Bitcoin Forum

I notice in the last few days quite a number of Xrumer-type automated spam shits on the forum. Mostly "Brand New" accounts with 1 post making blatant advertisements.

What if "Brand New" were restricted to the Introduction section where their Xrumer spam could be better contained?

Can you show some examples? I have 9 days of patrol (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;patrol) saved to find other accounts posting the same.

Is there an Introduction board? I agree that the first 5 posts of a new member should be made on an introductory board.

The newbie board used to be a introduction section, but, that didn't really work out as planned all it did was restrict the spam to one section and looking at these accounts that spam advertisements a lot of them are in the altcoin section. I don't think introducing a introduction section would actually benefit us here.

No, but there used to be a 'Newbie Jail' which was the Beginners and Help section where all new users were locked into for their first x amount of posts and time spent browsing but it was removed. I don't think it would be a bad idea bringing it back though in some capacity. Having some sort of quarantine to catch all the spambots and same old questions that get asked time and time again (usually in the wrong section) would help clean the rest of the forum up. I also have previously suggested that all new users are essentially shadowbanned until a mod can check their first post or posts and then whitelist them if appropriate. Obviously all spam bots would be caught and shit threads would just get trashed before they could even become a mess.

A newbie jail would work, but it would still allow the beginners section to become cluttered with the potential spammers.

With regards to alts - how about restricting posting to junior members and above?

A "newbie jail" could work but only if it wasn't x amount of posts and more a case of meritable posts to get out although with that you would also have to have a dedicated mod and merit source.

It could be a sub board of Beginners and Help, though them being essentially shadowbanned until whitelisted would also work.


This is one of the reasons why it was removed in the first place I believe because people just spammed rubbish for the x amount of posts over x amount of time then moved out. Making them get the merit first would probably be too difficult and time-consuming for them and some people would just get trapped in there indefinitely or quickly give up out of frustration.

Even if this new profile created after banning of the previous one? I saw many newbies on the forum who's first comments look very professional and I have just two explainments for that case: 1. A previous profile was banned from the forum and the user decided to start from the beginning; 2. It's a new user who is in bitcoin world for some time and he knows everything about it already.