Bitcoin Forum

I picked top 4 posts in bitcoin discussions and here is the last response made in those threads:





Was this the purpose of Merit system ? Note that these are not newbies making these posts.

And they didn't get any merit.

Those who are bellow the Legendary rank won't rank up anymore. What is your point?

Those four users have received, in total, one merit point. None of them have gained rank through the merit system.

It seems that you are saying that the Merit system is not working and there are still a lot of spammers or shitposters that is in the forum.

I don't think that the new system will have an effect immediately, the new system is still in months and I don't think that you will be seeing that effect soon. If this continues, theymos said that he will eliminate signatures and other ways of earning of money in this forum.

Top 4 posts according to what metric?

Is it based on the number of merit they've received? The number of views (if so it would have to be a thread)? The number of quotes? The number of replies (would also have to be a thread)?

It feels like you've picked these at random to "try" to prove a point.

They haven't got any merit for those posts you quoted. The merit system is there so those sorts of users get nowhere with their hollow ones liners and won't progress through the ranks without putting the effort in. Not sure what point you're trying to make here though unless you think the merit system is magically going to make everyone write a thesis for every posts which obviously isn't going to happen.

What I am trying to implement into campaigns I manage is users must have merits to join. I currently am allowing users without merits to join(partially), but have started paying higher rates to users with merits. Eventually I will make it a requirement to have merits in order to join campaigns I manage. I would also like to go as far as you must earn merits each week to stay in a campaign.

If all managers do something like I mentioned above, then eventually these shit accounts are phased out and not making any money anymore rendering their accounts useless. With the merit system being fairly new, I can't go full fledged merit crazy on everyone yet. Gotta give ppl a little time to earn some.

All is revealed. These newbies are really Rothschild bankers. :)

Well that's the point of merit system. Before, they could be posting like that just for the sake of increasing the activity, nothing besides that was stopping them from ranking up. Now, they can post as much as they want tom they'll not be raking up. So, if you ask me, merit system is working.

They are a jobless nation and they are here to beat the community to make them cheerful in life. of course they wont rank up, but they don't need to rank up if they can post garbage upon garbage with 10-100 accounts. don Hillary expects to see them putting effort into their posts. it would be like expecting an uneducated street beggar to write a thesis on cold fusion.

Actually judging by how many whiny posts you can find here I would say the merit system is working just fine, at least it's another layer of protection. It also has other uses like signature restrictions, I have seen a few where they require you to have certain awarded merit points just to participate, I think that's great and another incentive for people to put extra effort into their posts.

The merit system needs time to change the current system.
In the ancient times (of the pyramids :) ) this forum was a place for high qualified computer programmers, after when bitcoin started to get widespread, more and more people came and started to write useless spam (and get paid for it from bounty campaigns)
When it has reached the level that you have to read 10 posts (or more) to find one meaningful post which is ontopic and gives additional information to the reader of the thread, the merit system was introduced to reduce the spam.
This is not a magic wand that will clear the spam in a second from the forum. Unfortunately a really long time has passed since people got used to see that if they start here as a newbie, post shit and rank up to a member or a senior, they will have a good income from posting that shit. Bounty campaigns were encouraging people to spread their advertisements thru the forum in order to get the necessary attention for their ICO or whatever, they were(are) not interested in the post quality but the quantity.
The new system needs time to let people realize that unless they post quality, they won't be able to rank up, so on the long run, it will restrain people registering on the forum just for the hope of the easy money...

I'm afraid that those shitposters will keep spamming the forums even if they get 1k activity and no merits. Sometimes I get a feeling that those are actually bots not humans with an intelligence level only enough to spam shitposts and won't even notice that they're not ranking up, they will just keep spamming shitposts no matter what.

He actually said that! where? I thought he ruled out eliminating sig camps because I'm sure I've seen him state this in one of his old posts..
Would you please put a link or quote what he said?

I think he actually meant the last four posts. I mean when you visit a board you see the threads ordered according to the time of the last reply in each thread, what I think he did is that he picked the last 4 threads (which are placed at the top of the page ;D) then picked the last reply in each of them.

I'm still waiting for these idiots to actually realize this and to give up.  Honestly it's taking a lot longer than I expected, but I suppose that's one of the reasons they're idiots in the first place.

Those posts quoted are indeed horrible, and it's a shame that noob fools are still able to join shitty altcoin campaigns and get paid for such drivel.  I think that's going to be the next reform, but we'll likely have to wait a while for it to happen.  In the meantime, I'm still damn glad the merit system is in place.

Unfortunately I also have a feeling that there are bots posting on the forum... I was wondering why not to implement a Captcha for every post... It won't be a problem for me, I'm writing 10-20 posts weekly, so it's not a problem for me to solve 20 captcha per week... But for someone who runs a bot, it will take time to modify the bot's code, have to pay for some captcha solving ptc service to be able to bypass the captcha... Account farmers won't care a lot, but at least bots would stop posting spam...

Sadly this just often leads to more abuse as we have already seen with a group of people on one of your campaigns just trading merit between themselves to both get on to your campaign and get the bonuses. Whatever systems we put in place people will just try find ways round it if they can and those with multiple accounts can often do so quite easily (and the ones that don't are often just engaging in merit for merit trades). I still think the only way we're going to combat abuse is to just remove signatures altogether and make people pay a hefty sum to get one. Really can't see many people shelling out $500+ on more than their one or two accounts.

They'll keep shitposting because their sig campaign manager allows those sort of shitposts. They (shitposters) know that as long as they spam their 2-liner generic and unreadable bullcrap, they'll still get X reward from their sig campaign, so there's no incentive (for old accounts with no merits and account farmers) to make an effort to write a decent post.

It isn't really the allowance of signatures that is the problem, but the use of them. Many members don't care about their reputations, so they will promote any old thing, as long as they get paid to do it. Signatures should be a reward and a thank you from the forum, and not a right for any member to scratch a few coins by posting and promoting rubbish.

here we go again again about merit system is always a reason many question and suggestion maybe other is just making also trading their merit to rank up here because of its hard to get merit special to new here it this forum high rank here dont think that newbie is just startng here maybe little knowledge but not enough maybe high rank help us to rank and not to insult or discourage newbie here remember you also start here nothing share your knowledge sorry for my word i just expressing my point

The merit system does allow mediocre posting or campaign quota filling, you simply don´t get rewarded for it. The system is also complemented with Serious Discussion and Ivory Tower sections in which no signatures nor adds can be used. If you are worried about the quality, go there and find some. If you are worried about ranking up, do some quality posting.

Some practical tips:

Notice that you do not ALWAYS need to do great posts. You can do normal posts and quality post, the forum is alright with that AFAIK (for the moment). Just avoid crap in its purest expression because that may have consequences.

Obviously it is much much harder than a merit source reads the 10344th response to the thread "are alt-coins good or bad?" than the fourth original and documented answer to a good thread on bitcoin core code improvements or similar high level topic.

I agree that nobody should be insulted for asking, just make sure that you ask the right things and ignore bullying. Good luck.

Must be a system from a more rigorous campaign manager and also better to choose a user who meets the appropriate criteria. However, if viewed from the current conditions then this has been quite improved, there are positive impacts that have been seen. Usually those who do shitposting certainly can not be accepted by the campaign manager, some managers who have been trusted must have had a specific criteria. We know that in this forum there are so many campaign managers that there should be an association that can regulate these criteria. Sometimes I doubt the campaign done in section altcoin, because usually campaign manager is entering many users and the criteria needed is not too high. I have known for a long time the characteristics of every manager in this forum and only a few who always apply high criteria, yes maybe yahoo, atriz, and lauda who always have high criteria.

That's the point I wanna get to, they don't really care about ranking up, as long as they get paid for spamming shit it's all that it matters. I do hope that after a couple of months into the merit system Theymos starts a wave of bans for those shitposters to clean the forums of them.
This way old shitposters will get banned and new shitposters won't get out of Jr. member.

The merit system prevents accumulating more shit but doesn't clean the shit we already have  ;D ;D

Maybe, OP wanted to tell us that most of the spam are from Ranked members rather newbies.
Partly yes but, once (alt/farmed) newbie spammers find it impossible to rank up, they might stop.
Member to Legendary spammers may eventually stop their spam business once they got listed in SMAS (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1545652.0) or campaign managers established stricter requirements.

In addition to what @FlightyPouch (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3098584.msg32003704#msg32003704) said, the most notable effect is now there's less newbie accounts that spam the megathreads which may not be the majority of the spammers, but still a good immediate result.
Since there aren't too much new spammers joining, something like SMAS (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1545652.0) will become more efficient by the easier filtering job.

Perhaps, since spam has been being brought by bounties, and 0 merit to become a Jr Member to be able to join Altcoin bounties can be achieved by spamming, +5 merit should be required for newbies to become Jr and increase the Member merit requirement.

I am curious if a Member (10Merit) made it through the next rank Full Member (+90 earned Merit) is eligible to the full member slot since his 100merit was earned, not rank default.
A Full Member with 100 merit (+90 total in the merit history) is better than a Full Member with 105 merit (+5 in the Merit History), right?

I came here to point out the same thing. I'm pretty new around here, and even I noticed how wrong it felt browsing different sections of the forum.

I first joined thinking, hey this is a veterans forum so maybe It'll have plenty of constructive discussions and what not, but to my surprise it is mostly spam, and I suppose it's that way so people can climb up the ranks fast and start earning from bounties?

Eitherway, this doesn't promote a healthy environment for veterans or new comers.

If the purpose of the ranking system was to reduce the spam it failed hardly.
If the purpose of the ranking system was to just freeze the ranks it successed.

I think this was the point of the person that opened this topic. I think this new system has just freezed all the ranks without any reduction of low-quality posts. Probably it could be a good idea to make a "reverse merit", I mean to "demerit" posts without any sense or spam-posts. In this way people can rank normally and also they will not post spam otherwise other people will demerit it and they lose rank or it will be freezed.

Also, the min necessary to rank up in merit is very high considering the low amount of merits that circulate between people.

Open to discuss but it is really clear that the merit system needs improvements because how it works now will not help anyone.

Well, the purpose of the merit system is to make shitposters like that to put in a lot of effort and thought on their posts for them to rank up. Unless they are okay with their current rank and doesn't care much on whether they get merited or not, I guess there is nothing much we can do about it.


What you've implemented in your campaign is great and the idea that every participant in your campaign must earn a merit every week is also good. That way, if there will be users who will cheat their way to earn merit and trade with their alts, we could ban those shits for their wrongdoing. We could ban a lot of users if that happens tho.

The merit system cannot stop people who post shit but of course this new system are limiting them to rank higher so they cannot join campaign and no increase in the payout. Basically if all campaign required merit system, its hard now to be part of it. Time will come, and those shitposter will make a lot of effort just to have merit in order for them to survive.

Nice idea which is really working. You were the first who do so and I think not the last one. I think it is going to become normal for whole the forum to accept users with merits only or to set different kinds of payments to users with and without merits.

The task of the Merit system is not to block the way to rank up. It is in the fact that only those who really deserve it, who write competent, well-founded posts, become and remain members of the forum. You are wrong if you really think that those who are bellow the legendary rank won`t rank up anymore. For example, newbie can become a junior member without any merit. That means every beginner has a chance to rank up, but if he wants to achieve more, then he must exert more effort than previously required.

There is more to it than that. There has been a reduction in spam from account farmers as they slowly realise that the accounts have no value if they can't get merit to rank them up. Spammers that already have high ranking accounts need to be dealt with in other ways in addition to the merit system. It hasn't failed, it is slowly starting to work by stopping the influx of new spammers.


People that deserve to rank up have no problem getting merit at a faster pace than an average of 1 a day so they will rank up exactly as before. Have a look at the top 50 and see how much they got in the last 30 days:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=topusers


It probably was the point they were trying to make but it is incorrect. It froze the accounts that don't deserve to rank up and has reduced spam to some extent already and will do even more so over time.


This is a terrible idea as it would just be abused by people demeriting things they disagree with.


The other way to deal with that is to increase the supply of merit. That is what theymos has just done by adding another 20 merit sources.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources

Maybe it was a wrong topic to choose? This one, for instance, doesn't look terrible. If the topic is "Am I too late?" "Next 10x coin?" or similar crap, answers to it would also be shitposts. Much easier to eliminate those kinds of topics rather than monitor it for answers. Even better, collect 10 page of crap and delete it so scammer won't get his required post count.  ;D

The point of this new merit system is to cease the continues growth of high ranked accounts that are being controlled by sh**posters and spammers. Lots of alt accounts was also created that produced the same nonsense posts per day, over and over again. It's not only about the signature campaigns salary, etc. but the whole credibility of this forum that matters here.

Can we just appreciate what the administrators of this site has implemented? What matters right now is to reduce the population of at least Sr. Members to Legendary accounts that didn't really deserved that kind of status in the first place. Although its kinda late that this Merit system was implemented as some accounts (members) have already obtained such status, at least it halted the continuous growth of it that can make things worst in the future.

Also, with an average of 8,636.79 post per day. Don't expect the admins that they can monitor each post from time to time. It is a very difficult task to do so, since they are short-handed of staffs.

Yes, he has said that in a recent post. At the time when he was asking for suggestions regarding how to remove spam from the forum, he ruled out the option of removing signature campaigns completely. Later merit system was implemented and members started complaining that it is not working. He said that he might have to remove signature campigns if merit system fails to fight against spam.




This is actually what I meant and you expressed it better than I would have. I am in no way against merit system, I wanted to make the point here that a lot of members are still adding shit posts and they do not care about merit system. How is spam removed then ?

Spam has been reduced by cutting off the flow of new spammers into the system and catching some of the alt accounts and getting them painted red. There's a very simple way to remove the rest but it will not be very popular with a lot of people. Make a change to the forum so that signatures and avatars of anyone that has not earned at least 1 merit in the last 3 months are automatically hidden. That will force all the campaign managers to make earning merit mandatory.

Why is it required to do coding change to the forum to implement this. I mean the admin cannot just make it compulsory with an announcement for all campaign mangers to accept members only with certain number of merits as per the rank.

And those alt accounts being painted red, was it the purpose of merit system ? Was the admin aware of the fact that some people will try to cheat the system and start giving merits to their alt accounts. Admin must be laughing hard if this was intentional on his part but I never expected senior members to make it so obvious by sending merits like 50 or so to a single post.

That just makes it harder to enforce. Who is going to go through all the campaigns and check every account? I just suggested a way it could be automated to make it easier.


Everyone was very aware of it as it has been going on an industrial scale for a very long time. They've been getting caught and tagged for a very long time as well, but until the merit system that was only a minor inconvenience to them as they just farmed more accounts to replace them.


They are not exactly the smartest people so it was fairly easy to anticipate that a lot them would not be able to resist temptation and make themselves easy to spot.

They will never put in any effort. they don't know how. Jet Cash is trying to teach them English. that is impossible to do by one person with other important things to do. if he could spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his students couldn't learn anything, because they are busy posting with 10-20 accounts.


They don't know how to write a post with a minimum quality, if somebody is giving merits to his own alts, if they are giving them to constructive posts, you'll never find out if they are alts of each other.


There is something. charging a fee per post. any forum member not earning a minimum 10 merits in 30 days should pay a fee per post if they are wearing a signature. if they don't want to pay, they could report garbage posts and for every accurate report, they could post one time for free.

We were doing some stuff with BCT post visualization (word clouds!) before I dissapeared on you guys again to go work for Oyster.

Anyways, I am now really curious if we can use data analysis to identify meaningful differences between post data before and after the merit system was announced.

I mean, we have post data before and after this date and a means of gathering it via a benign crawler.

Once I am done with Oyster I will be back to pursue this again.  In the meantime someone else should totally do some text analysis and get back to us about significant differences.

Actually that is the reason the merit system ws introduced. It is designed to block upranking for posters who don't respect the forum and its rules.

1) That is one of the big limitations of the merit system. It was good that members here are able to recognize some merit abuse cases and report them. It happened because merits were sent in bulk like 20 or more for a single post. But, if someone is mart enough , he can still get away without being noticed. Since, all default merits of those cheaters will be spend on alt accounts in batches, this makes the situation more difficult for a new member with only one account

2) That are quite a lot of rules. I am in favor of steps being taken to remove spam from the forum but we should be keeping things simple.

That's true that the merit system can't stop anyone from posting shit posts, but they limit them to rank higher. The majority of shit posters are Full members and bellow, So the best thing to do is to require some merit points to join any signature campaign, because not all people deserve to promote a campaign with shitposting.

They won't go far with that kind of posts and are you worrying about? Are you bothered? Merits are credited to quality posters and that thread of yours saying that merit system does not make any difference will not make you any different from those you have posted.
Merit system freezes accounts that merely just post to increase their activities, which is a good thing for the forum and it directly affects campaign leeches. It may not end shitposters, but they will get tired very soon. All that will be left are those who  are determined to keep up with the quality.
If you are mad about them ignoring the merit system then be as good as you can to earn your own merits. Do not mind them, ignore them if you want.

Of course we should not discourage new members. The forum needs new members for its growth and we can see some good talent from those new members. Merits have dried up in my opinion and that might be the reason that members are not encouraged to make good quality posts. If someone makes 20-30 good posts and gets no merit for his posts, he might get discouraged. Everyone does not have the patience to wait for so long. New members should spend more time to read the posts of other senior members and the rules of this forum to get a realistic idea of current situation.

Nice to see that you are trying to give preference to members with merits in your campaigns. However, I think that with current situation it might be hard for all campaign mangers to implement this their respective campaign especially for ranks like member and below. Do we even have that much candidates with merits in lower ranks ? My personal observation is that it is getting tougher day by day to get more merits as the default merit points have dried up. One question for you, while checking the posts for eligibility in signature campaign, do you merit any deserving post ?

I do not know what you mean to say by the forum is not affected by these kind of posts. They are being posted here regularly and bitcoin discussion section is being filled with these posts even after the merit system. Any advertiser who decides to go through the forum before advertising will get negative impression about the community seeing those posts. He will then consider other forums or blogs with quality content. These spam posts also make it tough for genuine members to find useful information from the thread.

If I should add, some members on the forum believe that low ranking members should totally be wiped out which I don't think will help the forum and the classification of members. They sometimes call you a "shit poster" when you make a sound and logical contribution/suggestion on how possibly the merit can be handled better on the forum. They follow the line of their "friends" thought to call you "shit poster" just to feel good with their friends.

My question is, are we not seeing that the merit system is working? At least, we have seen members stocked in their old ranks because they have not got the required merits to support their activities. We should not be in a haste with the merit system because it is gradually serving its purpose.

Can you provide the link to where he mentioned it? I wander around the forum from time to time, especially in the Meta section and couldn't remember bumping to that specific post.


It's hard to maintain a quality post if a user creates an alt account. Keeping that in mind, they will intentionally spam post in order to rank up. Continuous posting won't help as only 14 out of the post that was been made will only be counted and that's the easiest way to level those account before the merit implementation.

I believe that there are old users who admitted that they have alternative accounts in existence, some of them where given negative rating due to post quality, making the account useless. This could be another reason why merit was added to rank up requirement.

I totally agree with you.
I made some useful and constructive threads and useful replies. You see I have received only one merit point so far.
I created a whole thread for discussing why we should go to another system which affects every shit posters in the forum regardless of their rank. But anyone doesn't like the idea.

I can show a bunch of shit and meaningless posts which were received merit points. It is really discouraging people to make good posts if good posts are not awarded here while shit posts are being awarded.

Adding more merit sources may be a solution.

Shit posts must be discouraged while good posts are being encouraged. If merit system discourages both the system is meaningless. There should be an active and efficient way of giving merits to good posts.

For beginners to get merit is quite difficult, beginners will try in many ways done to get merit in order to increase the level. But for the beginner, this is an effort that can be done to level up by posting a quality topic on the forum. for beginners, the knowledge is not much then they remain optimistic to quickly understand the ins and outs of bitcoin.

The quality of posts doesn't seem to matter much anyway. Eventually most people will have run out of merit to give and so the amount of merit you get for putting hours into a post will earn you nothing. Basically almost all the merit has already been given out. Now the only way to earn merit is to suck up to the merit sources and the few legendaries that actually have enough merit to give out still.

I do think spam is slowly going down though, but I have to wonder if that is more of a result of the altcoins crashing through the floor and most ICO coins becoming almost worthless as soon as they hit the exchanges. It is a hard world for bounty hunters right now.

I've also thought about that solution. Initially, I was against it - because shitposters would simply open new threads and continue to post shit. So the moderators would have a lot of work, almost for nothing ...

But your last sentence is true - and is about to change my stance here: If these spam megathreads were all regularly deleted (at least once per week) then people posting there would lose all their post count. The incentive to post in those threads would be reduced almost to zero ;D

But my general stance is that signature campaign managers are the people that could really make the system a success applying strict anti-shitposting policies, like some of the more established managers (Lauda, yahoo ...) already do, and requiring the participants to earn at least some merits.

While I think it's not necessary to require a certain amount of merits per week (that would only encourage abuse because many good posts simply don't get merit), the requirement of some self-earned merits before joining a campaign has my full support. It could be even a good idea to require merits from a minimum of different users (e.g. 30) to avoid simple merit buys.

Even outright banning of merit abusers, shitposters and "farmed Heros and Legendaries" would have my support.

Right! The merit system can not stop spamming endemic, but it can reduce spamming threads a little bit. Mainly because some spammers will change to be more constructive, to rank up; then over a long period of time, writing constructive threads will become their habits automatically. That's good for them and for the forum in general.
In contrast, merit system can not prevent spammers to rank up. They can buy merits to move up to higher positions. Nevertheless, doing this, they will put themselves under high risks of banning sooner or later due to forum rules' violations.

It's not true. If you joined the forum for long period of time, spent considerable amount of time to scan around the forum; you can see lots of Senior member and higher mainly posted shits. That is why Theymos gave us merit system as a big gift for the forum. I believe and hope that after the launch of merit system, we will not see any shit-posters rank up to Hero and Ledgendary ranks.

The very first reply explains it all...

Being able to join bounty campaigns is good without merit required but it's still hard so when bounty campaign requires merit it would be very difficult. In terms of rank jr. members like me won't ranked up easily so that means merit system works fine. About quality post being not able to rank up yet doesn't mean I won't submit good quality post.

Wow this posts are pretty interesting I liked it much and catchy to read

Atleast merit system is succesful in getting some of the legendary guys

Hey guys we should appreciate their efforts by giving some extra merits. Its our duty I think as seniours

Can anybody post the ids of these new members? I see good future in Them