enforcing their own anti-spam rule. It is entirely their fault for enabling those shit posters/account farmers to continue to post and be paid for it. They are encouraging shit posting by continuing to pay for it; and that is entirely their fault.

While yes there are still spammers without sigs, most spammers that I have seen do wear sigs and they shit post because they have an incentive to shit post; they are still paid for those posts. Furthermore, it is known that many campaigns are lax about who they accept, so newer members without sigs still shit post so that they can get to the right activity requirement to join one of those campaigns. Again, they are all motivated by being paid for their shit posts.

If it is known that the forum staff will harshly crack down on signature campaigns who allow their participants to shit post and do not properly check new members, then a lot of spam will be cleaned. Campaigns that enabled shit posters will be shut down, thus the shit posters will either have no incentive to post anymore or they will have an incentive to post constructively in order to join a campaign with higher standards. Furthermore, newer members will then have an incentive to post constructively in order to join the sig campaigns. The bar will be set higher, and thus post quality will increase.

Many are, but many still continue to shit post after their bans or they come back with alts to complain about their bans. However there is enough evidence to suggest that many of those spammers spam because they are being paid by poorly managed campaigns. Thus instead of treating the symptoms of the problem (i.e. the spammers), we need to treat the source (i.e. the campaigns themselves and the people who run them).

About punishing the services as well as the campaign managers: this is because the campaign managers are hired by the service. Most services advertising here have a forum account. They hired a campaign manager to handle their sig campaign. If a campaign for a service is to be found to be spamming, both the service and the campaign manager should be notified. It is up to the service to fire their manager and hire someone else who can do the job better. If they do not, then they are not doing anything to help even when warned. Thus, the service should also be banned from using sig campaigns for advertising.

I do not think punishing the managers is going to do much, but why not give it a shot. Obviously, the best solution is to ban campaigns and end the broken english spam...

punishments for people who run the campaigns very poorly is needed

or this forum will be full of rubbish.

Countermeasure 1: reroute links in their signatures somewhere else? That will for sure stop playing whack-a-manager with alts.

Most campaigns don't want users with red trust. A red trust label "spammer" from a Moderator could make the account worthless to farmers. It may also be possible to disable the signature for any account that has red trust on a certain DT level.

Yesterday I saw a good post from someone with a Yobit-signature. I checked his post history, and it really felt like such a waste to see him in that campaign. The image of the signature really makes his posts look bad, while they're not.

Clearly, they earn from it. And as long as there are no repercussions for them, they keep earning.
Devil's advocate: why do more work to earn less?

Go for it :) Usually I read topics filled with complaints about spam, I might have missed some topics, but this is the first time I read about plans to take action against it.

There are always going to be ways to counter something. However, if you do this then you should be permanently blacklisted. It would also get detected quite quickly IMO.

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Anyhow, what I'm proposing is an "all-out attack" of the problem:
1) Stricter evaluation and bans.
2) Ban users.
3) Ban managers.
4) Ban services.
5) Negative ratings for all 3 groups.

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If you aren't willing to work towards a better environment for everyone, and you are actually making it worse, then why should anyone tolerate you?

As Fedor Dostoevsky said, better acquit ten guilty men than punish one innocent. I understand that forum administration has the right to do what they want, but would this be quite in line with their own Constitution and ten Commandments?

Or are laws carved in stone rewritten in blood?


I have to disagree, for the sake of justice. Bitmixer.io is not part of BTCT, so they cannot possibly be found guilty or faulty by the forum laws. But if we extended the forum rules on them, even in that case they cannot be convicted and sentenced. Why should they try to enforce their own anti-spam rule if this is exactly what mods should do? I don't like shit posters maybe even more than you, but you are evidently trying to first humanize and then villainize the service. Right now I can't come up with a decent solution in respect to how resolve such and similar issues, but outright banning services would be highly counterproductive...

Unless they do or offer something really nasty, of course


That's what I suggest myself. But banning services just doesn't cut it. Punishing whole campaigns themselves would essentially mean that you openly admit your failure to resolve the issue efficiently and effectively

Banning users should indeed be the top priority, and not the managers.

I am quite active here and stumble over all the broken English shitposters, account farmers (which mostly are not enrolled in a campaign) that are posting 3 or 4 times in a row in the same thread with their alts in just a matter of 10 minutes or so, and still I keep seeing them every day shitposting again.

It's too obvious that these people are active, and I'm not the only one that is able to spot them. But the fact that I see them everyday doing the same, just shows that the ban hammer isn't being used enough.

I pointed out a few accounts to you Lauda, but the person operating these accounts is still shitposting with his over-obvious way of writing and sentence line up.

End - broken - English spam - this makes me smile but I encounter several of this posts. All I cant tolerate is a newbie,posting an off-topic thread promoting products with their links. Usually health consumables,pills, and drinks.They should be eliminated.

Banning users only is not efficient. Banning an account or ten of someone who owns a e.g. a hundred secret other alts is not going to do much especially if the service and manager keeps letting their accounts in (shitposter quality). Obviously we won't ban managers on sight, you will be informed in the coming guidelines.

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Regarding the accounts: I've already reported both IIRC. If they are not banned, then you can blame either:
1) Global moderators.
2) Forum admins.
All other staff members are unable to ban (excluding nuking newbies).

Those already get nuked on sight/report. This argument is invalid.

I agree that the amount of spam and nonsensical useless posts has grown,the problem has to be curbed
I have several proposals:
1.punishment system: enable mods to check(random check several participants,for example) campaign members,"award" negative trust to users AND campaign managers who are blatantly ignoring  warnings
2.encourage mods to run the said checks,require every signature campaign make a deposit before their campaign start(could be a set sum or a percantage of the monthly expenditures,easily counted via sheets)
the deposit is refundable (50-100%) if no rules were broken during the campaigns' run ,if there are consistent transgressions-keep the deposit and redistribute it among moderators
3.introduce global "post quality" rating,along with "trust"
4.signature campaign must become a privelege and a sign of a quality poster,not like today ,where people are creating own "black lists" to put every commercial signature bearer on to it,regardless of how good their posts are
for that to happen campaign managers should run more stringent screening process and campaigns must be limited to,lets say,twice less people and 2-3 times less posts weekly/monthly as it is now
this should result in higher per-post price,less total spam and higher quality posts

Assigning personal responsibility to campaign managers in regard to what users enrolled in their campaigns post should work better. Kicking a spammy user from a signature campaign would most certainly make him stop posting altogether without banning him directly. Die-hard spammers who are spamming regardless of whether they are wearing a signature or not should be the mods' concern, of course. I'm curious if you understand that your own posts are considered as spammy simply because you post under the signature campaign which is claimed to encourage shit posting?

Personally, I'm free from such prejudices, but there are different opinions

I understand your point. I am part of the Bitmixer campaign for the simple reason that I like the service that they offer since I use it very frequently, and I like the fact that it is an automated campaign with barely any issues.

Do I get bothered by other spammers from Bitmixer? Yes, of course, but these people should either get a heavy warning to up their quality to a level where people can understand what they are saying, and that their posts are at least related to the OP or the post that they quote, or they should simply have their signatures removed by an administrator or a global moderator (if it's at least within his power) including with a temp ban or a full ban depending on the intensity of the shitposts.

It's actually very simple, administrators have the power to hand out bans to spammers, let them do it.

Now we have a service which does something good to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem directly as well as indirectly by allowing a lot of users to earn bitcoins and thus letting them get involved with the Bitcoin community. We have users who are actively advertising this service in a constructive way. And then someone wants to ban it simply because some (well, a lot of) users promoting this service are posting shit...

Would that do any good to Bitcoin?


I would venture a guess and say that banning these users would be a shameless abuse of the ban-hammer. Yes, they are mostly posting total shit, but this is evidently not enough to start giving out bans

No, it is not. Read the list of forum rules properly. People have been getting banned for years because of this.

We all agree that something has to be done about this whole spam thing. But the thing people don't seem to agree on is what the solution to this whole problem will be. Whether spammers get banned or not, there are always people who agree to this with much satisfaction, and another group of people who think it's a way too drastic solution. Either way, all these threads about spammers have not lead to anything yet.

Unlike many others, I've actually read the forum rules. As they themselves say they are just guidelines, and the ultimate decision in respect to banning someone is still on the mod. Anyways, here's an example from another thread:


Could this post be considered as a shit post? I guess this is exactly what a shit post might look like. But I don't think that a sane mod would ban this poster. How come? Because judging what makes a shit post is totally subjective, and if the mod decided to ban users for making such useless posts, he would inadvertently end up heavily abusing his powers. Let's face the facts and cut the crap, had the rules been meticulously followed, most users would have soon been banned for just being off-topic here and there...

Because of the rule #2 (no off-topic posts)

What does that have to do with anything?

Think of it this way. The participants in the sig campaign are like employees of the company who are hired in and work in a "foreign country" (bitcointalk). According to the doctrine of Respondeat superior (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior), the employer (bitmixer.io) is responsible for any illegal actions of the employee as long as the actions were done within the scope of the employer-employee relationship. In this case, that relationship is that the employer wants the employee to post on Bitcointalk. The "laws" of Bitcointalk state that you are not allowed to shitpost, and that "law" falls under the scope of the employer-employee relationship for sig campaigns. Thus the service is responsible for their sig campaign participants and any "illegal" actions that the participants engage in while posting on this forum (i.e. shit posting).

If the service has been warned multiple times that their participants are shit posting but do nothing about it, then what are we supposed to do? If we leave them alone, more shit posters will continue to join. If we continue to ban the shit posters, more shit posters will still join. The only way to stop that endless cycle is to prevent shit posters from joining. The only way to do that is to outright ban their signature campaign, not necessarily ban them from the forum, but ban them from creating a sig campaign so that they are no longer paying people to shit post.


And what do you suggest is solving the problem "efficiently and effectively"? Banning a signature campaign outright solves the problem very efficiently and probably very effectively. It completely shuts down the incentives that those shit posters have to continue to post. It incentivises other campaigns to step up their game so that they themselves won't be banned too.

We are assigning personal responsibility to both the campaign managers and the service that they are hired by. The service is still responsible for the participants and for hiring a competent campaign manager. If both of them are warned about shit posters and nothing happens, then both should be punished as they are fail to properly manage their campaign.

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Keep in mind that banning the campaign is a last resort. That will only happen if the campaign manager and the service continuously ignores our warnings to clean up their campaign.

We are not employees and the money staff get paid is not a salary but just a thanks for helping out, but with the amount of spam that is caused by sig spammers it is unmanageable and you would probably need ten full time and fully paid mods just to deal with it but we shouldn't have to be dealing with it if businesses would run their campaigns properly. The problem here is entirely down to greedy/lazy businesses who want to get the cheapest advertising possible with little to no effort on their part.


I've suggested we try an outright ban if not on this forum then with the launch of the new one. Probably wouldn't help much if people know it's only temporary but it would be an interesting experiment to see how much traffic dropped off.


Of course they're encouraging spammers by their ineptitude and inadequacy to properly run their campaign. They pay people to post shit. People wouldn't be posting streams of crap if they weren't going to get paid for it. If campaign operators did their job efficiently there would be no issue in the first place but what happens when there is no manager? What do we do then? Let's take bitmixer for example. As others have said they will pay anyone for any post as long as it's over 75 characters regardless of content. They would literally pay a user for posting I don't know what to write but as long as it's a minimum of 75 characters I'll get paid or aaaaaaasssssssddddddfffffffgggggghhhhhjjjjjkkkklllllppppoooiiiiuuuuyyyytttrreew wqqqaaassddffghhhjjjkkkll;;ppoiuyttrewqqasdgf in every thread if staff didn't intervene. This cannot be acceptable and this shouldn't be left up to staff to clean up. If you pay people for whatever crap they post with nobody checking it then it is going to be abused and you are paying for it to happen so they're liable and this needs to stop. It's rare that you see anyone on bitmixer write more than a sentence or two because why would they? And most campaigns don't really care about the content because one post is one advert of theirs being shown regardless if it's one word or a ten paragraphs.


Do you have an army of alts on bitmixer or something? How is it not bitmixers fault? Of course it is. They are paying people to do this. So what do we do? Just let bitmixer continue to pay people to shit all over the forum and we as staff are meant to waste our time day after day running around after them cleaning up their mess? Don't be silly. If you have a leaky toilet pipe squirting shit all over in the every direction do you just run around like a madman trying to put a bucket under every hole that appears to catch the waste and then say problem solved? No. You fix the source of the problem. Shit campaigns are the problem. Bitmixer do nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. And because of that 95% of their users post utter rubbish. It doesn't matter if they have a handful of posters who make good posts. That's irrelevant. They can find other campaigns. Staff are not here to babysit bitmixer and every other campaign who do nothing but pay people to post spam. We shouldn't have to clean up their mess because it shouldn't be happening in the first place. We ban dozens of spammers a day but it doesn't do anything when the campaigns do nothing but keep encouraging it by paying users for whatever crap they can be bothered to do and this is the solution. If they can't run a campaign properly then you can't advertise here in such a way any longer and if you want to continue advertising here in such a way then get your shit together and stop paying people to crap everywhere.

Obviously, I was referring to forum rules and guidelines, or "laws" as you yourself call them. Did you really not get it?


Okay, but why we don't see users banned in massive amounts for shitposting who don't wear any signature at all? For example, a good part of new users are posting complete junk, but I don't see any of them banned for just that. As I see it, the mods are shrinking from banning users (and that's good in fact) and just trying to shift responsibility to a service which is not in any way affiliated with Bitcointalk. But why would the service care if the Bitcointalk moderators themselves are not following their own "laws" in respect to shit posters. This seems to be the primary reason why services such as Bitmixer are made into scapegoats...

Could I call that a sort of guilt sublimation?


But if the service is legit as it seems to be, allegedly does a lot of good to Bitcoin as well as attracts a lot of new users into it, would banning it do more harm than good in the long run even if the majority of their posters are posting pure crap?

In this way, punishing the service itself looks counterproductive, but I seem to repeat myself

That's like the primary reason for which the campaigns are not completely banned. They let newbies earn a little, and provide bonuses to people that truly contribute. That said, whether a service is useful or not is irrelevant. Rules are rules and should be applied to all as equally as possible. That said, Bitmixer is a bad centralized service that will get replaced by Joinmarket anyway. They should be the first one to be completely blacklisted.

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Read the post from hilarious. Also: This spam causes a lot more damage than good. Quality members are either completely ignoring certain sections or jumping the ship.

Oh really? You have no idea how many users are constantly being banned. But users wearing sigs are more likely to be banned and are more noticed as more people tend to report them. Those not wearing sigs tend to get a little leeway because they are not reported as much. However the staff still bans them as we see them.

Really-really. Just because it makes no particular sense banning them (I mean novice users). They will just register one more time and start posting crap all over again (likely even more aggressively), and we are essentially back to square one. But if you don't ban them, there is still a slight chance that they will try to join a decent signature campaign and start posting sense...

Or will have to start posting sense before they might have a chance to join such a campaign

Tl;dr: OP started this thread to suggest fighting spam by punishing campaign managers. Now, they are defending the banning of users/services and disagree with any other methods.

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What's the secret agenda here?

First of all, the bans usually aren't permanent, especially the first time. The ban is a warning for the user to post better. Not banning the users and warning them that their post quality is bad is completely counterproductive. Those users who are shit posting and aren't banned are not likely to increase their post quality of joining a sig campaign because the only ones they can join are ones who don't care about post quality (like bitmixer). Do some cost-benefit analysis. The cost of not banning users greatly outweighs any potential benefits. You can't just hope that people are going to change their behavior, that isn't how the world works.

Let's not be hypocrites. At the end of the PrimeDice signature campaign we all had been posting crap and then posting about how many posts we made during the month. I made over 1,000 posts, you claimed making even more than that (which might well be the case). In fact, after the PrimeDice signature campaign had ended, I joined Bitmixer's one and was soon kicked out for alleged spamming, lol (to be honest, I left myself having been underpaid after they had retroactively changed the rules). So if this campaign gets banned after all, I will be quite happy personally...

But this is not the way to go


Haven't seen your post before submitting mine, but as you can see, the road is open to everyone, and people do change the ways they behave (and some even become global moderators at that)


I'm against banning services as being counterproductive and overall harmful, especially the ones that are said to contribute to Bitcoin in a meaningful way. I'm not so much against banning individual users as I don't see much sense in it. Just in case, you would have to ban half the forum should it get moderated for real. In this way, punishing lazy campaign managers seems to be the only viable alternative, at least currently. There is no hidden agenda really...

Are you pretty? ;)

This thread has become counterproductive. Almost no useful suggestions have been provided nor have you sucessfully argued against the mentioned methods. Time to start blacklisting services.

That doesn't mean that they weren't banned at some point. As I said earlier, most bans are temp bans which serve as warnings for that user to increase their post quality or risk longer bans and eventually permanent bans.

As far as I can tell, Lauda actually received temp bans during their earlier days before being promoted to staff. So yes, the road is open to everyone, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ban people at all.

As pointed out earlier, I'm not against banning individual users (permanently or temporary). In fact, there are a few cases where the lifetime ban is a must. Usually, I refrain from reporting on anyone unless their posts affect myself personally, for example, if they start copying my own (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1542787.0) posts. Such acts entail instant permanent (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=410591;sa=showPosts) ban, and that I can hardly question. On the other hand, would it be proper to ban users who are posting along these lines:


I have already quoted this post before but no one criticizing my stance here wanted to reveal their attitude over this

This is getting way off topic.

That whole thread should be trashed. Actually, IMO the entire Gambling Discussion section is just a place for spammers and should be trashed.

Being trashed is one thing and being banned is quite another. So what is your stance on this? Would you ban (temporary or whatever) users for posting such comments or refrain from doing that? You see, I'm quite explicit about my attitude here and don't beat about the bush. As I said it as well, if mods start banning users (with or without a signature) for shit posting (and that post is an instance of just that), they will end up heavily abusing their power. And would have to ban half of the forum users in the interim at that...

That's why I'm rather skeptic about individual bans just for shit posting (meaningless comments adding nothing to a discussion)

Again, Off topic. I will stop answering after this until we get back on topic.

I would ban him and everyone else who constantly shit posts. They would get the usual treatment, 7, 14, 30, perma. It is not an abuse of power, it is doing their jobs. A mod's job is to clean up and prevent spam. That means that most of those shit posts would be deleted or trashed, and the users tempbanned as a warning. If they continue to shitpost, then eventually they will be permabanned.

I got your point after reading this much.Well,in my humble opinion,it all starts and ends with signature campaign managers.They're the ones to pay shit posters.I'm not taking names here but it should come off as an initiative from every campaign manager (Lutpin/SFR10 actively does it) to recruit a few quality posters than an army of spam.Imagine,if every campaign manager only hired above average or say best posters who actively intend to contribute to the forum,there would be no place for shit-posters in the campaign.The spam would reduce drastically.

The campaign managers are paid to run the campaign right? So they should do a better job in choosing who to hire in their campaign. If they cannot do it then they should risk getting their account a negative rating just like an escrower's account.

It is not that simple. There were, and most likely still are, huge signature campaigns that recruit hundreds of users while there may be not so many good posters, thus the campaign managers which are chosen to run these campaigns might not have any other option left but to accept almost anyone who knows how to sign up for a campaign and not make a dozen mistakes therewith...

On the other hand, the services may be more interested in the sheer exposure their ads get than in the quality of posts the enrollees make

Forum does have a lot of good quality posters.Just that campaign managers are too quick recruiting the shitty ones.I'm not saying add only members who are as good as DannyHamilton but at least a two sentenced descent post which actually adds something to the topic and not repeats the same posted in 100 comments above is expected.

Wouldn't they get the actual exposure if the person wearing the signature seems knowledgeable and fluent?

But some services evidently seem to be quite happy with that. Who is that DannyHamilton, by the way?


A good poster can't make more than, say, 15 posts daily on a regular basis, and daily might really be a hefty overstretch. Sometimes you don't feel like posting at all. Shit posters simply don't have such issues altogether, and the service easily gets the required volume of exposure without making fuss over what the members are actually posting and whether what they post does in fact add anything to a discussion. Sheer size may matter after all...

Note that this doesn't say anything about the legitimacy and utility (or lack thereof) of the service itself

I think he's talking about me.

I'm just a computer programmer from Illinois (USA) with an interest in the bitcoin protocol. I do what I can to help others learn and understand.

Spamming should not be condoned - it should be as simple as that. If any person could kindly tell me why spammers help the bitcointalk ecosystem (apart from pointless traffic for ad revenue) in any way at all, then I will certainly change my ways and turn into a hardcore one-line spammer myself. After all, I can easily pump out hundreds of useless posts to grind out those cents!

---

I personally do not think that spamming would ever be useful. I also do not condone posting in threads where there are scores of pages (exceptions are there, but in general) since they're just filled to the brim with regurgitated content and vague/general agreements and replies. You might see two users replying to one another, but they know what they're doing (if they aren't alts of each other that is) - they're feeding off each other, helping the other spam hoping to be able to reply to them to get those precious cents in return.

---

On the topic of whether
is a shit post or not, I think it's important to note the fact that the post is literally lengthened only to increase the character count. Do you see how much the user is repeating themselves, and just trying to add on more words? "Same case on others, I think it's not only me. This is just my point of view though." etc. etc.


Here's a couple more posts that I personally find to be spam:





Source: Is it just me or has the quality of this forum dropped immensely (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1637479.msg16619014#msg16619014) - me

---

Do you really think that agreement posts are useful? Sure. It's advertisement for whatever service they're getting money from, but it shouldn't matter what they're advertising - this is a forum, and at the end of it, you need to consider their post quality.

If I spam on random forums with crap and advertise bitcoin.org in my signature, is that acceptable? I hope not.

 ^^^ "Spamming should not be condoned - it should be as simple as that."

Malsetid is farmed. (others unchecked)

November 24, 2015, 09:09:15 AM - November 24, 2015, 10:12:52 AM
Time scale 1 hour. 12 farmed accounts, 2400 spam posts.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663111  Zosuda  (22)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663116                           molsewid  (22)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663122                                                    Bamselk  (21)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663129                                                                              fasdorcas  (22)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663136  Zadicar  (860)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663142                           Malsetid  (22)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663146                                                    Bamsed  (67) ***
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663156                                                                             Fasdurcas  (23)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663174  Zudalar (22)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663185                           Mastsetad  (1344)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663190                                                    Blamsud  (21)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=663195                                                                            Farstdury (23)  

Farmed accounts are only ever going to spam. (or scam) Whatever standard of post they need to achieve to carry on, they will achieve. (lets face it, the bar is unlikely to be set very high) Their posts will still be spam, just longer.

Admins could find these farmed accounts far easier than me, they have the tools available. Still, I can find them easily enough, although the 400 farmed accounts i have found were generally created a year ago. I am a year behind.

If this problem was dealt with, then moderators could be serious about stopping spam.
As you see above, 12 farmed accounts created in 1 hour, 11 months ago. Malsetid, 22 posts when i listed this account, now has 142 posts!
Mastsetad  (1344) now 2129, molsewid  (22) now 240 that is 1100 posts in 4-6 weeks from 3 of 400 accounts on my ignored by mods/admin farmer list.

The list is good. No serious objection from any account listed!

I do believe that it is mostly a campaign manager's responsibility to look over the post quality of their campaign's participants. 

I was a campaign manager myself for two weeks, in which (I think) I looked over post quality relatively well, I hope.

Guess who just randomly decided to respond to my pm? Bitmixer. What a coincidence! I'm sure someone with about ten accounts on their campaign mailed them in a panic or something.

Someone has either been closely watching this thread, or has been replying here under a certain agenda. What a surprise. If they don't make drastic changes soon, they should still be removed due to the damage that was already caused.

Nice to meet you!


But this is evidently not what you are famous for here. I have a bad memory for names, so your name didn't tell me anything, I'm sorry. Until I saw your signature. I had bookmarked your Ignore thread long ago, and when I see somebody starting to proclaim themselves as being among the top posters across the forum, I consult with it and more often than not find them in your Ignore list. Not that I would particularly care, but it still gives me some comfort and peace of mind, lol


I hope you came to an agreement with them in regard to stricter moderation of Bitmixer's signature campaign members?

I've told them what needs to be done and the consequences of not doing anything about it so it's just up to them now.

If there are not enough quality posters, the campaign should not hire that many people. Simple as that. If they want more posters, campaigns could compete with other campaigns on the price they offer.

Obviously. So I'm in favour of banning campaigns if warning them doesn't help.

I've seen your posts :) And would like to give you a "thumbs up" on your posts if I could. Instead of just Activity, based on just the number of post spread over the years, it would be really nice to have a +1 or -1 option to like/dislike posts as a quality-indicator for the user. But I think the army of Alts will quickly mess that up too.

It's a day job to them. I've done the math, it can produce a very nice income in a lot of countries. In my experience it's mainly Asians (Indonesia/Philippines), which explains the bad English. And the more people discover this, the worse it gets. Until the market/forum is saturated with spam and the price per post goes down. Or until the moment the ban hammer hits them hard.

It seems it has become more or less accepted to post this way. And because people post like this, others see it's accepted and do the same.

So just the idea of bans is already paying off!
Any idea what the timeline on the stricter rules for spammers is?

I'm sorry for the late answer, just returned from vacations.
We are definitely going to clean up our signature campaign very soon. May be hilariousandco help us in this work.

I think the problem should be resolved at the level of forum's admins, not sig campaign managers. They could ban users who spam on the forum.
Because our banned spammer may register on other sig campaign and continue fill forum with spam, then try another campaign, etc. But if he was banned on the forum, he can't.

You're looking at this from a limited perspective though (local). If you globally observe a environment where everyone is working together we have:
1) Services that don't hire bad managers/properly manage their own campaigns -> Spammers can't get in.
2) Managers that properly hire their campaign/hold to a high standard -> Spammers can't get in.
3) Staff that bans/tags the ones (users, managers, campaigns) that don't participate.

---

Tl;dr: With everything working together it becomes much more efficient.

There is already tough competition for slots in any decent signature campaign on the forum. If you clean up yours, the shit posters won't be able to join anywhere else here, at least, in such amounts. You are trying to lay your own fault (and that of other negligent campaign managers) at the moderators' door. As I have already said it, banning users exclusively for shit posting would be an exercise in both futility and hilarity since they would just register again and then "continue fill forum with spam". In any case, kicking a few campaign managers to do what they should seems to be the most efficient way to get rid of spam...

Barring total and indiscriminate signature removal, of course

Well, I slept on this (even twice), and I have a new suggestion regarding spam issues and how to efficiently resolve them. What I come up with essentially boils down to disabling signatures for all new users (disabling them retrospectively for all users doesn't feel quite right), and if a user wants to join a signature campaign or just wear some signature, he would ask a mod to enable it for him. The mod would then look at the applicant's post history and decide for himself whether this particular user is worth posting with a signature or not...

In this way, even new users would be prompted to post sense if they aim to enroll in a signature campaign later

Doesn't this add a ton of extra workload for mods, given that they would have to deal with report posts along with these? It's practically asking them to do a campaign manager's job.

Let's be unbiased here. Reading shit posts and giving out temporary bans only to read pretty much the same crap all over again after the ban is lifted wouldn't be a lot easier. In fact, these two seemingly separate jobs can be done simultaneously, i.e. if the user posts sense he could be allowed to add a signature without asking for a permission. On the other hand, the right to assess the quality of users posts as well as allow them to add signatures if they qualify could be granted to, for example, a default trust user group...

Indeed, this doesn't in the least exempt the campaign managers from doing their job

@Suggestion above: This is an interesting and unusual idea (I have not seen it before). The initial workload would indeed be high, and there would be a backlog. However, this would go down with time and there certainly are enough moderators to do this. The problematic that I do see:
1) How exactly do we decide? (e.g. approval by 1 or multiple mods per user)
2) Subjective decision making (e.g. some other mods are likely going to be softer than me. How do we reach consensus?)
3) "My signature is disabled but user X with bad or equal post quality has a signature?!?" threads.

---

These are the first few things that come to mind.

All these three points can be equally asked about the process of how users get banned right now. So, when banning a user:

1) How exactly do we decide? (e.g. approval by 1 or multiple mods per user)
2) Subjective decision making (e.g. some other mods are likely going to be softer than me. How do we reach consensus?)
3) Threads starting with "I was banned for shit posting while the user X with worse or equal post quality wasn't"

I guess you can essentially apply the same rules for allowing (or not allowing) signatures as for banning users. I think the gory details as well as differences in and of the process should not be very significant. Obviously, the forum authorities can easily work out the specific rules regarding this case without my or anyone else's help...

Ultimately, if nothing helps you can still apply rule #23 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0)

The process of banning on this forum is properly defined (e.g. who can, can't). Your idea isn't defined, ergo the argument is invalid. You should work on defining a proposal, not avoiding criticism with red herring.

Well, I'm happy you didn't say ban all the signature campaigns.

What about people who don't wear a paid signature ? Wouldn't it be biased for them ? They don't intend to post on the forum actively but if they have a service here,they might just advertize the same.

What if the mods get 500 requests on daily basis to be reviewed ? Puts a lot of work load mate.Not like they are even paid that much to do it.

New Business : Buy A signature ready farmed account,excellent post quality,100% mods approval chances.

I never said anything to that tune. You are obviously confusing me with someone else, since I made it perfectly clear right from the start that I'm against banning services (which pretty fast comes down to banning signature campaigns), irrespective of whether the members of their signature campaigns are spamming or not


All new users will be in the same conditions. If you spam, you can't wear a signature, as simple as it gets. Whether it is paid or not is irrelevant


As pointed out earlier, mods could allow signatures without being directly asked for that, as part of their usual post checking routine. If they don't do that and just check reports, then who is to blame for the rampant expansion of spam across the forum after all?


I suspect that the price of such accounts will be prohibitively expensive for the total majority of spammers. Besides, I don't think that anyone is actually buying accounts with the singular purpose of spamming even now. For the simple reason that the risk of getting a perma ban doesn't make it a profitable investment overall...

But you are entitled to disagree, of course

So indirectly it comes down to mods who are suppose to make sure they only allow signatures to users they think are posting constructively ? I disagree,better leave to the campaign managers since managers are only paid to make sure they weed out spammers from the quality posters.For the answer,not mods but the (undeserving) campaign managers are to be blamed for the copious amount of spam.

With 0% possibility of getting approved by the mods.

Yes, since it was unequivocally stated by some staff member here that the users who are shit posting should be banned, at first temporarily, then permanently. Given that the absolute majority of such posters are posting for money (i.e. they are paid for their signatures) and thus wouldn't post at all if not allowed to wear a signature, enabling signatures only for constructive posters will efficiently solve the issue of spamming on the forum. Whether the mods would be too strict on allowing signatures is another question...

If this is what you are getting at, of course


I didn't quite understand what you meant to say. Buying an unapproved account makes no sense at all if you are going to wear a signature

The first step towards removing spammers from this forum should be to stop the accounts buying and selling.Because newbies buying a Sr.Member account would surely spam because they dont have that knowledge and experience and secondly they are buying account only to earn through signature campaigns,meaning just to spam to increase post count.
So account farming should be strictly prohibited first of all,so that would stop users by creating alt accounts just to sell them in future and stop newbies to spam with Sr.member or hero member accounts.

Spammers gonna spam no matter what. I read somewhere about a gang of pickpockets who established their "headquarters" right under the gallows where their flock had been hanged, so that they could strip the mob of their money on the spot, so to speak...

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become

I see this suggestion a lot. How would you propose going about doing it? Who is account farming and who is just an occasional and crappy poster?

If account sales were banned on here, they'd simply move to another website and carry on there.

As a thought experiment perhaps all sigs should be shut down for a week or a month just to see how it impacts the forum overall. If enough people realise that prospect is permanent if the tsunami of crap continues, maybe they'd start to shape up.

You all could continue bickering about this and that till the end of time. The only solution is to disable the signatures throughout the forum for everyone. Problem solved. Now we all can go back to enjoying life and spend less time in here talking about trivial matters.

And by the way I have seen people talking to their alts in the same thread quoting their own posts and speaking as if they were 2 different persons. There are some real nut jobs on this forum and before the whole thing goes to shit something radical must be done. I haven't seen anything like this on other forums. I guess the incentive to gain more coins is pushing people in the abnormal behavior. Greed is bad okay?

Bitcointalk has become like a version of Westworld where we are surrounded by fakes everywhere  ;D

My 2 cents.

You can report them.  If it's proven that they're just one person talking to himself for signature earning I'm sure the mods will do something about it.

Edit:
Hm.  Looks like bitmixer's campaign is restarting under Lauda's management.

Looks like Lauda has been going strong with cleaning up the Bitmixer campaign. If that means that I get banned as well, then it is what it is. But it's a good effort to keep the forum clean.

You won't get banned. At worst, you will just get kicked from the campaign


It seems that I turned right in the end. Ironically, the most spammy service across the forum that was first in line to get banned has hired the most strict moderator here to get rid of spammers. Who could ever think of anything like that just a day ago? In short, you never know. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of Russian posters wearing the Bitmixer signature, and I'm curious how she is going to deal with them...

After all, they might kick her down themselves

You won't be banned, as you don't fit the criteria. You are going to be evaluated again in Round two which is tomorrow. I've also suggested a extensive BAN list from this cleanup to the forum administration. Whether they will take action on it or not, is not up to me. As stated in the post, this should be taken as a warning sign that flags your posting behavior as bad (hence it needed thorough improvement).

It is only effective if they have nowhere to run to. However, I can say that this campaign was among the worst if not the worst regarding farmed accounts and spammers (I've learned a lot during my examination of the users).

That may be debatable, but I do like that title. :D

I'll see tomorrow whether or not I'm still part of the campaign. Either way, it was about time that something was done to get rid of the major part of the Bitmixer shitposters. One thing is sure, your appointment will surely makes me want to improve my post quality directly. 8)


Edit:


I'll think out something that can be helpful and allow suggestions to be included in the thread to make it even better.

Then let them do that.  I think instead of batting this tired old mouse around, admins ought to try things--anything--out, see what works.  And even though I'm in a campaign now, I would have no problem with nuking the signatures altogether.  The spam here is just goddamn ridiculous, and it's painfully obvious that it's the sig campaigners' fault.

What I've already been asked several times is 'how to improve posting quality'. You could attempt to contribute to the community by writing a "guide" with some pointers for this (I'm not aware that there is one). Make sure to make it self-moderated and discuss with someone else prior. <- This is an example of something that a spammer is very unlikely going to do for the forum. They are likely going to respond to the thread with "Thank you, now I impruv my posting quality.".

---

Agreed. While it may be near-impossible to completely halt account sales, adding the risk of being permanently banned (both seller and buyer) will definitely kill a huge chunk of the market.

I guess they won't ban them. At least, not for shit posting per se, though some may indeed get banned, for example, for copy-pasting if caught. The punishment should obviously "fit the crime", and kicking them off the signature campaign will most certainly suffice to stop these users from flooding the forum with junk posts altogether. In fact, not banning them (even temporarily) would be a more severe punishment to them...

Since many will try to join other signature campaigns and undoubtedly end up kicked off again

Would it be of any use, really? After all, anyone that could possibly want anything to do with it should know what actual spam is. I don't think that individuals which would like to increase their post quality would be questioning whether their posts are spam or not.

---

Most people should be able to understand that if their posts are all one-liners or vague and generalized recycled garbage, or agreeing posts, then they are spam. If the post isn't adding anything, then it's spam. What's so hard to understand about that?

However, I think it's good to question whether your posts are useful or not. IIRC, there have been a few times that I've written down a lengthy post to realize that I'm on the wrong page... and then deleting it.

Even though I am kicked from Bitmixer, and I as result removed my signature, I am happy to see that something is being done about spammers. I am literally sick and tired of all these google translate freaks that are only milking this forum till it's empty. Good thing is that every user enrolled will be subject to weekly quality checks by Lauda. This will make sure no spammer remains active for long. I am sure of that.

Looks like someone is desperately trying to get rid of a (most likely banned) bitmixer Hero account through an auction right now.

It might be the trigger where soon many accounts previously enrolled in that campaign will be sold as an attempt to get some money for their with spam filled accounts.

You are working under the assumption that we are talking about plenty of different people posting in the campaign. My analysis has shown several strong patterns amongst the posters which leads me to believe that a handful of people own(ed) most of the accounts. Those are the people primarily abusing their positions and ruining this forum.

If something like SPAS was active (made by Lutpin), then that wouldn't be a problem. At this time, they can likely join some Altcoin campaign or something (which kind of makes the bans in Bitmixer less effective).

The important thing is that: You realize that it is your fault. You want to improve. You put in effort into 2. There are likely going to be people attacking me from heavy sides due to this, and those are the people that have really deserved to be banned forever. This is why I'll run a separation of the blacklist into people that are banned forever and those that may get un-banned if significant improvement is shown.

I've just looked into that; statistically the odds are very high in favor of the account being banned.

---

But let us not discuss Bitmixer specifically here. We will be observe the effectiveness of the 'put stress on the manager' method after some time. Additionally, I'd like to hear what people think about making account sales banned?

Account sales can't  be banned because they can be facilitated off this forum and you may never know what deal has gone through and where. How can you control something that doesn't happen within the reach of the forum??

No, you are wrong. Account sales can't be stopped, but they can be made bannable. If we make this a punishable offense, this introduces a huge risk to both parties involved in such trades. I'm pretty sure that this would have a decent effect on this though.

If I had the power in my hands, then I immediately put the rule to work that all account sales are prohibited, plus the fact that buyer and seller will receive a temp ban for actually doing that.

I personally don't see why this isn't being implemented yet as the majority of the people here are badly against the practice of selling accounts.

I don't think banning account selling would have decent effect since we are not able to detect many sales which are done inside this forum. If sales are encouraged outside this forum, our chances of finding sold accounts becomes slim.

But i would like to see banning alt accounts, which is main cause for selling accounts and spamming. Single person creating multi accounts and posting shit for few months and sell them with high forum rank to some newbie scammer. And also lending with bitcointalk account as collateral adds up to this queue for spamming, But happens mostly when the lender try to sell that account for defaulting and this encourages newbies to create multi account just for lending.

I don't like the reputation is based on the number of days and posts rather we need the ranking to be based on some other factors which could actually determine the their reputation.

They can start by having a look at this thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1378965.0
A ton of posters who can be removed straight away.

We can actually. We're aware of plenty of public sales, and there's a fair amount of accounts that have been tagged for this very reason. In addition to that, the administration has more tools to detect these. As I said, the primary thing about the idea is the added risk of a permanent ban (both sides).

I think that having one or two alts is fine, and kind-of-encouraged in a free speech environment (e.g. a case where stating something may receive 'negative feedback' on your main account). The problem is the people account farming (we're talking about tens to hundreds of accounts).

That's not reputation, that's activity.

Update: All of those have been banned yesterday already.

That lead to worst situation like someone can scam with main account and leave the account after negative feedback. just create an alt to do the same or otherwise

But the forum works that way in general higher activity rank members are more reputable and newbies are least. don't you agree this is the mindset of most forum members and visitors

Shouldn't be disallowing account sales to happen in this forum something where all staff members directly would agree on? As it didn't happen yet, is that because of the fact that there is some sort of resistance within the staff, or are you guys still looking for a way to incorporate it in the right way? I might be wrong of course, but enforcing such policy shouldn't be that much of a difficulty.

No. I'm telling you what the situation is now, and what may be acceptable. Having an alt account just to discuss something is fine in my view (obviously if you don't abuse it for any other purposes).

No, that's not how the forum works. You don't get to blame the forum because the crowd isn't properly acquainted with how it works.

Well, some argue that you can't halt account sales completely (which is a straw-man) and I'm sure that the staff is well aware of this. Others argue that the prices of accounts will go up which would encourage more farming, and so on. Generally speaking, I do believe that it would take a decent hit on the spammers market. Keep in mind that: If you get busted for trading even once, you'd get permanently banned (along with any accounts that you own). If that isn't considered a high risk/low profit trade, then I don't know what is.

You are wrong. The reason that account sales are not banned is that it is not possible to enforce.
Trading of accounts would just move outside the forum.

Edit: FAQ

I guess you didn't notice that I was talking about enforcing a ban policy purely focused on this forum, and not about what happens outside this forum. I know that it's not possible to hunt down account sellers operating outside the forum. That's something we should not be focusing at as that is something out of everyone's reach here.

I like this plot twist! Although it struck me as dubious at first, offering a job to a Staff-member after messages regarding spam, it actually is a good solution. This way Staff gets paid to clean up instead of doing it for free, and the polluter pays.

If Paypal can't stop it, I have no illusions thinking Bitcointalk can stop it. Email addresses and IPs can change, which makes it very hard to detect a sale. Even if 2 accounts were originally created from the same IP, and one of them moves to a different IP, it could have been 2 different people, for example in a student house.
In my opinion, the only thing Bitcointalk can really do, is ban the account-for-sale-threads on this site, after which sales continue on other forums.

While reading on, you say exactly what I just typed :) Banning sales will most likely limit it, but botany has a point too pointing at the "false sense of security" it can give. Just like obvious scam threads aren't deleted.

My beautiful thread was turned into smoking ruins. It was a genuine question. My curiosity wasn't particularly sated by the quality of the answers.

Yup, it's difficult to blame someone else as I am responsible for my own post quality. That's why I will put more effort and thought in my posts. People that get mad for being kicked out should look at their post history. If they then still don't realize why they are kicked out, then they never will.

I all for it Lauda.

I think members should also be able to see who is and is not banned, past, present and future.
It is hard, or a waste of time, to investigate/report/watch when we do not know if an account is already banned.

Maybe mark their profile page? This should be easy to achieve?

There is really almost no valid reason for one to sell their account here. Even if they were desperate for money, then the best thing to do would be to put it in as collateral for a loan.

I'm not sure about that, nor what other moderators/administrators think. Currently, banned users get stripped of their signature and other profile information (implemented sometime in 2016 IIRC).

Can you see how it would be helpful to us members? If so, could you try to find out if possible please.

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Look at RealMalatesta's account. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=321061

RealMalatesta has been a good member here for years. Now sold or hacked, and spam posting.
(his last real post June 20, his first spam post under new ownership October 20)

Would this be a ban? Is this 1 way that sold accounts would be recognised?
Are there other ways sold accounts could be recognised?

It is trivial for moderators to check whether someone is banned or not. I just have to take a look at their profile. I'm not sure if we should do it though, but in this clear case the member is not banned.

Yes, I think I've reported this one in the cleanup yesterday.

I would permanently ban this one as it likely correlates with many other 1 line spammers that used to be in Bitmixer. I do not have the tools/access to recognize sold accounts.

The account only has value as collateral if it can be sold. And if that's the "almost no valid reason" you mean, it could also be abused to sell an account: take a fake loan, default the loan, sell the account.

I would suggest a Rank: "Banned". One word, right under the username. It can even be a warning for other people.

But a real pain in the butt for us.


Excellent.


I was particularly wondering if us members would have ways of detecting sold accounts.
My example way seems good. Any other ways?

Good to see some action being taken on bitmixer signature campaigns spammers and many of them being get banned becuase of posting shit all around the forum and with their alts as well.
I think something like that should be done with yobit signature campaign spammers as well because i think there are many more spammers in their campaigns,i think many members are having 10-20 alts in that campaign.

I'm very well aware of that.

This may actually be a good idea. I'll check with theymos to see what he thinks.

That example is really an obvious one if you look at the second page of last posts. I'm not aware of other methods, maybe someone else has a suggestion or two.

Account farming reminds me democracy.

In a democratic country, a professor and a homeless dude have the same amount of votes. While a professor reproduces one or two children, an uneducated street scum reproduces like a rabbit without a brain.

Does that remind you something?

It is the same thing which happens in Europe as well as in this forum. This is a war which we can't win. :( (unless we find our own Trump and build a wall :))

First time i've seen any staff/mod/admin say that farming "hundreds of accounts" by 1 farmer (i read) is a "problem"
(i always said on my thread that i was not hunting anyone with 2 or 3 accounts - only organised farmers)
Is this "problem" also being addressed somehow in this clean-up? Advertiser-manager-spammer-farmer.
I have shown how easy they are to id, with 100% accuracy - no complaints/dispute from any farmed account listed yet!

(or please expand in my thread with some detail's on this, so as not to derail here with farming details. I'll be nice as poss, i'm genuinely interested  :D)

What's wrong with account sales as such, and how are they particularly different from any other sales? Of course, sold accounts can be used for something considered illicit (for example, spamming) or just outright wrongful (for example, scamming). But, on the other hand, Bitcoin is also massively used for illegal activities, though I don't see many people here calling for banning Bitcoin sales


One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent

This has actually been suggested before,
It was shot down by badbear.

The throne is never empty

Now that the Bitmixer signature campaign is handled appropriately (I hope Lauda doesn't heavily abuse her current position as the campaign's manager, lol), there is a new kid on the block. Hail the new guardians of spam, the Byteball Signature Campaign (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1666370.0), the most recent sanctuary and retreat for shit posters. As an aside, it looks like a lot of kicked-out Bitmixer members voted in the thread recently, despite the obvious fact that the proper management of signature campaigns has greatly helped to reduce the amount of spam on the forum

Well, I'll try not to be *too strict*. :D The campaign is finally somewhat settling with 50-60 users that are at least decent (IMO).

I have just sent them a PM. If they do not take action/respond, then the community should take action for them. Our measures are only effective if most of the managers are willing to participate.