Bitcoin Forum

Hey all,

as most of us now had some time to get acquainted with the new Merit-System, I thought it would be a good time to try and utilizes this great new forum feature.
To be more specific: Utilize it in Signature Campaigns.

But why in Signature Campaigns?
My reasoning here is the following: Merits mainly were introduced to reduce spam.
Signature Campaigns are responsible for a lot of spam, even if many of them try to encourage their participants to produce 'quality posts'.
Obviously, the majority of those posts aren't, else most of them would get merited. The threshold for a post to qualify as a 'quality post' in most Signature Campaigns
is extremely low hence there is no incentive to make really good posts.

The main problem here is, that if a member has a certain level and is 'stuck' there due to the Activity-rule, there is almost no reason for this member to create valuable posts as he can't get more stakes.

This is neither good for the forum, nor for the campaign itself as advertisement done by members who really post quality is also more valuable than by those who just 'get by'.
I already saw some hesitant suggestions to make Signature Campaigns solely based on Merit. While at a first glance this sounds feasible, I think that kind of change wouldn't work mainly
due to the fact that the higher the Rank, the better the ad space, so to speak (better signature).

That's why I attempted to find an easy system that allows for Rank and Merit to be regarded in Signature Campaigns when it comes to the calculation of stakes.
And because I like visually pleasing things, I made it a bit more colorful  :D

                            https://i.imgur.com/XHix8Ca.png
                            Alternate layout (https://i.imgur.com/5p2g78q.png)



This might look more complicated than it is. As most Bounty Managers already use Spreadsheets, it's really easy to use prepared formulas like the following (first example).
It needs to have some more levels/nested conditions though, but I didn't want to make the example too complicated:

       https://i.imgur.com/gqwKlA9.png

       =IF(C2>B3;D3+(C2-B3)/(B4-B3)*((D4-D3)/4);D2+(C2-B2)/(B3-B2)*(D3-D2)/2)



This is just an approach and an attempt to get the Merit-System transfered to Signature Campaigns because I think that this would really benefit the forum as it creates the needed incentive to even
make good posts if you can't rank up due to missing Activity. With the Merit now factored in, members get more stakes even if they stay the same Rank but they never get that much more Stakes then a member with a higher Rank
(IF that member also stays active and creates value).

A more sophisticated way could be to count the earned Merit (last 120 days) based on the forum stats. There are also many other variations (Merit/Rank/Activity), but that's something for another thread.

This took more time than I thought and now it's getting late here. I hope that I didn't make any grave mistakes :P
I'm really curious what you think, would you take a different approach to introduce Merit in Signature Campaigns? Hopefully, there will be some Bounty Campaigns that will include Merit in their Stake-distribution.
Cheers!

I think the Signature feature should be tied to Merit and Rank just simply tied to Activity would be better easier and not involve too much logic and compute processing and also not expose the system to vulnerability if we make too many complicated changes

Then that member is here for all the wrong reasons and should be encouraged to find somewhere else to spam.  This problem, the one of members joining bitcointalk to support huge families of dirty, ungrateful offspring that they can't seem to stop having, is endemic.  I think campaign managers ought to be a hell of a lot more selective than they have been.  I thought SMAS was going to clean up a lot of the bullshit, but you still see shitposters even in campaigns run by very respectable managers, like Yahoo62278, Lutpin, and some others.  I know they've got to get participants, but standards have really deteriorated since the inception of SMAS.  And then you have shitty managers in the altcoin bounties who will accept any garbloon who can make character quotas.  Posts don't even have to be coherent, don't have to make any sense--they just need to be abundant. 

Don't know how the merit system is going to influence this, but I've seen rates being adjusted based on merit points earned.  That's a step in the right direction.

What happened to Lutpin tho? Haven't seen him around for quite some time. Also, I can guarantee, that all those lower ranks that are going all over the forum right now, will just give up after a few months because they'll realize that they won't get merit with those posts. So, some of them will probably slow down and improve while the rest will just give up or wait for some bounty threads. Can't win 'em all.

I don't think so. Sadly, this lower ranks has their own way of gaining some merits that can make them rank to member. Yes, it is not that a problem there are a lot more lower ranks that will flourish make their way to member and spam the forum until they are a legion of accounts with the same ranks that is ready to be ranked up and just joining bounty campaigns that will earn themselves some currencies.

Unless every bounty campaigns require KYC to reduce this accounts.

Well, we know that Yahoo62278 is implementing a new rule in his every signature campaign wherein he has 2 different payouts depending on the merit that each member acquired. So, at some point, members who didn't earn merit ever since it was implemented has a lower payout than those members who earned a base merit that Yahoo stated. So at some point, members who are still in default number of merits will be inspired to give more efforts and thought about their posts. If only campaign managers in the altcoin discussion will implement this too, I'm sure we will see less of the shitposters here in the forum.

KYC is not going to be implemented by the admin as he mentioned this in one of the posts. I am also not a big fan of KYC as these things are easily abused. Any smart internet user has knowledge about places where he can get fake documents for KYC. These people are able to bypass the KYC requirement for leading websites like PayPal using these documents and thus they will easily fake it here as well.

Yeah, I see this as one of the disadvantages of KYC. A lot of my country men also tells me that joining a campaign might be a risk since I will be using my real information to invest but it might be used in a certain way that my information, or me will be in a danger. I just hope this will not happen since there is a lot of investors that use KYC to invest in a certain ICO as a requirement.

Well however, some form of ID would be nice, I mean also if they're buying merit and let's say it's somewhat $7 per merit (someone pointed that out) that would mean a lot of money to be given out so even if they had like 5 accounts, that's $35 for 1 merit on one account.

But considering the bounty campaigns, campaign managers can think of some way to prevent multiple accounts.

How about this: whoever wants to wear paid signature has to pay for it?

We can have this structure:

1 month = 10-20$
6 months = 5% discount
1 year = 10% discount
2 years = 20% discount

Do you work for bank or something? IRS?  ;D
Why would anyone share his personal information on internet and give them to strangers?


I hope bitdice will enforce KYC on you, mister creepings (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=923040) sir!  ;)  :-*  :-*

As long as there are no other mechanisms here, that prevent this, this argument is moot. To say that 'things should be different' doesn't solve problems. That's why I'm trying to find an easy way to make things better, one step at a time ;)


I also don't think that all those lower levels will necessarily give up, but that's not my point here, I'm not only talking about new accounts or accounts with lower rank. There are many many higher ranking accounts Full Member, Sr. Member and also Hero Member accounts that are content with just getting by in Signature Campaigns as they already get a lot of stakes due to their rank. Again, right now, there is small to no incentive to make good posts that deserve merit. But KYC is a bit too much, isn't it?

A Sr. Member, for example, has 250 Merit. To qualify for Hero Member, he needs 250 more Merit. Getting 250 isn't an easy feat. Even if he'd start posting valuable content, he has no imminent benefit from it, so he might as well stay Sr. Member as they're getting a lot of stakes in Bounty Campaigns as it is. He could come to the conclusion that he wouldn't reach the 250 Merit anyway. So why would he then create valuable posts in the first place when just posting some 75+ characters long blahblah will suffice? My approach would immediately reward him for getting Merit and by this encourage him to create valuable posts.

The same applies to the Full Member and Member Rank, as 90 and resp. 150 Merit are also very hard to come by (and I know what I'm talking about as my post obviously has no value/doesn't deserve Merit ;) no farming intended, I just want to prove a point, a sad one). https://i.imgur.com/6jfXV0il.png
Thought the effort would count for something, but obviously it didn't.



Awesome! I didn't know that. I hope that this will be more common in the future.
But this implementation needs to factor in both, Rank and Merit, at least I think that this would be the best way because a higher Rank allows for more and better ad space.


Well, this would shift the Bounty Campaigns to external sites in order to obfuscate whether a Sig is a paid campaign Sig or not. On top of that, someone has to keep track of all those campaigns and payments, that's a fulltime job  ;D

Hey OP , I'm pretty sure crestonium is a scam.  I've seen a lot of serious allegations against  it.  You may want to research more before wasting your time on their sig campaign.

I really do hope someone run a signature campaign and the sole payment is a merit or two.
I'd like to established my account on a higher ground before leaving this earth.

That's being said the thread seems to be perfect, We all agree to the same conclusion merit is highly needed in this community have we not?

Hey, thanks for the heads-up, I did have a look at it and found no conclusive evidence for it being a scam. Unfortunately, serious allegations are common nowadays when it comes to rivalries between projects, without any proof though they stay allegations. If you have something with substance, I would appreciate a PM, or maybe you can make a thread about it?
Nevertheless, I thank you for your concern  :)



Unfortunately, I don't get what you mean by 'payment is a merit or two'. Do you mean instead of stakes as reward that you'd earn Merits? That would, at least in my eyes, undermine the whole purpose of the Merit system. It might have some flaws and needs adjustment, true, but the core concept to reward value and encourage the creation of it in others shouldn't be subverted. Especially not by using Merit as a form of payment [in campaigns].


I really hope that some Bounty Managers see this post or come up with their own ideas to incorporate Merit. I tried to find an easy way to do it and I think it could work, it only needs people doing it  :D

how about getting more when they increase their merit during the campaign, they will try more constructive, helpful post during the campaign.

like before campaign 60 merits after the campaign 80 then 20 more stakes will be added

Probably fighting spammers and leading the merit charts.I'll tell him you miss him.

OP: Why does threads these days have to be extra long and verbose ? Putting it graphically makes you look like hunting merits is one of your intentions behind creating the thread. (which you did)

I hope someone posts a tl:dr version of the same.

Well, the main reason for me was that the forum lacks some features to better style things, so I chose a graphical way, especially since colors makes it easier understandable (at least for me). I also posted an alternate link below the image.
And I chose this layout because I already had a preset for it. So if you prefer something without bells and whistles, here you go:

      https://i.imgur.com/1XV3Wom.png

But to be honest, don't you find it a bit rude to react in that way? I put time and effort into it in order to make it easy to read since it's not that easy at the first glace. If you can't be bothered to read it, don't read it.



That is exactly what the simple formula does  ;)
It takes also into account which rank you've got so that the additional Merit gets properly weighted

You suggested that 1 Merit = 1 Stake. Did you test? Make an example and see if this method would be 'fair' for everybody. At a first glance, it doesn't look that way but I didn't test it :)

Here is one of my tables (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8ry1mf3whjpmmm/merit.xlsx?dl=0) if you like.

it will be fair an excellent poster (the one getting a lot of merits)is a sign of good communicator and competency, they deserve more. anyways shitposter will be just ignored by the vast majority so a signature is useless. but the main problem here is more post will be created to increase their merit chance, perhaps should be:

 additional stakes= merit / number of post.

with that only competent individuals will get more stakes

This is a great Idea in principle, but I think your numbers are a little off to start. Achieving the number of merits needed is a mighty task (I speak as someone who has a much greater number than needed so this isn't personal) working a number that starts at 5% above the base rate and then increases every month by a % or two would in my eyes work.

Managers all need to embrace a minimum standard level, and it may even be an Idea to get the managers to join a club? Where only the managers that employ a minimum standard can join - that would enable the advertisers to know that they are only employing the best standard of managers and therefore the best applicants

new merits since campaign start / number of posts as an indicator
That was my first intuitive idea also. Then I thought about the method with which a Bounty Manager would verify this. He could check the initial Merit count when a participant applied but I didn't find an easy formula to calculate the stakes forin combination with the rank. My problem here is that if you only use Merit for the stake calculation, no one would apply for Signature Campaigns any longer (or not enough people) since right now, it's way too hard to earn Merit. Or am I too skeptical here? Did you have a look at the numbers if this could work out?



You are indeed a rogue result when it comes to statistics  :D
Do you think that the column 'ModifiedStakes' really is that off? I thought that it represents the added value for better postings pretty well. Could you maybe make an example with your percentage-based idea :) ?
Or do you think that it's too hard for higher ranks? It tends to favor the lower ranks a bit, true, but I didn't see this as problematic, this could be either additional motivation for lower ranks or you could easily change the BaseStakes accordingly, e.g. in a way so that lower ranks initially get only a few stakes and basically need Merit to be profitable.


The idea of a club is a good one. This would be much more require much more effort though and someone would need to coordinate this. In addition, many Bounty Managers already are in a group or a 'company' so I guess they wouldn't necessarily agree on the basics of running a campaign, or at least the would diverge in their rules/views.

My goal was (is) to find a fair approach and maybe have a spreadsheet at the end that only needs o be filled by the Bounty Manager. Maybe it's too ambitious -.-

 additional stake =  merit x A  / number of post
 the A is the amount of stake bounty managers willing to give to good posters.
they will still have the based stake based on rank.

this not related but good to reduce spam, the bounty managers must put the minimum requirement to get a stake in 1 post. if they can give 100 USD for 20 posts why not just make it 5 USD/post it's same
reward.it will help the poster to enjoy the forum without worrying about quota's and help the forum overall

Ah, ok, I get it now. I had a similar idea but didn't follow up on it as this method doesn't take into account that a Signature of a higher rank has more value than a lower-ranking one (ad space). So you basically would need an "A" for every rank in order to acknowledge this.
This might be too complicated though, hm, I need to think about this  ;D

In as much as this method could help bring some order in the forum, but it's hard to get by. It will be a lot more complicated for the managers to calculate or will it be judged on the note that one must be merited irrespective of how many merits gotten so far or will it be based on number of merit gotten?. When it's based on numbers of merits gotten, calculating the payout will be tedious.

"This might be too complicated though, hm, I need to think about this  Grin"
then
modified version
 stake = ( (merit x B) / (number of post) )+ B

 B = to stake based on rank, only merit and number of post is not constant.

this was it can easily be done using spreadsheet/excel.

let say
B =
Jr. member - 2
member - 4
full member - 6
senior - 10
hero/legendary - 12

let say 1 merit and 5 post
Jr member
stake =  (1x2) /5 +2 = 2.4 stakes
hero
stake = (1x12)/5 +12 =14.4 stakes

the advantage of this post farmer will think twice to post again if they gain a merit.

Your comments are good. But to do it they need to change their policy. They need to agree and put in place good policies to avoid sMERIT inflation. This becomes very important if it is inflationary.

It will be nice quality over quantity experiment. I think outcome won't be so bright as in advertisement quantity will win. Yes, we have examples when some funny and well-made advert getting so much attention, winning Cannes Lions and millions of views on Youtube. But the signature is not youtube and doesn't matter how interesting your post is, it won't make you ICO more successful. But having it in thousands of posts spread across the forum WILL. But let's check the results, too early to say anything.

What you are suggesting will only benefit account farmers more than the forum. nobody wants to pay you more money, all of the campaigns based on stakes are not paying you any thing from their own money, they are paying you with other people's money.

Expecting merits for doing a long post with graphic is not meritorious. if you really want to contribute, spam bounty managers with your OP, see what happens. paying less to members with no merits will create a market to buy merits to get more in a campaign.

Merit exchanges have occured (and it is not strange due to basic human instinct) regardless of campaigns required merits to get higher payments or not. Simply because lower ranked users need merits to rank up (particularly shit-posters who are unable to write high-quality posts and will never get merits by themselves). Merit exchanges are very popular in local boards (I saw lots of users pointed Russian out as the local board massively abused merit system).
I strongly support ideas of signature campaigns to pay higher rewards for users who meet their merit requirements.

I wish that bounty manager could also award merits for every member at the end of the campaign, base of course also in stakes like at least we could get one or two merit at the end of the ICO hahaha no need to modified the forum rules.

NO! Definitely no campaigns will do it because there are scarce sMerits to give away. Furthermore, campaign managers mostly don't have too much sMerits to send and if they have abundant merits, doing this as bonus campaign rewards will violates future rules of the forum (if someone start a campaign like this, Theymos will do something to control for sure).
Only shit supporters hope that there will be merit-awarded campaigns in the forum. (of course, I do know that there is a campaign like this, but this one is really good with its original purposes which mainly motivates it supporters to contribute to the forum and forum users, not simply for money and merits).
Joe's Signatureless Challenge: Win $25 ($10 for 2nd) + 8 Merits every week! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3055616.0)

So far I had not got merits for my post from my campaign manager. But all members who are enrolled in signature campaigns have this advantage for sure. They have all their posts being read by a senior member here (who might be having good number of merits). There is definitely a strong possibility that he will give you a merit if you had made a very helpful post. Regarding giving merits to all applicants at the end of campaign, this will affect the forum. We will see a lot of new accounts applying in hope of getting those free merits.

You are aware that this already is the case, right? You only rank up with enough Merit and the higher the rank the more stakes.

My suggestion aims towards a more constant reward for continuously posting quality, as this is something that now isn't rewarded directly and creates the situation that members see no benefit* in posting really good posts as the gap between ranks (in terms of Merit) can be so high that they might never rank up. It's all about incentive.
(*I'm aware some will argue that those members shouldn't be here in the first place, but that's not the point here)


This would totally defeat the purpose of Merit :D



That sounds interesting. So you'd also use the Merit earned since the start of the campaign in order to calculate it?
The problem I see with this is that a Member could 'easily' get more stakes than a Hero Member:

B =
Member - 4
Hero/Legendary - 12

let say:

Member: 15 Merit and 5 posts
Hero: 1 Merit and 5 posts

Member stake =  (15x4) /5 +4 = 16 stakes
Hero stake = (1x12)/5 +12 =14.4 stakes


The problem here is that a Hero/Legendary Signature is much more worth in terms of ad space, even if he never even gets Merit but makes his posts.
I think that getting more stakes as someone 1 rank higher than you should be doable, but 2 ranks higher should be only possible in the rarest of cases as their Signature is much more worth for a campaign.

Like @TMAN, I also think your numbers are a little off, but in a different direction. It takes 10 merit to be a member and that gets you 15 base stakes, while it takes 100 merit to be a full member but that only gets you 30 base stakes. If the idea is to not unduly reward people who attained their rank by merely registering earlier and (shit or not) posting frequently then a better approach would be to increase the bonus from awarded merit as you go up in rank.

NB - I was contemplating a similar idea, but you beat me to the punch and, well, I can admit you did a better job of presenting your idea than I would have done. So you win by default, without even knowing there was a match on!  :P

The distribution of BaseStakes per Rank is just an example. You could also do something like:

Jr. Members: 2 Stakes
Members: 5 Stakes
Full Members: 10 Stakes
Sr. Members: 20 Stakes
Hero/Legendary: 30 Stakes

Taken from a campaign that is running right now. It's only to illustrate the way Rank & Merit can go hand in hand when it comes to the calculation of stakes.
I'm looking for an easy way to incorporate the use of Merit while no completely changing the way campaigns work as it's not that easy to change things that are established. Another reason is that the current system is the reference for bounty managers, meaning if you change it too drastically they have no data to rely on and it's harder for them to plan the campaign.

If your idea is similar, maybe they complement each other as mine is just a suggestion and I don't know if it works until someone tries it  :)