Bitcoin Forum

I was looking through the forum and found this member, coinfunda (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2287893), using the forum as an advertising wall for their website. The way coinfunda is advertising their website is disgusting and pure definition of shitposting and nonsense posting: pretending not to know about some wallets/services/coins and posting a question on our forum, but placing a link to their own articles answering their own questions which makes the reason of posting a thread here nonsense unless it's literally intentional advertisement:

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Moreover, taking a look at this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5143323) thread kinda infuriates me:


After coinfunda asked these questions, members of the forum took their time to answer them. 4 days later, take a look at the final reply of coinfunda before locking the thread up:


Coinfunda literally asked questions so they profit off other members' time. I don't know, this is kinda sad and infuriates me because they're using the forum and the knowledge of its members as a way to monetize their website. Is this posting behavior off like I see it or am I wrong?

If they ask a question that they know the answers to just to deliberately advertise themself then they are wrong.
But if is to benefit from the knowledge of members here I assume we are benefiting from members knowledge, is not bad to learn from another man's knowledge

For the ads that this user is posting, if he is doing it wrongly or breaking any forum rule, you can report the post to the moderators, the mods would decide if the post should be deleted, and if he should be nuked or temp banned for it.

As for his asking questions to use them make up his articles, there are two ways to that, if he is picking the exact words(verbatim, plagiarising)used by users on his thread to write his article, then that's plagiarism, and if he ever posts that article on the forum, he'll be banned for it. But if he is able to draw knowledge from HQ replies of others and make out something from it using his own words based on his understanding of what he learnt here, then AFAIK, it's fine.

a lot of us do but this kind of advertising has been happening for quite a while now and I see a lot of this in the gambling section. sadly there are no rules prohibiting this kind of advertising(unless it is a referral link which is against the forum rules) but you can always press the report moderator.

I kinda agree with you and do disagree with the behaviour, advertising is completly fine but doing it in stupid and shady looking ways is different, neutral ratings would be acceptable and advised from my perspective.
Edit: hadn't read second part of the post since Ithought it settled but on a second look it is disgusting.
I believe that if he was actualy beung helpfull instead the name promotion should be fine perhaps but he was only making people lose time which is infuriating.

No, the forum has rule regarding this kind of advertising.
Rule number 22:


So, it is not allowed to advertise in other threads. It is only allowed to advertise services in some specific boards (only in the thread started by the user, not in other threads) like gambling, services, ANN threads, etc.
I usually report posts that includes links to other websites and made for advertising purposes. They are always marked as good.

According to following post  made by mprep, there are only some exceptions in altcoins announcements.

You are wrong and not on pint, he is promoting under his very name thing that's been done for years anywhere actualy. If this was made a actual rule then a lot of legit accounts and actualy any service account would get banned.

Users are not allowed to talk about their services everywhere in the forum.
For example, a gambling website can have a thread in the forum and post about their website and promote it in their thread, but they are not allowed to advertise their site in every other threads.

Look at the screenshot below. Five posts made by coinfunda (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2287893) has recently been reported by someone and removed by moderators. If more posts are reported, the ban hammer will come down on this user.

https://i.imgur.com/nquWidD.jpg

I wouldn't exactly call what coinfunda did as "disgusting".  He has to get the information for his articles from somewhere, and it looks like he was just querying members here to get it.  And while I haven't looked at the replies he got, I would bet that a lot of the members who replied are in signature campaigns and thus got paid for their answers.  In any case, I don't really see a case of abuse or dishonesty here unless I'm missing some glaring piece of evidence.

This is the least of the forum's problems.  I've seen threads where alt accounts pretend to carry on discussions between themselves and much worse examples of "disgusting" behavior.  I wouldn't worry too much about what coinfunda did.

i'm on tablet and not properly looking into things, im thinking i was wrong all along and should erase my posts, I will review this when i finish drinking and get back on pc, I was thinking user was promoting the site with his name as service name then shitposting and thrashtalking the forum, i apology in this case.
Note: i sometimes do check my answers on pc anyhow even if a incidence didnt happen when I answer from phone/tablet.

Yeh people talking to themselves is both untrustworthy and terrible since it farms accounts while also promoting a probably scammy service.

Thanks for the replies - I understand all points of view but sneaking in these articles under some questions and pretending not to know the answers even if they're present right inside the article they're linking us to is not really okayish, at least not for me. I just feel like someone could create a thread summarizing their articles or to at least mention the fact that they are working on an article and are requesting information for it.

I have now seen that some mods have worked on deleting all posts from 2020. Thank you, mods! :) I do agree that it's not the least of the forum's problems but hey, one less makes things better, right?

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Meanwhile, I have looked a little bit into their account and it looks like coinfunda has at least one alt account on here. Will leave here what I found, just for the record:

Coinfunda has posted back on August 20, 2018 the following post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4795016.msg44392076#msg44392076):

And on June 07, 2018 we have the following post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3037174.msg39562937#msg39562937) from ankurguta87 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=978876):

According to the Trust (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=978876) on ankurguta87's profile, The Pharmacist classified the account as a shitposter on 2018-02-03.

Here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1858216.msg18482787#msg18482787)'s another proof:

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ankurguta87 also apparently ran the Twitter account topadnetworks which was suspended from Twitter (https://twitter.com/topadnetworks). According to Twitter,


Proof that he ran the account:

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Now if we go back more in the past, I found this (https://archive.is/wip/8Z57l) from some longer time ago:

This isn't something new or much of a big problem that can't be solved easily. By simply making use of the report button to report any post by this user that you feel is low quality will get the reply deleted. You can make use of the key word I input into my reports "advertisment spam". Behaviors like these are quite common in the bitcoin/altcoin discussion board. We have other users that their pattern of spamming the forum with reply advertising their site are quite worse than what the accused is currently doing.

Atleast the accused is engaging the forum members in meaningful conversation that obviously one or two users will benefit from.

One gets traffic to the website, the others get to achieve their posting quota!

Oh wait :D

But in all seriousness, I wouldn't really do that because that's the reason the signature and personal text features exist. Even if I have my own site. It just feels kinda... cheap.

@OP, as you are a Romanian and you understand the language: what do you think about goanadupabitcoin's hundreds of posts, which literally, in 99% of the posts adds a link to their website, spamming the forum for years?

This behavior has been known and observed for a long time by many forum members, just check this thread : List of advertising shills. Mods please review and ban as appropriate. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223412.0)

Some of them are banned, but most of them have a lot of alt accounts, and they just continue with their work by burn that accounts one by one. Some companies use this type of advertising, and some users just promote their site in each post they made. Such behavior is forbidden in forum rules, but who reads the rules and who adheres to them if it is so easy to bypass them.

Romanian have a classic Romanian style you most of the times can see from kilometers away.

There should be a control over such uncultured posts, many people just pick up shits carelessly and post without looking back at whosoever cares and begin to quarrel when they are penalized.how will you just use the forum image on your personal page. Well! I suggest if he be reported he/she should be given a warming at least to draw his ears and not take it too personal than necessary.

The problem from my point of view is the user being lazy and milking the forum for information without bothering to contribute constructively.
The user could have made it known from the beginning that he was looking for ideas for a blog post, or used the search option to find related posts on the topic, but instead chose the lazy approach of using a bait post to get users to post their replies in a single thread and reduce the work he would have to do while searching for materials for his content.

And the spray advertising technique, is not against the forum rules AFAIK, but it's a good ground for reporting such posts and maybe getting some of them deleted.

Unfortunately, while this is true for some, it is not true for all of us.

However, seeing the topic mentioned above by Lucius and also yours and hosseinimr93's posts, I reported (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223412.msg54234601#msg54234601) also goanadupabitcoin's shillings and as well Nea Sandu's (the sockpuppet account of goanadupabitcoin) on the thread mentioned by Lucius, which was started by o_e_l_e_o - List of advertising shills. Mods please review and ban as appropriate (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223412.0).

Besides, I also reported one by one each post of them where they were shilling their own site, spamming the forum. 38% of goanadupabitcoin's posts were links of their own website (75 posts out of 202). In Nea Sandu's case, only 5% of his post were directing to the respective website.

I'm really curious though how this will develop. The Romanian mod is Cyrus and he is also Global Administrator, sort of theymos' wing-man. And, as far as I saw from the posts of goanadupabitcoin / Nea Sandu, they are aquaintances of Cyrus (maybe friends?). However, I hope his judgement will not be biased by whatever their relation is.

@OP: thank you for opening this topic, which opened my eyes also to the situation I described. Also, thank you Lucius, hosseinimr93 and andulolika for showing the path on how to proceed in such cases.