Bitcoin Forum

I know I know. This sounds like a terrible idea at first glance because we paint the picture that this is some sort of premium forum and exclusive forum but we have a real problem on our hand right now. Spammers are every where and have no fear of getting banned. If they get banned they simply get as new VPN using some of the public ones people host and create another account to spam on.

Currently we are dealing with:

1. Advertisement spam.
2. Trolling
3. FUD spreading
4. Ref spam and general spamming.

Most of these things seem to get newbies banned but by the time they are banned their spam has already been read by a few hundred people. Sometimes the spam goes unmissed when it hasn't been reported or spotted by a moderator and sometimes people like the bump this topic by criticizing the OP for posting garbage which in effect bumps the thread and hurts legitimate threads in that sub forum.

That gets me on to another point. Can we please stop this backseat modding? What I mean by this is instead of reporting the topic you just post what they should of done or attack the user for spamming and all you are doing is promoting their spam by bumping their thread. Just report it and move on. They are likely a bot account and won't even see the reply anyway but by bumping it you are exposing it to a lot more people.

The quality of this forum is good when considering the amount of moderators and how they have to deal with the mass onslaught of users caused by the unstable market right now. But its still not good enough and I think more moderators need to be added to keep this place under control. More moderators doesn't mean over moderation if you get the right people.

I'm guilty of this sometimes, and I know damn well it's a waste of my time to do so--but it's just so emotionally satisfying.  However, I'll keep your suggestion in mind because it's a good one.

I voiced support (likely in a fit of rage about something) for closing the forum to new registration a while back, but I don't really think that should happen as it would deny legitimate new members the opportunity to discuss things on the best crypto forum in existence AND it would likely lead to someone creating a competing bitcoin forum (assuming they could implement signature campaigns, of course).  I don't want to see either of those things happen.

There are some very good solutions to the spamming problem, but Theymos is just taking his sweet ass time about changing things.  At least we got the merit system and then the 1-merit requirement to rank up to Jr. Member.  That's progress at least.

I agree that restricting registrations completely would be a little overkill. Its just frustrating seeing users not care that they will be banned because its so easy to just go make a new account with the numerous vpns which are coming up every minute.

The backseat modding I think everyone might be guilty at that at some point during their lives whether thats on the forum or off it. But it really doesn't have any point except for being off topic or bumping the thread.

If you are telling someone how to move their thread your reply is off topic. If you are moaning about them spamming it might be on topic because your pointing out to others that its spam but it just bumps the thread when reporting it would get rid of it and not expose it to other members of the forum. I don't know I just find back seat modding annoying.

None of this is that bad really, just inconvenient.
What actually is bad is what is happening with new accounts creating fake ANN threads in attempt to infect users with malware in their wallets and downloads. This is actually damaging rather than just annoying.

I'm half of the notion that people should just know better and if they get got by it I hope they learn from their mistake, but many don't know any better and expect the forum's scum to be cleaned up by moderation.

The more you moderate the more you have to moderate so I think the next reasonable steps be more new account restrictions such as only member and above accounts will be allowed to post topics in certain sections and/or a similar threshold to be able to self moderate topics.


This has already been made quite hard to do.

I think something needs to be done about registration but not completely shutting it down (very bad idea)
For example i noticed that when you register on this forum, There is no confirmation link sent to your email address, i really don't know what the reason for this is but it certainly is a contributing factor to increased easy creation of fake spamming accounts ( i could just use random emails to register as many accounts as possible)

- My suggestion would be to intergrate some sort of SMS verification/Email verification per account. Once a number has been associated and verified with a given user id, one can not use it for creating another account.

- Restrict use of disposable email services for new registrations
I really don't know how easy it is to implement any of the two  but those are just my thoughts

We have to let legitimate anonymous users register here and have multiple accounts.

How many alts does a legitimate user need to have 10? 20?
In my opinion 3 or 4 alts are more than enough and it's quite easy to access 4 phone numbers or non disposable emails in reality but for an account farmer or spammer, this would be a real pain to them as it would be so hard to get 100+ numbers for every new account

Yeah trolls are the worst i feel that we have a lot of cyber bullying in the forum. We are all men but still is anoying

Emails can be hidden and not exposed yo public view, having a confirmation requirement does not reduce anonymity of a user or the number of alt accounts they can own.
And for the security of your account, it's best to have access your the registered email. Although implementing this would only raise the difficulty a little for the bot account creators but it's still easy to go around it.
For now we can only report such posts when we see them, and maybe a report profile option (or post history) should be made available, this would give the mods a list of suggested profiles to ban

I'm a bit ambivalent about anonymous members. I might be mobile, but I don't try to conceal my identity (ies), and it wouldn't be too difficult to track me down. However, I'm in England, and I understand the limits here. Members in countries like Venezuela have a lot more of a problem, and they have to be circumspect in their comments, and I can understand their need to remain anonymous.

I believe that anyone promoting an investment programme, or looking for payments from other members should forfeit their anonymity though.

Email verification of accounts won't be as good as SMS verification. Like what the OP said banned members know how to create new accounts with new email addresses via a VPN network so email verifications at this point is useless. SMS verification although it might be more effective I don't think that new users would like the idea giving away their number to register an account in a forum, it might even discourage potential good members to even join the forum. Honestly I really don't have any good idea on how we will separate the spammers from good members when it comes to account creation without sacrificing the convenience for all of them, including the people who are not spammers in the first place.

In my opinion restricting user registrations might help but I should prefer on bitcointalk.org to promote the website for the cryptocurrency enthusiast that until now do not have the idea of this website for cryptocurrency discussions. I bet we can gain more especially on pumping bitcoin market price. I myself can attest to this because at first I do not want to invest in bitcoin and just will do bounty hunting but later on I decided to invest on BTC.

We have asked several times to solve this problem but so far apart from requesting a merit to reach the junior level, nothing has been done.
A solution to this problem could be to remove the possibility of posting without limits (apart from the temporal one based on the activity) for the newbies.
Yes I know that it's not just them the problem and not only they are the spammers and not only they try to scam but I think 90% of the problems are caused by them.
An additional step also this suggested several times could be to raise the minimum merit to reach the rank of junior, one merit is a lot for they majority of newbies but it is also a low amount at the same time and apparently reading here on the forum can be easily bought.

The thing is that there are so many already unbanned inactive registered accounts, that even if you wanted to restrict accounts from registering, setting into motion whatever set of verifications or restrictions, we’ll likely get a lot of already inactive registered accounts coming back to life with a market for them.

Read this:
I'd love to have less spam, especially from bots, but I don't expect theymos to add more restrictions to new registrations.

I would like to see much more bans. If I check some random spammers (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4720640.msg47808059#msg47808059) on BPIP, many of them have many deleted posts, but aren't banned. Even posts reported for plagiarism (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926895.msg48368456#msg48368456) don't always lead to a ban. The chances of getting caught for plagiarism or spam are low, as it's humans fighting against bots. If those spam bots get second, thirth ... and even tenth chances, it feels very demotivating to report them.

You can report the posts that quote spam or off-topic posts too (that's what I do) :)

Considering the fact I've seen "incidents" where there are suddenly 6000 more registrations than usual on one day, I wouldn't be against banning all Brand New accounts that are more than a month old. Make this a one-time thing, so spam bots don't get a reason to start spamming with their new accounts, and this won't hurt many real users, while disabling hundreds of thousands of sleeping spam accounts that are waiting to be activated.
As an alternative, it would be good to add "units of evil" to existing Brand New accounts, even if the IP wasn't evil when they registered. That means a spam bot that registered many accounts at once will be punished on all accounts if some of his accounts get banned.

Is not clear to me how this thing works in the case of a person with a dynamic IP (when they can change IP simply by resetting the router).
The unit of evil in the case of one user is banned is calculated on the old ip (the one which he made the infraction) or with the new IP of the new connection?
If the case is the second a simple change of ip after each session is the easiest way to avoid this punishment, you will get 1 account banned ant the others without EVIL IP.

This is a forum firewall package for SMF, and it is one that I am considering using for the Fit to Talk project.

https://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2815

It's not a perfect system ;) This explains it a bit:
My suggestion would be to add evilness retroactive. This too isn't perfect, but might help a bit too.

1) Theymos isn't going to do this (and nor should he) and 2) Restrict them how? I agree we have a huge problem with spam here but there are better ways to tackle it and without penalising everyone else. Any restrictions you put in place will just scare off genuine users whilst the ones who are here to abuse the forum will jump through whatever hoops you put in front of them time and time again because they are financially motivated to do so. Imagine you're new user and you come here and you struggle to post or are banned straight away (or restricted heavily in some way)  and all you wanted was to get an answer or genuinely talk about bitcoin. Those users will think fuck that and likely leave to never return. For those users who come here solely because they've been told they can earn good money here those are the ones that won't be stopped by a few hoops and will continue to create accounts and evade rules and bans etc. There are ways we can tackle the spam and many have already been suggested but heavily restricting users isn't really the way to go and it's futile even discussing it because theymos is dead against these sorts of restrictions. We can start by tackling the cause of the spam which is lazy campaigns. Requiring more than one merit to get a signature would also help (I think it should be a minimum of ten).

We have been chewing this topic for more than a year now. It is clear that more restrictions will not come any time soon ( or at all).
Basically you have two main problems :
-Money from advertising.
-Scammers.

When you have money involved like for advertising the genuine idea is really brilliant but also very utopian. It's almost impossible to stop those who try to abuse them and there is no way to control anonymous entities to follow some rules based only on moral values.
The only way to fight them back is just to scratch them off the forum. The Ann section has to go, together with the bounties,airdrops,and sig. campaigns, then the bots will be gone (almost, part of them will move to service section, but just for a while, keep reading).
Then your spam, bot and shitposting problems will be solved.

Then we have to focus on the scammers problem. Again, there is no way to stop the scammers (for the same reasons I mentioned above) if you do not take their playground away- the Markedplace, which will be a disaster for many people but again, this is the core of the problem, there is no way to go around it and apply some "fixes". They just gonna fail, again...

If those 2 problems are solved, the forum will turn into a quite place for discussions and development, and 99.9% of the active users at the moment will be gone. Ivory Tower will be blossoming again, and the Off-topic section will have only The Round- Earth Speculation thread active ;)

No money = No problem.

BTW some of the old users may return. Maybe satoshi will show up again, if he likes the new environment

I'll agree on theymos's decision towards this thing. His intention of why this should not happen is pretty clear and fair.

This forum should welcome all type of new users. We should not get the opportunity for those who wants to learn or discuss anything about crypto by the reason of because most of the newbies just toxicate the community.

In fact we have a lot of newbies right now probably rank FM bellow are actually contributing more than the higher ranks (which are actually more toxic. I know that you know some of this higher ranks)

There has been lots of suggestions on how to reduce spam - restrictions from starting threads, higher merit requirement to enable signature, limited to specific boards and lots more, and majority of these suggestions are targetted an new entries and members with newbie rank.

This rank constitutes a bulk of the members here and hence contribute largely to spam. But if we take it by percentage, we may be surprised that a higher percentage of other, higher ranks could be spamming more than the newbies.
Newbie generalization on the forum is reaching an all time high, and the prejudice would discourage lots of eager members.

The system is good as it is now, as long as we keep reporting spam posts. Any major shift could have significant long-term effects.

I have already mentioned that I think restricting user registrations would probably be a little bit too overkill. But the fact remains and that is we have a massive problem with spamming and virus spreading. I have seen the altcoin board myself and there are many fake announcements trying to act as another project and trying to compromise users via a virus. They get banned and the topic gets removed and then they create a new account and do the exact same thing and the worst thing is people are falling for it and getting their systems compromised.


None of these solutions prevent users from creating a new account to post their viruses/advertisement. Something has to be done about it as its kind of out of the moderators hands as all they can do is ban that existing account. Then it takes them 2 minutes to create a new account and expose their malicious post to another few hundred people.

But what exactly are you suggesting? It's useless just saying 'restrict 'registrations'. Restrict them how? And how do we not penalise everyone else under the same net? If people are spreading malware then just keep reporting those threads or posts but until you're going to propose something feasible then it's pointless even disusing (especially given the fact that theymos is almost certainly not going to implement any restrictions that hurt everyone).

One thing I've suggested in the past is that all new users are essentially shadowbanned until their first post or two has been verified by staff before they go public. That way spam bots wouldn't get through and anyone spreading malware could be dealt with before they get the chance to infect everyone.


Don't click the links unless you trust them. We are not responsible for users personal security and that is something only the individual can protect against. People really should be more careful with what they click, download, or who they send their money to.

The bold part is exactly what I was hoping to be suggested. The aim of this thread was to maybe brainstorm and collect some ideas. I never wanted to propose that registrations would just be completely stopped and just limit to invite only. Thats stupid in my opinion.

What you have suggested though is actually a pretty good idea. If users don't know they are banned and their posts aren't showing up to the public then this might actually prevent them from realizing it and creating new accounts. People who are aware of shadow bans might check with another browser which isn't logged on. But what we could do is display shadow banned users to the public but not to registered users. This would then require them to actually make a new account to check whether they are banned which I doubt a lot of people will do if there are no indications that they are banned.

I don't know the best way to go about this or if theymos has said anything about it. But shadow bans could be pretty damn useful in my opinion. I would do it differently to how you suggest it though. I think instead of shadow banning every newbie until they are whitelisted you could just issue shadow bans when someone is breaking the rules. This way they won't expect that they are shadow banned. Or you could combine the two. I like your idea because it prevents bots from just posting garbage but would certainly increase the moderators work load. If the workload can be managed combining both of these could be a great idea.

The issue with your proposal is everyone is going to know they need to be whitelisted until their posts show up so they will make constructive posts for the first few and then they'll continue on their spamming ways. If we combine this with a shadow ban that moderators can issue then a lot of the users won't even notice.

They'll work it out eventually, especially if they have alts, but my suggestion isn't really to leave them languishing in some sort of digital limbo, but just to stop bots and malware spreaders from being a nuisance. They'll either just be accepted, or banned straight away if they're a bot or spreading malware. Users who post rubbish or break the rules in some other capacity like posting a ref link or something could be warned so they don't continue their behaviour.


He put it under the ok category:



I agree my suggestion would be useful and is pretty much one of the only ways to eradicate spambots and other nefarious characters, but I disagree with what you suggested and it wouldn't stop people spreading malware as they still get the chance to spread it before we catch them. Just giving people shadowbans after the fact isn't a great idea. If they break the rules then they should be banned, not just take up server space until they figure it out.


Spambots won't be aware of this and most people won't be aware of this feature who are just signing up to the forum. Most people won't even notice it as is the nature of shadowbanning, but it will catch all those who aren't familiar of the forum and how it works and it doesn't penalise everyone in the process.

I think you are right in that most people won't be familiar with it. But I think those that are spreading viruses and posting advertisement spam are probably more that familiar with Bitcoin and this forum. Spambots probably wouldn't notice. But don't spam bots just post 1/2 posts and then just create another anyway? even if they don't do this right now that would be a way of getting around it.

I think any system we put in would be beneficial even  if there are ways around it. A good example of this is when shadowbanning every newbie until they have been whitelisted. This would actually require the spambots or malicious users to post constructively first of all before they start their spamming and they would have to do this for every account which I think is the best possible way of reducing this. Not many people will be willing to go through all of that wait a few hours just to get their accounts banned right away.

I think that's the best solution and there's no real need of any other restrictions or anything.

The rules are the rules and it states that multiple(unlimited)accounts are allowed,if we're to implement your suggestion,we will be changing the rules on that(which we wouldn't do)
Thus it's up to any user whether legitimate or "illegitimate" to own as many accounts as possible as long as such accounts do not break the forum rules,only when they do can they be tagged illegitimate and punishment meted out

This forum upholds user anonymity and would never request for phone number verification

To speed up the cleaning of the forum from spam, you can do so if the post has several reports to the moderator (5-15), it is automatically sent to the trash. Here is an important one for the automatic removal of a post should be counted only reports of users with more than 300-500 reported positions with an accuracy of 90-100%.

 We can't beat forum spam because we want to use anonymity. 

 I think that the complete restriction of registration is not correct, but to introduce the simplest KYC procedure for new users (old users may not pass, as already registered) is a great step to reduce fraud on the forum. Or as written above to bind your account to your mobile number.

After all, many exchanges began to use the KYC procedure, and before it was not needed.

Such thoughts. I apologize for my English, dear forum users.

Nope. Would be colossally abused. Anyone with 5-15 accounts (or however many you require to remove posts) could just silence anyone they want. With bots this would be easy to do and they could bot your posts to get them removed as soon as they appear.


We're not an exchange. We're a forum, and theymos has said he would never implement KYC and nor should he.

This is because they were made to do so to remain legal. It was not for the benefit of their users or the community. We've seen in the past many exchanges being compromised and only coins and certain sensitive information being compromised. But now if an exchange is compromised or the government has a back door into them they have all the information that they'll ever need and it could be catastrophic. Remember this forum has been hacked on a few occasions too. Are you sure you would want your personal information to be stored on the server? Theymos hasn't got the need or the budget (probably has the budget) to create a security system worthy of protecting sensitive data. Plus theymos would then have to abide by some laws because hes storing personal data.

This would only work if we elected users that have good report accuracy and reported regular but at that point we might as well add them to the staff members anyway.

Restricting user registrations is a slap in the face for anyone willing to join this forum for good reasons. When crypto currencies become mainstream this forum will be one of the main sources of information and closing it for those who want to participate is not the right thing to do.

I understood. Then there is only one thing-to tighten the rules for obtaining the rank of Jr.Member to 10 merits. This will reduce spam, but will not solve the problem of one-day accounts for spam and fraud.

Yes, the retroactive point is the only thing can be good with the evil IP, but I don't think it will be possible to do it since we have millions of accounts with thousands of bots and alts and we have a huge amounts of data, over the time the file.txt will be huge and we will have space problem.

In the end, I'm against the restriction of registrations, it makes no sense because I still believe if we have a 0.1% of new good users it will be always a gain for the community, but I hope to see something against this massive abuse of alts and bots.

As always some people here on the forum are using over 200 accounts in the same bounty and this is disturbing my mental state  ;D.

You seriously suggest removing these sections of the forum?
If you think the forum would be better off completely without them then why don't you just put them on ignore? You should also remove your signature and ignore signatures.

Delete the marketplace too. No buying and selling anything allowed! No trades or transactions.


Change the name to nothingtalk.org ?
Just castrate the forum so it becomes docile.

Oh, I'm sure he would just adore your ideas.

What about bitcointalk itself? Theymos and the moderators? Do they not count?

So I log in from my hotel wifi or mcdonalds and all of a sudden I'm banned until I pay an evil fee?
Every account that has ever logged in on an IP that collected evil just gets wiped out, and the next time any IP gains more evil all accounts that have used that IP get wiped out again.


How exactly does this effect you? Are they your competition?
They are just a bunch of fake twitter accounts spamming scams to other fake twitter accounts providing very little to no value to the company hiring them. So they are the ones loosing by paying them for garbage.
If they don't want to wise up to who they hire then let them fail. Why should we protect them?

IMO ETH token ICOs are one of the worst things that ever happened to cryptocurrency because they tarnish the image of crypto as a whole. They make crypto look like shit.
99% of them are get rich quick schemes at best and I don't much mind them getting a taste of their own medicine.
Just ignore the bounties board and whack em if they try to spam this forum outside of it.


In closing I guess I would just like to say that I value the ideals of Bitcoin and Bitcointalk more than I value the absence of scammers and spammers. Dealing with them is a small price to pay.
If Satoshi's priority was to stop scammers at all costs he wouldn't have made the BTC blockchain immutable, would have made transactions reversible, and would not have been concerned about anonymity. Satoshi's white paper has a section (10) just for privacy.
The only reason I am in Bitcoin is because I believe in freedom.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety, Benjamin Franklin.

This isn't Twitbook. By coming to this forum you are venturing deeper into the internet.

I guess you took my comment wrong. I don't suggest anything, just pointing out the the main problems and the real solution to what everyone is wining about.
It is completely clear none of those suggestions (as you call them) will be ever implemented, so no worries.
The whole idea if there are free money on the table, there's always someone trying get more (all) so it's no way to have fair shares for everyone.

I have thought about this and still fail to see where this is implied in your post..
You even predict an outcome of such action to be where everything is peaches and cream, and Satoshi even comes back, lol.

When the unabashed communist stands with "If we just took all the money from the rich and gave it to the poor the world would be a better place", even though I know that will never happen, I will always stand against these ideas because that is what it takes to ensure it does not happen, action.


Is it the real solution? Is it what you advocate for or not?
Or are you just making a mockery out of all those who are whining because the only "real solution" is complete catastrophe?

I wouldn't consider it free
It's not supposed to be fair. If you are quicker, faster, and smarter you should get more. "Fair" is just feelings.




The only thing that can be abused is rules. The more rules you have the more avenues for abuse their are. The most "fair" is no rules and survival of the fittest, may the best man succeed. This is why freedom and free markets work so well..


???


The more rules you make the more rules you have to make and the end is complete authoritarianism.

Everything will be just peachy.

Wouldn't it just be obsolete with no signatures forumwide?


Didn't the first pizza transaction happen here?
Where would bitcoin be at all without the economy this forum has hosted since the very beginning?


I like address integration ideas but I don't see how this would solve any of the problems of this topic.
BTC addresses are about the easiest thing to create anonymously in existence. A millionfold easier than anonymously making an account here and with no realistic limit.

I do not know if it has been suggested in the past, but instead of having email account confirmation, every new user should be able to register a Bitcoin address and send a signature with a unique code received at the time of registration. This address would become a way to recover the account as well.

If he did not do this, the new account would look like "on probation" and would be even more limited than the newbie account. It can be more easily nuke by moderators and not just administrators.

It has been suggested multiple times, although I'm not sure if it has received an official response from theymos or not. I imagine this will be implemented when the automatic account recovery is introduced to the forum.

I don't know whether putting restrictions on accounts which haven't included an address is a good idea though. Not everyone on this forum will have made an address, and might be simply researching into Bitcoin, and asking a few questions. We shouldn't be punishing legitimate users.

Newbies are really limited accounts, they can't really do much... And form each 100 new users registered 1 should be a good element, so, for that one it worth to have the registration system just like the way we have it right now.

But if in future it becomes a problem, we can change the registration just like the steemit one and ask users to verify their account with a phone sms.

SMS verification in my opinion doesn't belong in a Bitcoin forum. Yes it would stop most malicious users but a lot of people here wouldn't like giving out personal information. SMS verification could be optional for 2fa.

As I've said before things like this will just scare genuine users off whilst the ones who are determined to earn here will just jump through whatever hoops you throw at them (and theymos would never implement this anyway). If I signed up to this forum and it required sms verification I would seriously think twice about proceeding and just leave... or I could just buy a throwaway sim for £1, and that's what those who come here to abuse the forum will also do and that's also why it's essentially futile.

For the amount of money that these spammers earn they wouldn't even blink at getting a throw away sim. SMS verification doesn't solve the problem but it does affect genuine users. I know there's no point in discussing this as theymos would be against the idea anyway. But any restrictions which severely limit normal users should be avoided. This is why I think the shadow ban is the best idea out of all of them. It doesn't affect normal users and only those that break the rules. It solves almost all the problems. Yes they will find out eventually but if it slows down the process of the spamming then I'm all for it.

Or, we should make different merit requirements for creating a topic in various threads, e.g. if you want to open a topic in the Beginners's section (or in the OFF topic), you don't have to have any merits, but if you want to open an [ANN] thread, you should have at least 5 merits etc.
I know that it will scare away geniue coin devs and those who want to advertise a really working new altcoin, but that's only 1 out of 1000 or even less...
Also, because we're a bitcoin forum, let's make it easier to open a topic in the Bitcoin Discussion thread (less merit requirement and more merit to open in the alt section).

I have to agree that not all might really want to use sms. Tho, there are already few members here who were giving out personal informations and sms verification might not ve a problem for them.

Therefore, 2fa and sms is both good as long as you have choices since also not all wants to do the 2fa cause i think we already have it in here yet not everyone is using this feature

If this happened even today, i would also leave the forum. It would be totally demoralizing for newbies looking to rank up. This kind of attitude towards new members must stop. With this kind of restrictions, this forum will just loose it it no time and new users will just migrate to other forums with "softer" rules.
You don't want to see to a lengendary Bitcointalk forum loose it's number one spot to a new rival forum

More reason for genuine new users to go to other forums. what will stop the genuine devs from going to other forums to post their projects due to the stringent measures on bitcointalk?
Am pretty certain that the altcoin section brings in almost half of the users in here, so imagine there are little or no more ANNS of projects in the Altcoin boards due to your strict rules but instead there are quite a number of them in other crypto forums... i guess you know what will happen next.

You may not see it short term, but long term, it has an effect.

SMS verification is a very bad idea, it will stop only potential good people, bot and abusers will likely use virtual online SMS generators to bypass the problem...

This is true, I was aware of the possible effect.
But ANNs are bringing most of the bounty hunters who just don't care about bitcoin, won't ever post in the bitcoin section, so from bitcoin point of view, it's not quality traffic.
From the traffic point of view, I know that every user counts. (even bots, who are e.g. half of the traffic of the ANNs traffic I guess, but I don't have proof of course, it's just an educated guess :) )

I'm also against of scaring off genuine devs but I have no idea how we can make a difference. I think that genuine devs are the ones who won't be able to get merits on the short run when they start their altcoin topic, because spammers scammers (who work together and sharing merit among themselves) seems more legit from the merit point of view than a genuine dev who has no connections with the forum to get merit quickly. I know that a genuine dev can also hire the bots to be able to stand out from the mass of shitcoins but that would cost heavy ETH for him and half of the bot farmers are also scammers, they won't just do anything but run away with the money...

So if you have a look at the ANN threads, from the point of view of a newbie (who came here to make some money with joining the bounty campaigns),  what is the chance that they can select a legit ANN topic with a genuine dev? Really low... Even what is the chance that they will ever found that legit ANN topic, when all the scammy ANNs are bumped all the time and legit ANNs won't have a chance to get to the first page? Users are used to select from the first page (like in a google search) so chances are really low for genuine devs to get noticed at all.
So I think at the moment this is what scares off genuine devs, so if we make some restrictions, maybe (maybe) the legit ANNs would become more noticeable, so I'm not 100% sure that restrictions equals the loss of the quality traffic.
But this is just my opinion, I'm happy to discuss, I hope somehow sometime we'll be able to work out a solution for the current situation, it's badly needed...