Bitcoin Forum

The bounty section is flooded with new accounts that 'join' all kinds of bounties, even when they are closed. Probably lot's of bots, never reading anything in the threads. Posting reports, even when not needed, even when the bounty is over.

Would it be a nice idea to exclude newbies from that section of the forum? To stop the spam?

I give props to anyone with enough skill to get a bot to sign up for a bounty, make enough posts and meet their criteria, and get paid.

Yes.

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I'd like to expand the idea as follows: Ban/remove any bounty campaign that does not use Google Forms (or similar) for submissions. Using this is: a) More efficient. b) Doesn't spam Bitcointalk with useless enrollment posts. @mprep should take a look at this.

I doubt it'll stop the spam since those newbies sooner or later are going to become Jr. Members (quite often by farming their accounts in other sections). TBH, this would just hurt legit users more than it would the spammers. One of the staff suggested excluding the Bounties (Altcoins) board from activity calculation / post count which I'm totally for.

Seems a bit too heavy handed. As I mentioned, I'd rather the Bounties section simply not contribute to the post count. Doesn't punish the legit users who are there to apply to bounties but doesn't allow the spammers to pad their post count / activity.

I concur with that idea.

Why? It is strict, but very easy to *implement* and enforce. I am even working on moving signature campaign applications, of the campaigns that I manage, off of the forum.

Since quite a few campaigns use the forum to manage entries and weekly / monthly reports. And those that don't, quite often use it to verify whether a user who applied off-site is actually the BCT user he claimed to be. Sure, there's ways around it, but unless done automatically it's usually rather inconvenient to do so (e.g. accepting entries via PMs either via your main account (flood of PMs) or via a dedicated account (have to switch between accounts)).

Stopping the report spam would be a good start.

I don't think people use bots to do whole bounty process, but this is what I see a lot:

1: newbie with 1 post joins a certain bounty
2: next post: another newbie with 1 post joins
3: next post: another newbie with 1 post joins

Can't help thinking that must be one person .... They probably have social accounts with inflated followers. Bounty managers get more work getting those accounts off the bounties. More useless work for everybody. If they manage to get unnoticed, they get more stakes from the bounty.

Then later on, the newbie account only go up in rank due to the reports in the bounty section, they never post on other sections of the forum.

I'm a bountyhunter myself, I would love to stop reporting my work on the forum, but I have to report.
I love the bounties that use forms for that, a better way to report your work.

My two cents.

People are using bots in these sections. I've seen people using bots with blatantly obvious hacked accounts to copy and paste somebody else details from earlier in the thread in Games and Rounds. They obviously don't care about the giveaway but just want to rank up their accounts with absolutely no effort on their part.

As mprep indicated above I have previously suggested we remove boards like Bounties and Games and Rounds from counting towards post count and activity because those boards are just being massively abused to farm accounts en mass and posts in there contribute absolutely nothing.  If they were removed then a lot of people just wouldn't even bother.

This is a good idea, it would reduce spam.

It often happens that bounty managers don't accept newbie accounts

Most bounty managers/campaigns don't have such restrictions just on bounty campaigns but they do on signature campaigns but not due to the quality of their contributions or ease of abuse they commit but merely for the fact that they don't have worthwhile signature space. However, I'm increasingly noticing more and more campaigns that are paying newbies because why the hell not. If you've premined a crapcoin for free then it doesn't matter who you pay as long as they're spamming your advert all over which is all they want at the end of the day.

Well how shitty does this forum have to get before heavy-handed measures become necessary?   I would suggest that the benefits of a measure like this would outweigh any inconveniences experienced by some noobs who are in all likelihood alt accounts anyway.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's worth trying.  It's better than doing nothing.  If you keep doing nothing, bitcointalk might as well start up a local board for English.  Drives me nuts when proposals get shot down because they're not perfect.  Nothing is.

The bounty board isn't the core issue. If all shitposting was limited to it, we probably wouldn't be talking about it. The issue is users using the pumped accounts outside said board and until that gets solved, enacting measures that only put extra burden on moderators is pointless. That's why I mentioned simply not counting posts and activity within such boards - stops the pumping and doesn't require mods to interfere.

Spamming will continue taking place in that board too,if ever theymos decides to create such. Shitposters just need a place to post and increase their activity count. I have doubt,if a person gets banned,their IP also does get banned? But yet people create their legion of alts and come back. I have seen websites which tackle the VPN problem,wherein people with multiple accounts are exposed even while they use VPN,is it possible for it to be implemented in this forum too? This will tackle one of the greatest issues on bitcointalk,right? A lot of people are wasting their time for nothing if shitposters keep coming back. Any thoughts on this??

It'll cost the spammers to do so though. If signatures get removed from ranks (and thus activity), users are going to have to pay to get one and while a regular user might not have many issues paying 10-50$ for a sig for his only account (especially if he plans to actively participate in the forum), a spammer's is going to take the hit of the aforementioned 10-50$ for each of his accounts getting banned.

And that's why I agree with hilariousandco's suggestion to make certain boards not count towards the post count or activity. Doesn't impact what content can be posted yet removes any incentive for posting there, aside from genuinely wanting to discuss the legitimacy of a project or participating in a bounty / bitcoin giveaway / etc.

Simply removing signatures from ranks would solve the alts issue as a person would have to pay cold hard cash for each account he wants to run a sig campaign on (and as previously mentioned, would suffer a direct monetary loss for each of his accounts getting banned). Considering the generally privacy-conscious crowd that seems to hang around here, I doubt the alt detection would do much as most people who want to hide their alts simply sign up with a VPN, proxy or Tor in the first place.

There is a simple solution - use the two new discussion boards for your sensible discussions. :)

But theymos isn't agreeing to remove signatures from users, so the better find out alternatives, in this way you can ban shit posters forever and they'd never come back. Even if a user has multiple accounts shit posting, he would not mind paying those 10-50$ because he can earn that much in less than a month and then again he continue earning by shit posting at the same time. Ban the user's ID forever, even if they use VPN, then people won't have to waste their time on reporting useless shit posters.
Not making those sections not count for activity count would definitely help but this needs to be taken into consideration at the administration level. Until then people can only discuss about it, actions do speak louder than words.
Exactly, so what I'm saying is that there is this thing which detects your original IP even if you use VPN or anything, so if you're banned, you cannot access your account/s even if you use VPN. Simple as that. If this feature gets implemented, then people won't have to fuss about shit posters.

Their IP only really gets banned from creating new accounts on that connection. Their 2/5/100 other accounts they were already farming on that connection will still be fine and free to post especially when there's no admins looking into ban evasion or alts. People can also just go to their local McDonalds/Starbucks/whatever to create new ones or just use a proxy anyway. I think limiting one account to be created per IP should be considered and would cut down on a lot of the abuse as there's only so many connections/proxies in the world and fresh/clean ones would quickly become increasingly difficult to find. Alternatively, as already mentioned (and expanded on below) paying for the signature would help with this issue considerably.


$10-$50 would be too cheap to be effective. I think it would have to be $100+. It won't stop people having multiple accounts completely but it will significantly reduce abuse and the number they can have because nobody is going to pay $100 for their 100 alt accounts. People currently farm hundreds of accounts because it's free and relatively easy to do so right now and that's part of the problem. If signatures are removed from ranks and people have to pay for them then account farming would stop pretty much instantly.  Most people would then only have one or two accounts and just concentrate on those one or two rather than looking to abuse campaigns en mass with multiple ones because it's just not worthwhile or feasible, but as long as people can create an unlimited amount of accounts for free then they will continue to do so.

But again, it all comes down to theymos right? If he doesn't even want to think about banning signatures for shit posters, then how is it going to help?
Agreed to some point, people would be hesitant to pay 100$ for one account, that too in a forum. I just realized one more thing, since a lot of shit posters are from India, not all of them but most. Paying a 100$ would be a little too much, here's the math:-
1$=63 rupees or so. 100$=~6300 rupees. I have heard a lot of people get food for around 30-40 rupees per meal, a lot of Asians would be grieve-struck, if they have to pay a 100$ for such. Also will legitimate users would also have to pay for this?

Yes, it's all down to theymos now but I don't think he's unmovable on his stance. Besides, he has proposed several things previously such as blacklisting signatures from problem campaigns and spammers and also requiring merit points to have a signature. He's also open to suggestions from other users but he just needs to actually take action and commit to these things otherwise we're going to be in the same exact place years from now. Things like punishing campaign managers, removing certain boards from activity/post count and disallowing certain ranks from posting in other boards are all relatively easy to implement. Allowing users to buy certain ranks alongside being able to rank up naturally shouldn't be an issue either especially now that we have the Copper Membership so there's no reason why we can't have Silver and Gold ones.


But this is partly the point. It would price a lot of people out of buying a signature and it's those sort of people who are mostly causing the problems in the first place. I don't think $100 dollars is that out of reach to someone who has access to a phone/pc and the internet either and if they want to earn from here then they will have to beg borrow and steal to try get that money in whatever way they can and if posting here is your only way out of poverty or to earn money then I'm sure they'll be able to achieve that amount if they put their mind to it. People would probably value their accounts here much more if they have invested money in it but they certainly don't value them when it's free to create dozens or hundreds of accounts because people get lazy and greedy and exploit it any which way they can and that's something that has to change.

I have a new idea to reduce the spam and improve the forum, stop the activity increasing when you are wearing a signature and exclude those sections with the most spams from counting towards activity. if a hero member is wearing a signature, he should get minus 1 activity per post, unless he has paid $0.2 for 1 post. if you are a newbie or any other rank, wearing a signature should reduce your activity when you post if you haven't paid for it.
I will complete this post later on, it's my mom's birthday, need to attend while loling.

I'm surprised they even allow Newbies to join, if there's anything I've learned during my time managing (Bitcoin) giveaway campaigns, it's that many people love joining with many accounts.
I can only conclude they simply don't care about fake entries: they're giving away a small fraction of the tokens they've created out of thin air, and make a huge profit off it once it's hyped enough. The more they spam, the more profit they make.

My thoughts exactly!

I was under the impression this isn't even allowed:
Most bounty-threads have hundreds (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2682890.360) of (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2440198.520) posts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2499187.540) showing nothing more than endless lists of links to twitter and facebook. The bounty board has more than 300 different topics bumped up within 24 hours.

Most bounties are only used to hype some ICO, and after the creator gets his money, he moves on to the next similar project to do the same again. According to theymos' definition (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2251834.0), most "Initial Coin Offerings" actually sells Tokens, not Coins. Wouldn't it be time to enforce using the right terms, in other words, take away the advantage of using the overly hyped word ICO and force them to call it an ITO if they sell tokens?

I think it's a ridiculous amount to pay $100 to be able to use a signature on an account on a forum! But, my signature pays me an even bigger amount, so if required, I'd pay it instantly. When I had my first signature payment (https://blockchain.info/tx/ba219e967312f5d75698137264d9fd5b8565cf04db650c6bda58ae0ef40192f8), it was worth $16.64. Back then, I wouldn't pay $100 for a signature. It may even backfire: the industrial scale farmers could just add the cost to their business model, while normal users back out.

I can even imagine the Lending-section will get a new business model: get a $100 loan based on the quality of your past posts, so you can afford to buy a signature and pay back the loan.
Paying for a signature won't stop the bounty-spam though.

I totally agree with this. I think, this would be the best solution to be implemented to prevent spammers and account farmers in this forum. We want it or not, thousands of these kind of people are creating accounts, they get into the forum without even thinking of reading the forum rules maybe just to be paid for nonsense posts and then keep on spamming all over the boards. I was even thinking of suggesting something like this before when I was in a member rank but I forgot the idea due to priorities. There would be a boundary between ranks. I mean for example newbies are only allowed to post in local boards but can see and read posts on the other boards like exclusive Junior Member boards up to the Legendary ranks. Just like games there is something like a level of difficulty. Lower ranks cannot access to higher level of sections or boards. ;D

I still insist this method (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2496860.msg25571156#msg25571156) to get the problem fixed..
I was newbie when posting that post.. And I would prefer that method better then reading all junk post in good thread.
Making a good discussion thread is very hard now.. Too much shitpost from bountry hunters that post everything or whatever as long as their target reached. The newbies should help mods to report those assholes..

The junk bounty report posters even post reports when the bounty is already closed for weeks/months .... They don't read the threads, they just do all bounties on auto pilot, hoping to catch some tokens/coins after the bounty.

Most of them are not in the signature bounties, but in the Twitter/Facebook/Telegram ones. Wondering if their social accounts do something real for the ICO's, in terms of getting investors.

 If they have multi-accounts here, how do you think they got their twitter accounts with lot's of followers .... So, we with real social accounts are getting less from the bounties, because part of the stakes go to the spammers.

I do a lot less bounties then months ago, just because it takes to much time for me to weed through all the info on the bounty threads. And I see the bounty manager struggling on managing the whole thing.

I think the value for the bountycampaigns will go down and finally ICO's stop with bounties on this forum.