Bitcoin Forum

As far as we know there is no any guidelines or rules for bounty managers. Bounty section became a important part of this forum. Bounty managers almost directly involved with spam. We can see different reaction regarding bounty managers from members. Day by day increasing scammy and spammy activity on bounty section.

Lot of members suggested different opinion to avoid spam and scam from forum. But I think nothing is possible without theymos help. Theymos should publish a guidelines for bounty managers. I write few suggestion (draft) below, theymos could consider some of them if need.  


Best option for me if required Bitcoin for bounty campaign. ERC-20 is useless until it listed on reputed exchange. Since this is Bitcoin forum so forum could require Bitcoin for bounty award. Bounty means advertising on this forum. If require btc payment by escrow than we can avoid scam & spam. At least they will not able to scam bounty hunters. I think theymos will not agree with it. So I would like to suggest to implement some guidelines or rules bounty managers. Forum should not give them freedom to promote scam ICO's.  

• Bounty manager's shouldn't ask submit report on OP, bounty report should collect by Google form. Proof of annunciation can be post to avoid bounty cheaters.
  
• Since scam(upcoming or ongoing) are not moderated by forum, no stake distribution on time frame will consider for scam. If a manager failed to distribution stake among bounty participant he should get temp ban for each campaign. 3 temp ban result will be permaban.
  

• Managers shouldn't ask or forced more than 20 post per week for alt coin reward to avoid spam. Or they can pay per post
• Managers shouldn't accept spammer and spam post on count.

• Bounty managers shouldn't not ask reply on thread for airdrop, bounty and ANN Thread. If asked than thread should be trashed and OP should get temp ban
• Thread should be locked after stake distributions.  Because sometimes people's reply even bounty is over.

• BM should lock bounty, ANN and Airdrop thread if team unable to give appropriate answers against scam accusation.
  
• Bumping thread with similar word of "great project (http://archive.is/DVjGk)" by newbie and Jr. Member is prohibited.  More than 15 comment a day like this will consider paid bumping except constructive discussion. If use paid bumping, thread should be trashed and OP should get temp ban.
  

• Bounty manager's should not spend merit on his own bounty thread.
• If need KYC approval for receive stake BM should mention in bounty thread. No mention means there isn't require KYC in order to get stake.
  

• Both account should ban if caught managing bounty with alt account to avoid ban evasion.
  
• Bounty manager's could add disclaimer on bounty thread, it's doesn't mean he/she will not get ban if stake isn't distributed on time. Bounty manager fully responsible if stake not distributed for hunters.
  

• Duplicate thread are not allowed if previous thread trashed by moderators.
• Bounty budget shouldn't decrease after end of campaign if there is more than 100 participant on spreadsheet.

• Bounty thread should made self moderated to delete spam post. ( I am not encourage made self moderated thread for ANN. Because peoples will not able to share true opinion. They might be delete all negative comments. Better option is remove self moderated option from Altcoins Announcement section)    

• Ponzi scheme should not allow to promote on bounty section. ( All ponzi scheme turn into scam eventually)

There is few question if bounty managed by themselves how it will control. My opinion, let them do it themselves by getting copper membership. At least reputed and rank members are not related with them. If hunters trust them and participate on bounty than nothing we can do.  But rules should applicable for all main poster.

Good effort. But you have to consider that admin/mods are not willing to (and cannot in practice) investigate content of every topic, not to mention things like following on bounty-campaign progress and checking whether participants got paid etc. Just put yourself in their shoes.

If you want to create a 'good practice' guide topic - that's fine. But if you want to introduce new forum rules proposal, then you have to boil it down to something clear and simple. ie.something like this could solve the problem:

"Bounty campaigns organisers are responsible for preventing spam-posting of their participants. Providing incentive to spam, or failure to counter it can result in ban for both: participant guilty of spam and campaign organiser"

... but it's probably already too complicated and could be impossible to enforce. How do you define who's 'organiser' (there could be multiple accounts involved), who decide where's the line between normal post and spam? How many spam post does it take to get organiser banned etc.

You could have a separate discussion thread for every point that you proposed. But what strikes me is that you're attributing too much power to bounty managers. Often times they're just middle men between ICO organisers and participants and have no say on things like when/if the tokens are issued, what's the budget and its distribution, even minimum post requirements could be decided by ICO devs.

Oh my gosh. I second all your points. We definitely need some guidelines like this. There are a ton of scam bounties out there. We do not have enough time to go through all.
Specially, when you suggest bitcoin as prize for bounty hunters, fabulous. I WISH this will become true one day.

Sorry but it's hard to quote OP list  :P

• Bounty manager's shouldn't ask submit report on OP, bounty report should collect by Google form. Proof of annunciation can be post to avoid bounty cheaters.
  

What if someone uses 30 accounts? He can cheats anyway

• Since scam(upcoming or ongoing) are not moderated by forum, no stake distribution on time frame will consider for scam. If a manager failed to distribution stake among bounty participant he should get temp ban for each campaign. 3 temp ban result will be permaban.
  

Some managers complete their job at the end of the bounty, yes they don't probably even read reports.

• Managers shouldn't ask or forced more than 20 post per week for alt coin reward to avoid spam. Or they can pay per post

Depens, if post are good why this cap?

• Managers shouldn't accept spammer and spam post on count.

Agree, but it will never happen. Probably are the ICO owner who ask for spam on 1st place.

• Bounty managers shouldn't not ask reply on thread for airdrop, bounty and ANN Thread. If asked than thread should be trashed and OP should get temp ban

Already done.

• Thread should be locked after stake distributions.  Because sometimes people's reply even bounty is over.

Agree, but actually is one of the best way to find bots and multi accounts bots.

[/list]

• BM should lock bounty, ANN and Airdrop thread if team unable to give appropriate answers against scam accusation.
  

Agree.

• Bumping thread with similar word of "great project (http://archive.is/DVjGk)" by newbie and Jr. Member is prohibited.  More than 15 comment a day like this will consider paid bumping except constructive discussion. If use paid bumping, thread should be trashed and OP should get temp ban.
  

I do not agree.
And if I do 30 accounts and spam on your thread? You should be banned?

• Bounty manager's should not spend merit on his own bounty thread.

Agree.

• If need KYC approval for receive stake BM should mention in bounty thread. No mention means there isn't require KYC in order to get stake.
  

Agree. Buf if the ICO's owner ask if before distrubution?

• Both account should ban if caught managing bounty with alt account to avoid ban evasion.
  

The can always use another account or friend to post for them.

• Bounty manager's could add disclaimer on bounty thread, it's doesn't mean he/she will not get ban if stake isn't distributed on time. Bounty manager fully responsible if stake not distributed for hunters.
  

Some managers, are here only for 1 project or scam project and they will leave the account after their ICO, in this way you punish only regulars manager but I agree with this.

• Duplicate thread are not allowed if previous thread trashed by moderators.

I do not agree, someone can do 10000000 accounts and spam one thread only to make mods delete it.

• Bounty budget shouldn't decrease after end of campaign if there is more than 100 participant on spreadsheet.

Yea if target is reached, the decreasing for no reason should be punished, but if it not bounty manager fault?

• Bounty thread should made self moderated to delete spam post. ( I am not encourage made self moderated thread for ANN. Because peoples will not able to share true opinion. They might be delete all negative comments. Better option is remove self moderated option from Altcoins Announcement section)    

I don't know this has pro and contro.

• Ponzi scheme should not allow to promote on bounty section. ( All ponzi scheme turn into scam eventually)

Ponzi are always scam.

Definitely this is a good and helpful thread regarding on getting rid of spam and shitposts. I was forseeing this that theymos will implement some changes on rulings and policy for bounty managers in those bounty sections as I posted it in my thread few hours earlier than this thread.
 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5038486.msg46234638#msg46234638)

Just posted this few hours earlier and it was indeed a coincidence that my post and OP's thread providing effort to help and keep the forum healthy for cryptocurrency discussions.
I had my 100% support for OP with this!

Quite a number of these rules are overly complicated or just outright nonsensical; they would lead to to severe worsening of the situation. You really need to think this through. There aren't even explicit rules against spamming by theymos (e.g. posting from several accounts just to get paid).

I think it would be better to apply stricter moderation in bounty and ANN section.
Also instead of submitting reports, BM could directly track users post through their profile (I think a few do this). It would reduce mega threads and pyramid posts.
We have to accept that as long as there are bounties spam will come with the traffic it generates.
The new merit system is helping curb that.

I don't think that is true, Ponzi schemes don't have a means to transfer funds directly between investors, Due to inflation, almost every asset class has rewarded early investors - just look at property and gold for example. Not all new buyers of Bitcoin have lost money, and there is price volatility with all forms of currency. Bitcoin is an asset, but it is in a different class - virtual assets, and most people have difficulty in understand this about bitcoin, however they seem to be able to understand the values of other virtual assets such as domain names, fiat bank deposits, games awards and some others.

As a member of Bitcoin Talk, I think you should clarify the situation with your friends, and make them aware of the advantages they are missing by rejecting Bitcoin.

Well the problem is not about the bounty managers as well as their rules whom they created and posted on bounty sections. There are some things that we should consider also and that is the part where bounty managers introduces an ICO projects. Some of them are just accepting the job as a bounty manager even if there is a need to check first the project before accepting it.

As we all know that the ICO projects nowadays are flooding in the bounty section and this is the real problem. Most of it are labeled as fraud for some of them will not comply and will make their own adjustments as long as they want it and favorable to them. ICO projects could be introduced on bounty sections anytime since it is free and there is no required documents to assert the that the ICO project is legit. The likely to scam others would be high because of the ICO projects team are anonymous or could isolate themselves and run away after getting the money from its investors.

To run an ICO projects and promote it here in the forum should undergone screening procedures. Thus, starting an ICO project should require some relevant documents for the team that would be held liable for the money of the investors. The Lesser the ICO projects,the lesser people that could work on the bounty sections and lesser spamming posts will be made by the bounty hunters but higher rate to get good rewards than being scammed with an ICO project.

Note that you are advertising an ERC20 token(BQT) in your signature.
What makes you say so that ERC20 is useless? EOS was an ERC20, BnB is an ERC20. Both of them weren't traded in reputed exchanges at first. Many even thought that BnB along with its exchange would fail miserably.
Does that mean they are useless?
Listing in a reputed exchange alone won't make the token/coin great enough to be accepted as a legit one. Are you exactly against tokens or the scams and spams happening around the forum? If you are against alts stop advertising ERC20 in your signature.

No, this is no more a bitcoin forum. This is one of the largest cryptocurrency forums. If this is a btc forum, then why does it have "Alt currencies board and why do they allow ANN of alts?"

Regarding your guidelines, they are already being followed by some of the reputed and spam free managers.

Some of your points are legit , but most of them is impossible to implement beacuse it would require huge moderator efforts, mods have their hands full and part of your suggestions is not the forum's responsibilty.

This is by far the most rational suggestion so far.

Also it is not like mods are not doing anything, even with this huge job, there is a negative trust given for managers who are dishonest and are promotng scam ICOs repeatedly.

I have only one recommendation towards bounty managers. Take 30 minutes of your precious time and check the project before you accept to manage it.
I know it's not your job to verify the legitimacy of the project but in a very short time and almost no effort you can potentially save the forum from thousands of unwanted/spammy comments, weekly bumps and most importantly unpaid bounty hunters (also managers).

Take this as a friendly suggestion, it's not too much to ask, right?

Yes, it's little bit complicated. But at least need few guidelines or rules from admin to reduce spam and scam.

I am fully aware about that. For your information this campaign reward is by btc and this is spam free campaign as well there is merit required. You are ignoring my point, award should be by bitcoin. So participant no need to worry about exit scam except investors.

How you consider bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, there are no promising return. How new investors are lost money ? Someones scam them ? There is any promising high return on bitcoin whitepaper ?

This is not going to happen if there is no any guidelines or rules from forum.

These can be easily fixed by forcing bounty campaigns to always have an official escrow for the bounty pool. Having an escrow to hold the bounty pool means that the project team can no longer change the allocated bounty pool and the date of bounty distribution. Of course, escrow must be highly trusted within this community to avoid him/her running off with the bounty funds.  ;D


This could potentially be abused by the project's competitors. Create a bunch of alts and spam post your competitor's ANN thread to get it trashed.  ::)

Great effort, but there are some things that you don't understand about a free market. Let me point some out.

There is supply, and there is demand, that being said, you are not allowed to require anything about how payments should be made. There is the decision of the business how it desires to pay customers...btc or own tokens.

Everyone has a different method to run his campaign. There is no one's business to intervene.


The number of posts are usually required by the business. Can you force a bounty manager not to take a job because his client wants 25 posts per week?


I agree, but you can't force them.


I am pretty sure it is not allowed to incentivise people to bump up threads. In any case, i don't see how thrashing the post would help with that...a red trust should be enough.


Actually, the best way to identify scammers is to leave the thread open and then just ban those who continue posting after 3-4 weeks have passed since the end of a campaign.

Hard to say here, they could do it so they won't recieve retaliation trust from the scammers in the bounty.


I still haven't found a reason why disclaimers help in any way...
Tokens are usually paid by the team, why would the bounty manager be responsible if the team doesen't deliver?
The team could decide to alocate bounty tokens proportionally with the ammount sold. Some of them market a big bounty budget to attract more people (if hardcap is reached)...you know, that's how marketing works


Bounty budget and the number of participants are negociated and agreed by the team and the bounty manager. Nobody's business, except them, how many participants should be allowed to participate.


I am pretty sure this is kinda obvious. They should not be allowed to be promoted anywhere on the forum.

In the end, before making rules or something like that, try to understand the dynamic of the the agreement between the bounty manager and the business.[/list]

So bumping thread should allow? I don't think it will happen very much. Everyone's busy with their own projects. I accept it might be hapoen 0.1% , it doesn't mean we should allow bumping ANN thread. On the other hand accoumt also will permaban those are related with bumping service.


Budget details should publish from beginning. Should not change after end of ICO.

That's why need guidelines or rules.


Clients are not allowed to decide about forum rules. Only admin can. I told you, that's why need guidelines from admin.

I will disagree with your point. I am aware about the campaign rewards being paid in Btc and it is being run by Zapo as I was a part of similar campaign run by them. Participants are mere advertisers and promoters/ marketers of the product. There might be a newbie investor who view this signature and might invest in the project with little read through of the white paper. I have seen some DT negging some bounty hunters who promote the scam even after the projects were exposed. Both Participants and managers who promote the project should be aware of the project they are endorsing so that it doesn't misguide any newbie investor who enter this field.

I agree with this solely. FYI Dick bigs a Ponzi is something where the people/group of people urge others to invest in their companies or so called great returns schemes. Also a ponzi scheme owner promises gains if the people invest in their company. Did satoshi ever say anyone to invest in bitcoin? Was it even worth enough to buy few thousands of btc for a $ in late 2009? If you/anyone who say btc is a ponzi it clearly states that you doesn't even understand what a ponzi is! You are not urged by anyone to invest in btc nor satoshi didn't run away with the money as commonly ICO owners does!

The ones in bold, I said that. But the messages below it, you're quoting the wrong person buddy  ;D
Back to the topic, The current rule states that bumping on one's thread is allowed provided that it's the OP that bumps it and it is done only once every 24 hrs. If anyone is found breaking such rules, why not just report them?

Lending coins project should not be allowed to advise their bounty campaign here. I have not seen any lending coin that has lasted for more than a year. They are all scam.

I have mentioned about ponzi scheme.

All lending platform are consider as a ponzi scheme. All ponzi scheme has became scam eventually.

"Guidelines" sounds like regulation. Regulation on a libertarian forum probably isn't going to go over so well.

The root causes of these trash and spam posting is the bounty manager who ask their bounty Hunter to post 20- 30 post per week.there should be stricter measures  for signatures compaign.i will suggest five post per week nothing more than that.any bounty manager that violet theses rule his or her trend should be deleted.these will control the activities of the forum.we need sanity here mate.

We have a child board in Marketplace (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=5.0) called "Services (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=52.0)"  which is where any bounty, campaign or service paying in Bitcoins is posted. Those bounties pay in ERC-20 tokens because they are all Alternative Coins, and they have been given a completely different section for their services and stuff. So, this forum, being a Bitcoin forum, also has a place for other alternative coins out there, so it is not possible to not allow someone to pay his workers with any other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin, unless you are proposing to remove the complete Altcoin section from the forum which is also not possible.

They're guidelines, not strict you will die if you don't follow these authoritarian laws.

The clue is in the title:


How is a 'guide' IE something we suggest you do regulation? It's just a way to try bring some order to the chaos here. Besides, this is a bitcoin forum not a libertarian one. There are also rules here, but it's because we've been so lax about what people can get away with here that the forum is such a shitshow. Without some basic rules it just become pure anarchy and the greedy shit all over the place and ruin it for everyone else. That's why we need some rule of law, but that doesn't mean you have to rule with an iron fist. I'd say expecting some sort of minimum standards here is in everyone's interest, especially when the forum has become largely unfit for it's true purpose.

I agree with with you. I have shared just idea. It's really not rules, but admin could chose some of them that I suggested. Or admin should make few rules or guideline himself. Something is better than nothing. This forum almost working fine because there is few rules. Even a country or a company can't run without rules. I believe there should be few rules also for bounty managers. Don't leave them free.

People seem to think that this forum is a free-for-all and anything goes and because it's a forum about bitcoin that means there's no rules because of decentralisation. Bitcoin has rules. So does this forum. We don't have to have a list of thousands of them written like a legal document but we need at least some to keep some basic order and functionality, but this forum is a pretty good example of what happens when you don't have many rules or enforce the ones you do have as people are quick to exploit that when they realise they can get away with certain things.

This one is easy to implement and would prevent "reports" being used to pump the threads and having users whose posting list is 100's of twitter reports.


I disagree. The Bounty Manager does a job for a company. Most of the times they don't have a say on the bounty payments and many times they are affected by those late payments.


I would even go further: no more than 15 post a week. Any thread asking or incentivizing more than 15 posts a week should be deleted.


I would go further: There should be no merit in the ANN / Bounty sections.


On the contrary, I would not allow any member that is not at least Full Member to launch an ANN. A member or Copper Member have nothing at stake, so they can try to break the rules or scam and the worst thing for them is losing a non-valuable user.

I like those guidelines except for the self-moderated thing, for the same reasons you mentioned.
Other than that, I don't know if this could be implemented but it would définitely be good for the forum.

This unfortunately common opinion is not true.
I agree on bounty reports, they shouldn't be posted here. Proofs of participation should be posted in bounty thread to make sure no one is cheating.
Bounty manager is not responsible for token distribution.
Most(all?) bounties have 10-15 posts rule.
Agreed.
If I am not wrong, this is violation of "no altcoin forum giveaway" rule and if you report such thread(s) they will be locked/trashed.
I agree.
That is only their decision. Scam is not moderated.
That is actually tricky one. Competition can easily exploit this "rule" to trash various topics.
Good solution for this problem might be to not allow certain ranks to bump threads. For example, only members and above can bump thread and newbies/junior members are allowed to post but thread won't be bumped when they post.
This has nothing to do with this forum. It is deal between bounty hunters and the company. If it is not stated in rules, you are not obligated to provide your information. Company is not allowed to change rules after job is done(change rewards, ask for KYC)[1].
Well, it is against forum rules anyway...
Bounty manager is not responsible for distribution of rewards(again  ::)), but if they keep managing bounties for scams they can't hide behind disclaimers.
This is also against forum rules.
Read [1]
Ponzi is scam from day one. It doesn't "eventually" turn to scam.
To be honest, sometimes it is very well hidden and you will have very hard time to prove it is ponzi. Then what? Would you blame admin for not removing it?

 unfortunately , it seems like everybody is upset about these bounty campaigns except the managers themselves, seems like everything is working well for them, and most of them don't seem to be bothered,even about the "cheaters".

the pay out for most of these campaigns is either very low , or a lot of "nothing", therefore who ever funds the campaign can't be bothered about what is really going on, i even doubt they follow what those participants actually post , despite the rules of  " posts must be constructive" that seems to be common standard that they never actually breach( except for a few managers).

i think this thing will have to sort out itself, they will get to a point where they need to start enforcing those rules, the forum can't moderate their business for them, we are just the victims of their shitposts, i think we stick "report to moderators" until something major happens in the whole crypto market which will change the whole nature of these bounty shit.

stupid attempt at tyranny

Managers are not bothered at all because they are using stake based system, so it doesn't not affect them how many people are doing the bounty. If more user ( or cheaters) everybody will get less payment. Managers and ICO are not affected at all.
If remove the staked the I guess manager might get serious for checking posts and quality or interested in catching cheaters.