Bitcoin Forum

I am wondering how you seperate promising alt coins from coins which are potential scams.

So far I usually start by looking at the website. Unfortunately, this often does not help that much as most have a clean website with some promises, and a decent Youtube video.

Next I check to see if they have a sub-reddit and how active it is.

After that check if there is a Stack Exchange and if there are developers.

Also, I try to look at their GitHub or other hosting repository to see how the codes looks or is organized.

What methods do you guys use to research a new crypto?

Big promises running on poor technological base, media censorship, low dev activity (1 core dev is not reliable, he can drop the ball; 2-3 core devs is much more certainty) and low community support are red flags. Community support does not include speculators posting how the coin will reach the moon, filter out that noise to see the real community. Sometimes you will miss good trading opportunities when pumps happen on poor quality snakeoil coins because you avoided them for the reasons above. Pumps and dumps are pure speculation though. If you strive to invest in quality you need to have due diligence and patience and not fall for hype.

What I would do if you want to find the newest altcoin is look on the announcement threads on this forum.  Most decent (or wanting to be decent) cryptocurrencies will start a thread here, and then you can see all the user feedback on the currencies in the comments and figure out based on the factors they describe whether it's worth investing.  That'd also help you to evaluate yourself in the future.

better to steak with good reviews here inside the forum those project who already have some established progress had been review by the community better to read information about it and learn how that alt can have a good future and how they got support from the community the forum itself gave honest feedback.

The Code.
if you can read the code and understand it then there is nothing else that matters. just go to their Github repo and start reading the code and see what is it that they are exactly offering and claim it to be new.
and then check to see if these features are really implemented properly or not.

but if you are looking for profit (like the rest of us) then all of that is pointless because no amount of good code, features, developers, white paper, etc can compete with pump and dumps and the profit earned from them. look at ETH and you'll see what i mean, a coin with a bad code but a good profit only when it is being pumped :)

I'm exactly the OP to do research that is still basic, but when it is also, I started to take into account the money that has been issued dev altcoin, and calculate the total bounty, whether bounty paid will affect the price of ico after the release or not, if the bounty paid from to collection crowdsale, then ico release will be into garbage altcoin.

Google is your friend.

Put the alt name + scam into google and see what comes up. When people are upset about a coin, they usually blog about it somewhere and list all the grievences.