Bitcoin Forum

I just created the chart that shows how many forum users ranked up to higher positions since the day the merit system was introduced, and I was quite shocked to see the curve that shows how many Jr. Members ranked up to Member position compared to other ranks:

https://i.postimg.cc/W1WmQYXb/chart-enhance-requirements.png

Please note that these ranks are based on the merit amount regardless of the current activity.

According to these statistics, almost 4 thousand (!) users received 10 merits and ranked up to Member position, and only 222 users earned 100 merits and reached a Full Member position.

I calculated the ratio of ranked up users:

• 50 (users who ranked up to Hero Member) / 16 (users who ranked up to Legendary) = 3.12
• 108 (users who ranked up to Sr. Member) / 50 (users who ranked up to Hero Member) = 2.16
• 222 (users who ranked up to Full Member) / 108 (users who ranked up to Sr. Member) = 2.05
• 3957 (users who ranked up to Member) / 222 (users who ranked up to Full Member) = 17.82 (!)

In general, a Member account does not significantly differ from a Full Member account. Of course, Full Member can wear an avatar and a colored signature, but both of these accounts have the same font size and clickable (https://bitcointalk.org) links in their signatures.

In addition, if Members are rewarded with 1 stake in the signature campaigns, Full Members are typically rewarded only with 1.5 or 2 stakes. Account farmers take this disproportion into consideration and send exactly 10 merits to the alt accounts they farm.

Therefore, I propose to enhance the requirements for ranking up to Member position. In my opinion, Jr. Member must earn, for example, 40 20 merits in order to become a Member. Members who do not have 40 20 merits should be demoted to Jr. Members. As a variant, the required merit score can be gradually increased over several months.

This post has been slightly edited. Comments are appreciated. 8)

First of all, not all the Member accounts are alt of Full Member accounts.
Secondly there are also some quality and constructive posters in the forum who with the help of their posting ability has been ranked to Member rank from Jr. Member. Also Getting a single Merit too takes a lot of time. In that case you want to make 40 Merits for Member rank? :o
Then the senior and hero account can give their alt accounts 40 Merits and can easily make it  Member rank.
By the way nice graph OP.

I seem to have conflicting data on the Merit Dashboard (i.e. needing merits: 8 Legendries were gained, 29 Heroes, 93 Sr. Members, 167 Full Members, 3.130 Members and 9.495 Jr. Members). Not sure why we differ really (If you want to, PM me the list of Heroes so that I can contrast it with my data, and PM you back with the reason we differ).

Regardless, aside from Jr. Member being quite easy to achieve. The other ranks are not (not even Member), and even though one can still cut corners and try not to get caught in the event,  demoting members back to Jr. Member would seem like a harsh punishment targeted at a specific segment because it is plausible to reach their rank through merit abuse.

Every tweak on the rank-from can cause the ripple to turn into a wave (no pun intended) in terms of the number of active forum members around, and that has dropped somewhat significantly lately (some for the joy of many), but even so the number of newly created posts with fresh content seem to waver a bit.

Stake assignation is campaign manager discretionary, and the forum should not shift things around rank-wise to adjust to how stakes are being set by them.

I also proposed the same thing in my earlier post that  Merit requirement should be proportional to activity (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5081840.msg). I second you in increasing the Merit requirement.

Unfortunately I was misunderstood in that topic because I used the word bounty.

It would be interesting to see how many Jr. Members is ranked up with one of two merit donation (2x5 merits or 10 at once), and how many of them is stay only on that 10 merit (not receive anything after that). Only then we would get a slightly clearer picture how many accounts abuse merits, and what is the percentage of alt accounts.

I am not sure that even 20 merits requirement is a problem for those who want to abuse merit system, and on the other hand it may be very discouraging for those legal members who are trying to rank up. It's a very tricky situation for admin, and considering that Jr. Members who are demoted to lower rank need only 1 merit to rank up, these 10 merits increase seems pretty unrealistic.

Saw your topic then remembered I gave similar suggestion sometime ago and here it is;
The high stats coming from jnr member and member ranks is due to the facts that most bounty hunters prefer owning multiple accounts than building on one account and the merit criteria for those two ranks mentioned above make it easier for them to achieve that.

A bounty hunter will prefer earning 100merits distributed among 10 accounts ranking those accounts to member then just building on one account. But if the member rank merit requirements was increase it'll decrease such act.

I don't support demoting any user but I'm in support of increasing the merit requirements for member rank most especially and maybe jnr member too.

 

Without crossing with current rank, the number of merits received bares some concentration on key amounts:
10 is way above 9 and 11 for example, and so is 100 in comparison to 99 and 101 (but a small representation at that).

I have 2 alts with member rank, and this one with member potential, but not enough activity. They were created for various purposes ( and declared ). I ran them up to member rank, mainly because of the link capability. None of them has ever been used for bounty promotion, and I think it is sad that so many members here are completely obsessed with bounties, and scratching a few pence from promoting them

4000 ranked up users isn't that bad considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of users didn't rank up. Merit wasn't meant to stop all spammers, it's meant to stop the majority.

I can't say that I'm really worried about the amount of "members". Considering it's a low rank with an easily attainable requirements those numbers look good for the past year, to me. When I look at your ratios for member/full member it makes sense to me. That is the first change from low requirement merit to substantial. 10 from brand new -> 90 required from member to full member.

So I'm obviously playing fast and loose with the numbers. With a requirement of 9X the merit required the ratio is nearly 9X the amount of "members" being created against the number of "full members". That's just what jumps out at me.

Overall I think things have improved drastically, especially thanks to the people out there breaking up merit rings and eliminating account farms in swaths. So for these actual stepping stone ranks I'd leave it as is. I personally would eliminate the jr. member rank. This would allow people a good amount of time to be actual newbies, take the time to learn and participate while they wait on merit or activity depending on the user. Obviously anyone can still go and get the copper membership if they need to.

I think that increasing merit for junior ranks (Jr.Member, Member) will give a positive result for the forum. This will enable us to quickly find users who abuse the merit system. If the user benefits the forum, then such changes will not frighten him. But fraudsters it will create big problems.

I don't think theymos will like this idea because already merit system is working fine so enhancing more will create too much of chaos again in this forum with threads named Why my rank was demoted,Why I have different ranks,blah blah... so let it be at it was now. :)

Good point so most of the newcomers wont stay atleast a day here.Forum's traffic is decreasing,and most of the people coming arent native english speakers doing this shitty idea will prevent them from ranking up. 1 merit requirement for most of them is too hard to achieve esp those shitposters making it x10 x20 will surely kill this forum.

I disagree with you regarding the advantages given to Full Members over Members. Having a colorful signature and being able to put an avatar is a great advantage and differential for any marketing campaign. It holds more attention.

But I agree with the idea of slightly increasing the number of Merits needed to move forward. Perhaps a statistic of the average time that the users take to advance of ranking after having completed the necessary activity can be a good parameter.

if a member who earned 100 merit is awarded for much less than a legendary who never earned a single merit, then the problem seems to be a bit larger to be solved by increasing 10 merit requirement to 20 merit.

you are also ignoring the fact that there are many legit members who still at ranks of members or full member but have more merit than most Sr / Hero / Legendary members, your proposal is a good one , but you can't solve a problem only to create another problem. by applying your solution, you will simply give a lead to those shit-posters of higher ranks plus creating a higher demand for merit, some shitposters might try hard to get 10 merit, but if they have to get 20 they will look for shortcuts.

@mikeywith
You basically said what I was gonna say.  :)

I don't think the current merit requirements need changing. For a new user who joins Bitcointalk and doesn't have much knowledge about Bitcoin or crypto currency or plenty of time to post, getting those 10 merits can be quite challenging. Making that even harder could be a big blow to many users with the Member rank. And like you said yourself, even if a user earned only 10 merits he has still earned 10 merits more than a Hero or Legendary who are stuck at 500 or 1000 for a year now.

You're right. 40 merits is too much. I lowered the proposed threshold to 20 merits and edited my first post.

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I forgot to mention that these ranks are based on the merit amount regardless of the current activity, so I just added the notice below the chart.



You've shown interesting statistics. 2415 users have exactly 10 merits. As I can see, most of new users stop earning merits if they reach a Member position.

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In my opinion, the second problem might be solved by removing merits from such users, using transactions with a negative merit value.

Baby steps is the thing here, If we put much higher hurdles for new members to cross into new ranks then I think it will also harm the community as they will be discouraged from ranking up. We might end up seeing very few people getting ranked up to higher positions which may not be good for the community in the long run.

From experience, when you get 1 merit as a newbie, you instantly feel happy that someone reorganized you to make you have a possible rank up to a Jr member, this gives you even extra courage to gave just a few more 9 merits to become a possible member, by the time you achieve that, you even feel much more eager to go for the remaining 90 for full member and so on. This really builds confidence progressively. A much higher hurdle would just spoil everything for the beginners.

Also, It would be interested in seeing the ratio of Jr members to those who ranked up to Members

I think that the bold part in your post could show a lot of accounts that ranked by cheating.Of course there are smart people that take measures to avoid this and do it more gradually so their alts can't be easily detected, but it would at least prune the situation a bit.

That is what actually happened with demotion in September of 2018.
Then, a wave of demoted Junior Members promoted again with merit abusements found massively.

I looked into that option too, but strangely enough, we still seem to differ for some reason:
Considering just merits, not activity. Data as of 22/02/2019. We’re spot-on Sr. Members (108), but differ a lot in Members for example.

I take into consideration the initial amount of merits, that is, the rank on the day the merit system is introduced also matters. If a user was a Member (or higher) on January 24, 2018, he/she couldn't rank up to his/her initial position.

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This is an additional ratio of ranked up users:

• 16130 (users who ranked up to Jr. Member) / 3957 (users who ranked up to Member) = 4.07

I can reproduce your data: From Total number of users who received 1 or more Merit (http://loyce.club/Merit/all_users_who_earned_Merit_2019-02-22_Fri_08.19h.txt):
There are 7080-543+1=6538 users who earned anywhere from 10 to 99 Merit.

That makes sense :)
I'm not going to try to reproduce it.

I also feel that merit requirement should be changed.

For example,

5 merit for jr member, 20 for member, 50 for full member, 100 for sr member, and 250 for legendary. 

I am not asking for merit airdrop to everyone again, start from scratch, I don't care. In current system, reaching jr or member status is ok but anything above it the gap is HUGE!

Those first two are good to wipe out all shitposters and don't allow them chances to move up to Member rank.

I don't agree.
Those three requirements, if accepted and implemented by theymos, will create a new generation of shitty Full Members, Senior Members, and above.
I have a hypothesis that if those new requirements implemented, we will see a new abusement wave like that happened with Junior Members Demotion last year.  ::)

I like the gap, that makes a lot of sense for the forum.