Bitcoin Forum

Is there are place where to check the newly registers copper members?
I have searched for copper members in the Member section but all I got was all the accounts til 2018-04-27.(*) /btw there are 990 accounts registered till that day/
See the image below.
(*)- actually after researching a bit more, the registration date is not the day the membership was bought/activated but the day the account was registered, so I cannot list when those accounts were ranked to copper members.

After a turbulent day like yesterday, there should be quite a lot newly registers members, and they gonna keep coming.
Something we should keep an eye on, right?
So why the database is so outdated, and is there any other place to check for?

https://i.imgur.com/VP1oCgm.png

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NOTE TO ALL THE NEWBIES READING THIS :
Copper membership gives you the possibility to wear MEMBER RANK signature, + removes other newbie restrictions.
READ HERE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2385104)

I requested this somewhere in another thread yesterday. I think it would be helpful if there's some sort of patrol page that lists all the recent users who have purchased the copper membership. Would be good to have just out of interest, but would also be very helpful in spotting huge abuses if farmers suddenly start buying them all in mass with accounts registered around the same time or with similar formatted names etc. I suspect the huge farmers who have been making thousands or even tens of thousands by abusing bounties and sig campaigns aren't going to give up and let this minimal merit change get in their way and will start either purchasing copper memberships or buying the merit and frittering it between all their alts so it's something we should keep an eye on. 

Yes, this was mine concern too, that's why I tried to find any tools to make a list, but seems like this record is not public /yet/.
Actually there is a way, if we scrape the data from the member search list and make our own list, when the number of accounts increases we could possibly compare to the old one and list the new ones, but it won't be as efficient as if we get a access to data dump. I guess @LoyceV can give an advice here too /lets see if piggy tool is working/:)

Here is the link to the search > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sa=search;search=copper;fields=group;start=1

I did a recent write up about it here:

Units of Evil, copper membership & list of copper members
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5025522.msg45476567#msg45476567

(Last week)

As of 10 September 2018 there are 1020 copper members.

Great work man. Today there were 990, I reported 1 which was banned yesterday. I guess they are removed from the list if they are banned.

I actually wrote a script that should be useable to create a list of jr members that were demoted to newbies, then received exactly 1 merit so they became jr members again... I already posted it in Theymos's thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030366.msg45826022#msg45826022
I'll have to wait untill LoyceV updates his full merit history-db again before i can run it tough... It needs recent merit data.

This being said, this script will just generate a list of potential suspects, I'm pretty sure a lot of people will have received exactly 1 merit in a "legal" way, by asking people with smerit to review their posts...

Eventough this doesn't seem to be the popular opinion, my personal opinion is that we have to strike the iron while it's hot and make a strong stance against anybody who is trying to cheat the new system by buying merits, exchanging merits, begging for merits, blackmailing for merits, buying copper memberships for the sole purpose of spamming,...
If we stick together and systematically tag and ignore anybody caught abusing the system, it will send a strong message to anybody who's just planning on abusing the system... Hopefully leaving us with a cleaner forum.

If other tools are needed, shoot me a PM and i'll see if i can quickly write something to get the job done... I can fetch and parse about any page, even behind cloudflare, or pages only accessible to logged in users. I can combine this data with about any data that's publicly available, either trough an api, a database dump, a flat text database,... If you can show me the data sources and tell me exactly which data to combine with which other data, i can probably create a script to automate the process (no guarantees tough)

I can only do that when theymos does the next data dump (next Friday).

Did you see this post:

As far as I know, theymos disagrees with tagging users for (small) merit abuse.

I must have missed that one... The whole announcement thread evolved so fast i was bound to mis a couple good posts :)

EDIT: apparently i did read your reply before, but for some reason i missed the part about the reference data... Like i said: the thread grew so rapidly i was bound to miss (parts of) good posts

That being said: those statistics look very interesting... Using them we'll have a basic indication of the potential size of the potential abuse (used potential twice there   ;D )
BTW: i hope you don't mind my script using the data from your merit history database? If you do mind i'll just remove the script from bitcointalk. I don't think there'll be a lot of extra load on your server, since you need at least some technical knowledge to get the script running anyways, so i don't think a lot of people will make the effort of downloading the full merit history because of my script anyways.


Sure, but in my opnion, if we let these small merit abusers slide, we'll send out the wrong signal and in the end a lot of spammers can potentially use the loophole created by not tagging small merit abusers... I know there are two sides to this story AND there's always the potential of false positive tags... But doing nothing about people circumventing the new rule isn't a good option either (IMHO). Besides, negative tags can be removed by the tagger in case the "victim" can give a plausible explanation...

There are also legit reasons to expect more new users with 1 Merit: the number of Merit sources went up, and from what I've seen, they were instructed to not only merit great posts, but also "just" good posts.

This is why I publish it, so of course I don't mind :)

The full version of theymos' data isn't that big. Besides, I use bitcoin revo's free web hosting (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2830067.0), and use only a fraction of my allowed data.

Theymos' reasoning was that abuse will eventually only be a very small (and very expensive) part of all merit. But if you feel like chasing them, there's a very large group of users with exactly 10 Merit earned.

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Update: Note that your script will search for all users who received Merit for the first time, while the "less than 50" I mentioned is only the increase in number of users with 1 Merit (users who earned their second Merit lower this value).

Lots of business here in bitcointalk :)

why they dont implement 10 merits to become jr.member, and 50 to become member.
New rules decrease real spammers by approximately 15%
still a lot to hunt :(

That’d probably make it harder to conceal Merit abuse yes. It’d go some way to turning off the supply of constant noobs with 1 Merit joining sig campaigns & bounties.

whats the diffrence with copper members ?? maybe dumb question haha  ::)

Copper member has some advantages. It will let a legit newbie has a signature again in addition to letting him add an image to his posts...

so it gives only advantage when your a newbie ?

It is mainly made for newbies. Afaik most of the advantages are dedicated to them. I don't know if the other ranks have a reduced waiting time by 75% between posts or not. Take a look here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2385104.msg24371150#msg24371150

The member search page only returns a maximum number of results. Currently there are 3145 copper members. Maybe I'll compile stats over time later. For now, you could search the Bitcoin block chain for transactions of the copper-member amount.