Bitcoin Forum

Lately a lot of new accounts have been posting direct buy links or external contact information to trade gift cards or similar digital goods.
These links are published on self-moderated and locked threads so no comments are possible other than fake vouches by their alt accounts.
As a result a lot of people get scammed and the sellers launder money.

I've been trying to fight this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3035620.0) by leaving negative trust to those accounts. Hopefully a red warning will help.
However since they try to sell off-forum, either on auto-buy external sites, skype or similar, it seems their main target are non-registered users finding the threads using Google.

Exactly those users are the ones who don't see any red warning on the sellers' accounts (in case you didn't know, trust is shown to registered users only).
At the moment it's not possible to warn them in any way. The result is bitcointalk is helping users to be scammed and sellers to launder money.

What I'm asking is those non-registered users to see the default trust. It wouldn't add any significant load to the server because it can be cached since the same information would be shown for every guest, web crawler et al.

Although I think that's the best solution, I see other options too:

• Making the whole Marketplace board available only to registered users. Guests would be forwarded to the registration form when trying to reach it.
• Showing red trust for everyone until they register and set up their trust list. Something similar to what theymos is thinking about (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2945878.msg30265724#msg30265724) for registered users with DefaultTrust only.

DT is flawed though. Even theymos agrees and is encouraging people to tailor lists

Agreed. And that can be encouraged (even forced) for registered users. But guests can't customize their trust list. Showing the default trust is much better than not showing anything at all

Totally agree with these propositions and if it is possible, just show the default trust comments and hide the others and if possible only in the marketplace.

True, but in marketplace (only available there), a negative trust should make the customer pays more attention.

I get your point fella, but with abuse from the likes of OG nasty and theymos admiring the system is flawed then we shouldn't be pushing the details of a failed system out. Maybe force people to join up to read the forum

That's another option, yes:
But something needs to be done.

Since they create new accounts who have no negative trust anyway, might be a better solution to make it so that one cannot create a topic untill having reached a rank like junior member orso. This would solve scammers creating new accounts just to post topics.

Merit and rank requirement would make a lot of sense.

Unless it's in the newbie section of course

They're not. I've seen they're staying with their flagged accounts (ex1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1444132), ex2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=709833), ex3 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=402140), ex4 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1798836)).
It seems they don't care about the negative trust. That's an additional reason why I think their main target are guests who can't see that negative trust.

And fortunately, it's much easier to leave negative trust than to create a new account and a new thread.

Then they would keep their account until they're Jr and up (like the examples I posted) and keep posting their threads, regardless of the negative trust.

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It wouldn't solve the problem of guests not seeing any warnings and being scammed, unfortunately.

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Edit
You have a point. But this is off-topic here. I'm looking to solve the problem about guests being scammed because they don't see any trust or warnings at all.
The money launderers are Jr and Members as much as Newbies.

I don't think it should be allowed Newbie to open a new thread. Maybe only few section in the forum for beginners and help.
it's too much opened shitty discussion like "How to make 1 bitcoin in a month or 2" "buying coins" "How to sell my house" etc.. This is topic created by Newbie, and their purpose is just to increase activity and post counting.
Or users make an alt account and attack someone who has resented them, but they keep the original account
I think maybe of hundred new topics Newbie created the only one can be useful.
From Newbie to Jr.member is not a long way, even if they need merit, but this is enough time to reduce the number of new accounts created only to open one or two thread and spam with a link or frustration because it was rejected from the bounty campaign.
They have too many rights, just after registration.

I like this idea. It would cut down on the number of people coming here to attempt to engage in shady dealings to occur offsite. This would also hurt the google search result rankings of websites that are posted by these shady characters.

I would also point out that your proposal would not address the fact that the forum has many mirrors run by others, and it would be nearly impossible to force those mirrors to display trust ratings. 

This is basically the trust system currently with certain very shady people running around giving negative trust in masse. I think this dilutes the effect of a warning of an actual scammer, or a likely scammer. It would also make it easier for a scammer to fake having legitimate trust when they tell their marks that they have their trust settings setup incorrectly.

If I may add another option, similar to your first option but slightly different

• disabling/hiding off-forum links for unregistered user, replace it with standard redirection to register page

so they won't be able to follow the link or copy paste the urls
unless the seller use certain masking technique to write urls on the their threads
this way we can still attract new bitcoin user to join the forum when they found us thru marketplace searches

The last suggestion I gave is my least preferred one (but it's still somewhat better than doing nothing). I'd rather have the DefaultTrust shown, or the Marketplace hidden behind the login wall.

Good point. However it seems several mirrors like bitcointalk dot to (which is probably the biggest) just copy all the pages as shown to guests/crawlers. If default trust is shown in those cases I'd guess that would be included there too.
If it's not then there's nothing we can do but at least it would appear on bitcointalk.org which I'm sure drives much more traffic than all its mirrors put together.

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I'd like this idea if it were possible to implement. But I don't think it is.
Hiding websites, emails, skype info, ICQ numbers and others seems like an impractical task. It would be extremely easy to trick any system trying to do that.

Bump. Non-registered users keep getting scammed by accounts already tagged as scammers because they can't see the warning:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3035620.msg33231264#msg33231264

I've PM'd theymos but haven't received any reply. I think this needs more attention

I think the lack of a response is your answer.

I support your idea, however one drawback to showing default trust to guests is that it gives more weight to the DT system, which goes against what theymos wants, and would make it more difficult to maintain the hands off policy regarding trust disputes the administration has taken.

Not necessarily, you can't assume anything not replied by theymos means he's explicitly against it

Yes, that's a valid drawback. However I really think that's much less of a problem than letting people get scammed and damage the appearance of the forum (and probably bitcoin by extension). Besides showing default trust to guests is not the only option as previously discussed

Bump

Just another example of a scam because guests can't see trust:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3295830.0

Bump.
Message from staff.

First I thought only allow locked and/or self-moderated threads afater xx posts but that could lead to scammer spammers. Just don't allow locked and/or self-moderated threads at all for anyone in the digital goods (and sub) fora.  That would avoid newbies spam posting to get to xx messages to allow it.  I'm sure it would cause some hardships to "honest" gift card sellers selling their goods for 99999% off (LOL) but that's life.

Trust should absolutely be shown to non-registered users. Far too many people are being scammed day after day even though some users have got dozens of negative feedback. Showing trust would prevent a lot of these users from being scammed in the first place. I also think we should have a landing page that warns users when they click on external links and displays a warning message about the dangers of buying from autobuy links and not using escrow and so on.


But a lot of people will also miss out on things being sold on this board. I know the majority of marketplace hits from google are probably for dodgy stuff, but there's a lot of genuine sellers too that might miss out if google isn't indexing the results.[/list]

Requested here too:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5100111.msg49341267#msg49341267

Trust is information that is just as valuable to non-registered users as it is to users who have registered. Bump