Bitcoin Forum

I think a lot of tasks in signature campaign management can be automated, it's pretty easy to write a program that counts posts in given timeframe, checks in which boards they were made, checks that length was sufficient and so on. Of course it can't measure quality, so managers would still need to look at posts themselves, but it eliminates the need for counting, which is long and error-prone.

I know there are many services for bounty campaigns, and there was some service for automated sig campaign management in the past, but still I would want to know if there's a need for such tools today, because I could develop one if someone asked for it.

I believe there have been things like this in the past, namely, the really old bitmixer signature campaign 3 years back. It was a bit of a mess until they actually added in a manager in, but from the top of my head, I believe it had these features.

-Starting post count for the week
-Ending post for the week
-Current accepted posts (the bot only checked the length of posts, not quality)
-Payment due

I reckon a viable option would be creating a bot that would pull all the posts that are accepted (so you need to make sure the bot can make sure they are posting on the correct board, with the correct length) into a word document, then auto checking it for plagiarism.

I don't think bots will ever replace managers in this industry though. Bots are unable to check post quality.

Yes there were many campaigns like Bit-X , Coinroll which used such automated system to do this stuff.

I think there is a still need for it but not in campaigns with low participant no.s such as signature campaigns. Anyone can do that manually. You can start making bots for bounty campaigns as managers find it really time consuming going through checking each participant in long list of around 5-10k entries in total.

From my experience, checking posts from 10-50 participants in a week is not that time consuming, assuming that you've already selected good posters from the beginning (I work as a bounty manager assistant). This might be different with other manager but most of the time I use around 3-4 hours to do it.

I agree with Avirunes, this kind of bot is probably more meaningful if managers use it to check others reports such as social media reports which are done weekly and sometimes has more than hundreds or thousands of participants in it. I never see a complaint from a signature participant, except for a few where they feel they've made enough post but in fact, 1 or 2 were deleted. On the other hand, I always see a complaint from social media participant where they feel that their report is not checked yet.

if all that the tool does is show a report or stat to the user of it, then i don't think it would be a very useful tool. most of the things you listed can easily be calculated. for example number of posts only requires you to click on the page numbers in the post history and find the last datetime of the previous payment. the number of posts is the number that is shown on the top right corner of that comment.

what you could do is to create an interface that shows all the valid posts. for example it could fetch the post history based on that date and "hide" posts that are not accepted. for instance it could hide posts in boards that they don't pay like altcoin board. and only show the valid ones. so the manager could just focus on them.
you could also add an X button on top of each post to let him remove anything that is not accepted and project that in the total accepted number.

Some campaigns had/have tools, but I don't see their usefulness in a good campaign. In a good campaign the manager has to check the posts for being good quality, not off-topic, no duplication and so on, things that a tool cannot do, so whether he'd use your tool or not, the campaign manager would have to check the posts anyway.

Of course, for lower quality campaigns, where only the numbers matter (number of posts, number of characters in a post, max number of posts in a thread or page), then indeed the tool would be enough. If it's the case, probably some campaign managers would approach you.

Imho such tool would "help" the quality of posts decrease, so if you ask me, you better stay away.


Edit: with such a tool on twitter maybe you can become a twitter bounty manager, if there are still such bounties...

I've worked with Twitter API in the past, but there are bounty platforms that cover that, so I don't plan to reinvent the wheel here, I want to knowif there's a need for tools specifically for Bitcointalk posting. If there is, I could make it and release to the public as an open source project.

I think the best people to understand those needs are the campaign managers themselves. If they are willing to be interviewed by you and ask what makes their job hard, maybe you could start from there. I'm not sure how hard it is for them to make sure they have the correct counting, correct board posting, etc. From their response, it would be easy to start a chart then see what you could code from it.

Have you tried contacting the trusted and reputable managers here? Like DarkStar, Hhampuz, and yahoo? I don't know if they would reply or if they use tools already, but pretty sure you can have an answer to your question.

A lot of automation is already used, but the Signature campaign managers would not want to divulge their secrets or every Tom, Dick and Harry would want to do this or cheaters would try to exploit the loop-holes.  :P

A good Signature campaign manager knows what to automate and what to handle hands on. As previous posters already mentioned, the controlling of post quality should be the primary task of any campaign manager.

Also, differences between campaigns, makes the task more difficult to have one single solution for all the different campaigns.  :P

Yeah, this is what I had in mind.

Management would never be able to be fully automated because we do not have the technology to be able to determine quality posts from spammy posts. This is very similar to what I had in mind, with the bot being able to fetch the acceptable posts, and then the manager being able to only need to check the posts that the bot has already approved. This + some spreadsheet formulas would make some tedious tasks that are involved in managing very easy.

One way to think of it though is restricting this to a twitter/facebook bot. Auto checks the account if they are following the correct people, as well as if they've posted their necessary posts in the correct sections.

The main purpose of signature campaigns is not to show the signature but to trust who makes that signature and thus trust that what is published is something of value.
For example, if you have a problem and X member wear Y signature, solve that problem. you will be interested in Y signature when searching for that service.
Campaign managers are trusted members who can identify who is helping everyone and therefore hiring them.
You can create a bot and add some paid features or rely on donations, but the essence of the subject is what you mentioned above.

Any tool that can substantially reduce the effort necessary by the manager without compromising on quality should be desirable.

However, you will need to consider the time burden for you actually creating this tool, and whether or not it benefits the managers enough for them to pay the price you ask for it.

Some examples of useful tools could include a post similarly checker, which checks how similar a post is to previous posts made in the same thread.

Another useful tool could measure the number of posts per day before enrolling, vs after enrolling in a signature campaign, to see which accounts are just used for sig payments.

If it can't decide accurately whether post is qualitier or not, how can it help managers to count posts? Because that script can't count quality posts and in any way, counting job is still depends on manager.
I think if you make something that can filter posts: check them gramatically and etc, this will really be a great deal. But it can also cause loss of job for them, possibly.
But in any way, bot can't change human in this process, at least without great algorithm which I hugely soubt anyone will write for sig campaigns.

I guess it can easily be manipulated as bots can be outsmarted by the clever hunters. Yobit campaign still uses this even today.
This is why there is the need for Bounty Managers just so every posts will be checked and this will also lessen the difficult job of Moderators of this forum. If you can make a not strict enough to monitor individuals post, I think some companies that will do bounty campaigns might just try your solutions.

From what I know we already have one for registering participants that is. I know that Google allows you to synchronize Google Forms and then convert it to Google Spreadsheet data automatically. So when a big bounty campaign comes bounty managers would save their time on going through all the pages copying and pasting all the needed data into the spreadsheet. They just have to provide the Google form link on where the users will answer a survey to register them in the campaign.

I don't see how automated post counting would be necessary for any sig campaigns though. Sure it will speed up the process but bounty campaigns do really need to see the qualoty of posts one by one. Not unless you have an A.I. doing the quality checks and word count for you I don't think it would be such big help for the forum spam wise with this kind of automated program.

Never!
Bots do have specific field of usage like post counts/payments etc. but for quality then managers would really be needed there's no other thing that can replace human on this field.

I've seen several campaigns using automation - Yobit,Bitmixer, Coinroll as far as i remember but they do still add up managers on it.

Manual checking is still the best tool for a signature campaign.

A reputable and good manager will never use an automated tool to check post quality even it involves checking a large quantity.

Maybe your plan tool can help other forms of campaigns here such as Social Media Campaign or any in a bounty program.

Sure, but you can eliminate some work from a manager's task list.
If they don't have to count the posts & characters any more, then they can just focus on manually checking the quality.

Quality control is indeed something that shouldn't be automated, but the other menial counting tasks can be in my opinion.

I agree with you, bots can't check the quality but count the post made by participants in a particular time. I think that's needed when you have 100+ participants in your campaign. Yobit signature campaign is currently using this system to maintain participants record. I think this system can make campaign management easy and for quality check campaign manager may review posts and eliminate the low-quality posts from the total count by bot.

To me, yes we actually need some tools to save a lot of time and efforts managers take while managing a campaign's spreadsheet. There should be a date-specific column setting that must allow the bot to check the posts based on total posts made during a specified date (week) range so to save users from being provided false numbers due to deleted posts and decrease in total number of posts of a user because of the same. I was once a part of a campaign that used bot to determine post number, but it had this issue of starting count with the previous week's last end number and even if a few posts get deleted, bot used to show the same number as starting post count for which users had to make the remaining amount of posts to first make their count reach the count the bot used to show.

Not that I will ever manage a campaign, but were I do to so there's no way I could face it without some automation on side.

Some campaigns must have 100 posters doing 30-50 posts a week. That's thousands of posts to count and skim. My eyes would roll back in my head I'd puke my own pelvis up on the first attempt. The idea of having to do it all again the following week would fully break me.

Kudos to those who do do it.

If it were largely automated you could still dip into every few posts manually to make sure they weren't posting complete and utter bilge.

I think if someone creates such software and publishes it there, since effort of campaign managers will decrease, their salary will decrease too and possibly there will be less demand on them. But on another hand why to publish it in public? I think orders may come from campaign managers or if any of them knows programming, they'll do it for themselves and lessen their time spent on campaign management activity.
Again, I think it's not a big deal without great algorithm, bitmixer had money and etc to do that but they chose simple bot and Lauda as manager, he was needed.

Yep. Bitmixer is a good example when they tried to be fully automated, it was a massive mess and any regular shitposter was able to run rampant and spam posts and get paid. When Lauda came in and helped out with management, all of the shitposters were booted, even with their bot being able to detect the characters and what sections the posts were made in.

I don't think that'll be possible, even if you check every 1 in 5 posts, because they'd be low content posts getting through. It'll be very hard to manage a campaign, even with automation, because you'd need to read every single posts, which I'd reckon would be over 20,000 posts a week, all read and counted in a single day. It's crazy.

It depends on how carefully you select your members in the first place. If you have a bunch of old hands that you're familiar with it's very unlikely they're all going to have a funny turn and start posting risible junk. It's a different matter if it's something like a Yobit campaign of course.

The more effort you put into initial selection I presume the easier actually running it is. Rather them than me all the same.



 

Ah, I can agree with that. What could be a possible new way for signature management would be getting all the interested users to sign up via the web application (similar to bitmixer's one), and then for the manager to selectively accept and decline users via the application. Alerted users would be automatically PMed and they would be able to utilize the portal throughout the week to check how many of their posts are qualified from a basic standpoint (above certain characters, in a certain section).

I could see this working, and then the manager only checking posts ever so often. For example, a lot of high paying campaigns probably do not need a manager due to their post quality and how used they are to doing everything correctly.

That's kinda what I'm talking about, most sig campaigns have requirements like not paying for certain boards, minimum char counts, limited languages and so on, it can easily be parsed automatically and presented either as a simple totalPost/qualifiedPosts report, or go into detail like board structure of posts. Then the manager simply needs to quickly glance at post history and if necessary substract any posts that are of low quality.

As for automatically scoring quality, it might be possible to develop tool that probabilistically do it with machine learning. In fact, I was even working on that recently, but I dropped the project because a big dataset is required and I'm too lazy to prepare it.

That's wrong because in the end, it's all campaign manager's job to effectively put things into consideration and watch out for quality and negate any posts that doesn't suit the campaign's standards. So, the manager still deserves what they are being paid. If everything could be considered correct for automated counts and everything, then why didn't Yoshit campaign become a successful story here?


Something I'd agree with, because this is something that should be taken fare of as it's totally somebody's talent they are showcasing through making such program that'd do almost everything a manager does (except the quality watch part).

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I believe I've seen some spreadsheets with integrated automation which isn't fully automated but the manager used sums and subtractions in specific places to determine exact post counts and payable amounts in BTC which is quite interesting.

All of that can be really done manually without having software to do it. The biggest challenge is checking the quality of the post which is nearly impossible so there is no point in putting efforts. There have been tools like that in the past and no reputed manager has used it. Counting posts and length is pretty fine.

If you can dig into the right threads, you might find such tools used in the past.