Bitcoin Forum

I just ran across this, is this a new way to hide abuse?

1) Create a post that says 'blah'
2) Have a friend (or alt) send it a lot of merit
3) Delete the post to hide the bad content
4) Keep the merit points

Edit:

I am NOT ADVOCATING this, I think I just saw someone with a deleted post that still had 18 merits attached to it.

it doesnt matter i think merit is useless and it will make btctalk worst before it was reply spam now it will be threads spam

Yes you are right there are some smart abusers can do like this but he can't do like this forever then he will get caught by the DTs maybe he can do once,but if he do more time then it will become suspicious.
But still lot of changes will come into the merit system as per theymos statement it just a trial run so new upgrades will rectify these kind of problems.

I think it is better to burn that recieved merit if the post was deleted so spammers can not do anyhting like this.

Yes, I have seen some of the reputable beggars doing this, I have posted on merit's thread about it with no response from theymos. I sent a merit to somebody, he edited his post after a few hours.

Here are my PMs with him:



I tortured him just for one merit of my own and not of my source merit.

Merit doesn't get deleted along with the deleted post. Once merited someone for a post it will stay forever.
Once I posted in a thread and I received 1 merit, later that thread got deleted. But the merit is still with me.

The technique you saw is possible and it is a tricky way to earn merits by abusing in order to rank up quickly.
But one cannot do multiple times because there is a high chance to get caught by someone from the community.

If you have seen such abuse then you should have tagged that user with negative trust along with reference as proof.

Short answer yes, as I'm sure you've already gathered from this.

The majority of your merit, or even a significant amount of your merit should not and will not come from deleted posts unless there is something unique about your posting habits or you are abusing the merit system and trying to hide it. This makes it very obvious when someone is abusing it; they will get tagged and the people that are enabling their abuse will also be tagged with negative reputation by DT members.

If you notice someone has a history of this, you can make an archive.is of their post that received merit so that you have proof of what is going on, but you also can make a thread in meta explaining who is abusing and they will get looked into.

So the solution for this one is very simple.

If someone is getting the merits from the deleted posts on major scale then take him under the radar and then check if his behaviour is still the same or not. If the merit listing from his history keep showing the same results over the time then such account can be marked red as that would be clear cut spam.

There are hundreds of posts might be deleted everyday but for single account having the chances of posted over many posts that got deleted would be very less. So the difference can be felt by just looking at the merit history and further actions can be taken.

It amazes me how people can become so creative when it comes to abusing the systems in this forum, they find a loophole and then strikes right at it at the best given chance. The system is new which is why it should be expected that there will still be shortcomings from it that needs some polishing. However, people should be mature enough to not exploit the situation at hand.  Hopefully, the moderators would be able to find a way to solve this sooner and the members would report the wrongdoings to assure the effectivity and success of this system.