Bitcoin Forum

Hi Folks  :D

How many threads exceeded 10 pages after they have already served their purposes in the first 2 pages? Thousands i guess.

I don't know if mods have the ability to lock threads. But when i think that they can, i can't find reasons why they don't just lock those thousands of useless threads !

I have a suggestion that I'd like to see implemented if this is technically possible : If at least 10 full members+ report a specific thread with a specific code (it can be an option available only for those ranks), then mods should revise the thread and lock it and a message automatically sent to the creator of that thread informing him that it was deleted (like the "deleted post" message).
This option can also be limited to some boards, like excluding the "Bounties" section where users report weekly works and the project announcements board.
If this suggestion, or any other solution, be implemented, i think it will surely serve to limit spam in many boards like "Bitcoin Discussion" and "Altcoin Discussion" who are a useful great boards but full of shit replies in some great topics.

I don't know if this was suggested before. I want to know your opinions or guide me where a similar option had been discussed before .

Cheers  ;D

If you feel a thread has become superfluous you can report it to the mods and if they agree they'll have it locked. Creating an algorithm with a number of reports and rank threshold for that is unnecessary, imo. It could also be exploited

This isn't a horrible suggestion, but I doubt it's going to be implemented. 

Mods do lock threads as far as I know, just not a lot of them and not based on how many pages they've accumulated.  And there are a lot of threads with many, many pages that are still useful (like the WO thread).  If there was some kind of reporting system in place whereby a thread could be locked by a consensus of votes, you better believe there would be abuse happening.

Ideally, thread starters ought to be responsible for locking the ones they've started after they've gotten the answer they needed or if they feel the discussion has outlived its usefulness--and I've noticed that a lot of senior members actually do this.  Unfortunately it's the shitposters (as usual) that are the ones causing the problem, because they start a thread and don't even usually bother to post in it again once it's created.  Their alt accounts post in it, but not usually the OP (lol).

Also, OP, if you come across a thread that's obviously become just a mega spam thread, report it to the moderators and let them handle it.  Even if they don't take any action, at least you've done your part.

This is a good proposal but alternatively to this and the best way is to report those spammers who continuously post unsubstantial posts or directly report the main page to the MOds requesting to lock the specific spam thread.

Actually there's a thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5236357.0) that compiled Megaspam threads requesting to lock those topics but I think the user realized that it is good if you will report manually to the Mods.

Not all threads that exceed 10 pages are Megaspam thread, some of them are still useful to have an update rather than making another thread that similar to the locked thread. As of now "Report to Moderator" is the best solution for this.

I can understand your point here. However, i have another point of view here; when i report a post with mention that it's a spam post, mods usually delete it. But how to report the full thread? maybe you mean report op main topic by saying it's a spam thread that need to be locked, so would you tell me how many threads had been locked by mods after being reported? I think a logic explanation is missed because a lock action is almost required to prevent accumulation of shit replies.
Even those old threads created in 2010 and 2011 are still opened, they must be locked imo and if someone want to add a note to, easy to create a ne thread and just add the link to that thread.

I have already mentioned in my suggestion that there should be some exceptions like the wall observer thread and threads in "investigations" board.

OP isn't suggesting an auto-lock feature, just that mods would take a look at it.

It is, however, an unnecessary suggestion. If you find a spam megathread, then just report the first post in the thread, state that it is a spam megathread, state that there is no ongoing discussion and its just being used by bounty spammers, suggest that you would like to see it locked, and the mods usually take action fairly swiftly. Here are a few examples of spammy threads in Bitcoin Discussion I reported just the other day, which were all locked within 24 hours: One (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5251049.0), two (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5258060.0), three (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5242499.0).

Some do, but even among senior members there are an awful lot who don't lock their threads once they have run their course. Perhaps it should be impossible to remove your own threads from your watchlist - that way if they keep getting bumped with spam it will serve as a reminder to lock them.

Some users participate in a thread with 10 pages but they avoid to read and reply to the shit posts. You can for example notice users still having a real/decent discussion with each other, they just can't stop other users to posts. When you have a good ignore list also, you don't see the noise...
Of course in most cases, after 40 pages, there is often nothing to add...

And moderators don't have to check every thread to see if it deserves to be locked. It's up to us, users, to report the topic explaining why it should be locked. I did several times and it works

I don't know if others agree with me that signature campaigns bounty managers are somehow responsible of this issue, as they accept counting posts in any thread. Recently, the bm of the signature i am part of required just 2-3 posts in mega threads to be accepted in weekly post count of 25 posts. I think it's a wise move for both, the signature to be visible (as no one usually read posts in mega spam threads), and the forum as well .

I don't know if I suggested this before or not but I think the best way to avoid spam threads is having some kind of automation when it comes to locking a thread. Like when the first 2 or 3 pages the OP of the thread hasn't replied to his own topic then the thread will automatically be locked. This just means that the OP itself isn't interested in his own topic and he just posted it for no educational reason. This way we can easily avoid having megathreads with the same generic answers from people.

I agree with you, signature managers have the biggest responsibility to reduce spam. Yes, posting in mega threads is pure spam and nothing more, and it is a complete waste of money for campaign owners.
It seems, signature campaigns with payments in Bitcoin, they have slightly better control and most spam comes from bounty program and where are payments in token or low-level altcoin

By automated, I meant a system where a certain number of reports from a certain rank would be a threshold to get the attention of the mods which the OP was suggesting, and as one report could do the job I felt this would be unnecessary.

I agree with this, especially with bounty projects. Most of the current signature campaign managers do well to handle spam by carefully selecting the people to wear their signatures as well as reducing the minimum post requirement. This would lead to less spam as users are not forced to post more then they would naturally do.

 Even in a thread with 3-4 pages you will read users saying a lof of shits (note: expressing a different opinion than other is something else, by 'shits' I mean real shit à la "great project sir"), reapeating what has already been said, give wrong informations, add generic sentences to make their posts longer (<= so pathetic)

If the persons are still rewarded for their stupid posts, of course they won't stop. For sure the BM should be more severe but I can already hear the "I can't check X participants" "I can't read all the contexts of the discussions they posted in"

 Did you wanted to say "the BM of the signature i am part of accepted just 2-3 posts in mega threads?
Because requiring is weird  :D

Why do we need to lock them, can't we have a long discussion on certain issue? Also, locking a thread would stop generating more spam but there are a lot of spam posts already in the same thread.
I agree that most of the threads in altcoin discussion are full of spam but that doesn't necessarily mean there's no good discussion at all. Instead of reporting for locking a thread, why not that 10 members report the spam posts to moderator? Wouldn't that clean the thread and make it read worthy? In fact, the goal of deleting spam post is to make the thread more read worthy. I remember once I had reported all the spam posts of one thread and after moderators handled the reports, the thread was like a GOLD. All the posts were high quality, on topic. So, basically that would be beneficial to the community. Simply locking a thread would never be beneficial.

Yes that's what i meant, a process to enforce mods to take actions over mega threads. To be honest, i didn't try to report a full topic before and i thought it's useless because of the many threads i see. Maybe it's unnecessary to create an additional report feature if this can be done just by using the "report to mod" option.

Lol Yes i chose the wrong verb. I corrected it.
My English is not that perfect as you can see, but it's not that bad too.  ;)

I look at it as, "if they are spamming here, they aren't spamming elsewhere," and this is important for people who are patrolling users for spam. I found the bulk of my reports coming from the users that post in spam megathreads and it's usually extremely easy to pick them out: these accounts are far more likely to stick with their egregious one-liners and vague general/common knowledge posts than if you were to drop them in a Meta thread.

The problem isn't the threads: it's the people. And if you lock one thread, pretty soon another will start up to replace it. It's like a 50-thousand headed hydra, and all of the heads are hungry for bounties.

I am not sure but I started a mini project by myself few months earlier and still working on it. Somehow I have not updated it recently due to time constraint but it worked fine.

You might wanna have look on my thread here : Posts that are outdated / Needs to be locked up (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5236357.msg54120199#msg54120199)

Let me know what are your thoughts on this one. It resemblance to your idea. Since I am one man army it's taking me time to report mega threads.

I will surely give more time on this project since it can actually move those threads to archival or lock.

Even if a thread has 100+ pages, I don't report it if there is ongoing actual discussion. I wouldn't call that a spam thread, regardless of its length. A spam thread is a thread which has very little or no actual discussion, and rather just has bounty spammers repeating what has already been said or just churning out the most generic and vague posts. Unfortunately, most threads past 5 pages fall in to this category.

There is nothing stopping someone from reporting the individual spam posts as well as the thread itself. If there is still ongoing discussion in a thread, but interrupted by spam, then I will report the spam but not the thread. Once the discussion has ended, the actual good posters have left the thread, and all that remains are the spammers, then deleting the spam generally doesn't bring back good posters or revive the thread. Keeping the thread open just leads to it filling up with spam again, even if you report all the spam that's in it. Better to lock it and move on.

The suggestion you submitted, I remembered the suggestion submitted by: @nc50lc.

Topic: [GUIDE] Lock Thread(s) After Receiving Enough Replies. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2841800.0)

the topic is currently locked.

The aim is good.

However, I see: @hilariousetc has replied in the thread: @nc50lc.


Don't know for the time being, mod does that suggestion or not.

Agreed. There are still some topics exceed more than 10 pages but the idea and discussion still alive and compelling. I dont know if OP's idea is when a thread got many pages it become a megaspam thread.

The idea is not bad. But who will do this? Also even though OP is not replying anymore on his own topic, what if there are people engaging on the discussion/interested on the idea he started would that be still considered as spam?

---

The best suggestion Ive think to this are:

• Report spam response on megathread or the thread itself if its a low substantial topic
• OP should always used self moderation feature to avoid spammers and be responsible to lock it if your finished with it
• Avoid posts that have generic topics( if not today later it will be locked or deleted)

What he said.

Before reporting, I check if there wasn't at least a minimum of intelligent replies. As soon as there are more than 10 pages in a thread, there is a chance that someone posted something that actually makes sense, so mega thread or not, I leave those threads alone. You can always report separate threads in a mega thread, right.

The best trick is to check the BTC and AltC general boards several times a day to find newly posted spam threads, where the number of replies are still relatively limited.

Then I simply report the OP mentioning "shill your coin thread" e.g. for "Which coin go to moon next sir" threads. Or "shout yes or no thread" e.g. for "Is crypto important?" threads.

From past experiences I can say they actually get deleted, so not even locked.

Personally, when one of my topics has received plenty of replies, it's enough IMO, and I close it and post last on that specific topic telling others that I'm going to close it. I think it's good practice wherever you may be, not just here in BTCT but in other forums as well. The best thing for members is to report threads, just like what others posted here and know from your POV if it's worthy or spammy, etc.

A great goal for reporting is to unlock the "Your report history" when you press the report to the moderator and see if you have good quality etc.

Most of this MegaSpam thread can be found on Bitcoin Discussion or Gambling Discussion. In reality, It's impossible to halt all new post coming to the thread that asking for an opinion about a certain topic because there is many possible explanation on each topic and most the time, User will not gonna read all previous post.

Example:

What's your favorite crypto for gambling? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261459.0)

 If bitcoin doesn't reach $500K in 3 years....  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262988.0)

Reporting them 1 by 1 was really hard. It will be better if all Signature Campaign(Including Signature Bounty) in the forum will have a General Rule about NOT accepting post in general thread. Most of spam poster are participating in campaigns. It will be easier to cut them from the source of income.

I've suggested years ago that campaign managers should be responsible (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5038531.msg46200141#msg46200141) for cleaning up spam / actively searching spammers and kicking them out of the campaigns, maybe leave negative trust etc. Looked like I wasn't the only one who liked this suggestion.

Now I'm not going to bump my own old thread, but maybe it would help if the idea got more support.

That's one point I have missed out and you are right if people are engaged more than the OP on his own topic I think they should continue to discuss it but in this way where even the OP cannot moderate his own thread and his topic is somehow generic then there is a high chance it can be a spam thread with only members parroting the same responses. If we can somehow have a voting system where 3 or 4 people have answered the same response in a page or two then it is eligible to be locked to avoid it being a spam thread.

If something came to that point then the best solution is report all those new posted that considered spam. If the topic is already left by the author then we cant do anything about it. But we can report that if the topic he opens is likely a generic one. Like >>> Report To Moderator = Topic has been spammed advised locked.

No need I guess. Just report it, cause the thread becomes a spam hub already. Im sure moderator will noticed that especially if the pages are above 50 to 100 pages already.

But isn't this a platform meant for continues discussion? There are some or specific topic that are meant to be left open because irrespective of the pages of the thread, the discussion ongoing aren't usually a repeated one. Also in prevention of having repeated or similar thread created, the open thread will serve as a reminder that there's a topic currently active on the same topic.

I'm not in support of an automated system or a voting criteria to lock topics, as those can be easily abused by attackers using their alts or close friends to attack your topic. The way the forum is been manually moderated is ok by me, as it goes to prove before you get any punishment, your account must have been reviewed by a human and not this annoying bots we have this days.

It gets annoying getting locked out of my twitter account almost weekly, I won't want to have same experience in the forum with my topics getting locked.

• Agree, but if a thread is of a low value or insubstantial topic ("When moon?" springs to mind), you don't have to wait for it to become a spam megathread before reporting it
• Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. Even senior members don't moderate their threads and leave them unlocked to fill with spam.
• Again, unfortunately, never going to happen. As long as there are bounties there will be bounty spammers filling up low value threads.

We already have Signature Campaign Guidelines (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1684035.0) which state spammers will receive escalating bans, and managers and companies will be held responsible for members who spam. Unfortunately, these guidelines are widely ignored and not enforced.

This is definitely the case in boards like Technical Support or Technical Discussion, where often it can be counter productive to lock old threads. Bumping an old thread which discusses the same problem/issue/idea/proposal/etc. as you were going to start a new thread about prevents users having to repeat the same information over and over, and allows you to build on top of ideas or solutions which have already been discussed.

This is largely not the case, however, in boards like Bitcoin Discussion. Topics like "Is this the best time for Bitcoin" and "Are people afraid of investing in Bitcoin" can and will be posted in ad infinitum by spammers because it is incredibly easily to churn out a generic two line reply which adds nothing to the discussion but fulfills their posting quota. Such thread should be locked.

Spam mega threads are not issues if there is no signature in those threads. People will not complain about it. However, without signature, less people will post in Spammega threads and when time goes longer, total number of spam mega threads will be decreased.

Wall Observer, no one complains about its and what people post in it. Signature is disabled in Wall Observer and no campaigns count posts in WO for payments.

Regards to managers, count which posts are accepted for payments and which posts are not accepted, it belongs to them. Spam mega thread or not, it does not make sense. There are good posts everyewhere, even in spam mega threads. Unfortunately, same quality posts in non-spammega thread and spammega thread have different attention and traffic for companies, less of posts in spammega threads.

I often post in a Mega thread in the gambling section about the Italian Serie A. I do it because I like Italian football and there are a few members there who know what they are talking about. There is a lot of crap and spam as well but I the entire thread isn't a spam thread and doesn't deserve to be locked in my opinion. It started at the beginning of the season and contains discussions about a whole bunch of things.

The gambling board is full of mega threads. Just take a look at any of the threads of the Bitcoin Casinos. But you can't close these as they have a purpose.
There are many other examples in Gambling Discussion.

Here are just 3 examples from the top of the page currently:

FreeBitco (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=320959.0) 657 pages.
Stake (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2072589.0) 300 pages.
Crypto.Games (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=750760.0) 287 pages

Post I see mostly now is the bounty threads been handled by newbies which supposed not to be so and probably someone high ranks or most Members of the forum will say we should look away from it probably those Bounty topics which are spammers and scammers supposed not to remain on the forum instead of giving them RED trusted or negative trust only.

Yeah! I understand your sentiment dude. I also like engaging with some of the discussions there especially when it comes to NBA, PBA and UFC so I will be sad if ever such threads will finally come to an end. But in my opinion, I think these could be included on the exemptions since the discussion there does not only revolve in a single topic. Sports updates keep on coming from time to time thus opening gateway for new discussions :). The ideas there are not so repetitive compared to spam megathreads.

Yes, all threads with a lot of pages does not count in SPAM MEGA THREADS. There are some threads in gambling discussions which are based upon the discussion of sports like Test Cricket Prediction and Discussion Thread [self - mod] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5168384.0) where you will find sports discussion of every new match. So such threads should not be considered as MegaSpam threads.

I avoid pointing fingers or will I say calling out threads by their title to avoid my message getting misunderstood. Some of this thread we presume to serve a purpose of discussing sport event are just worthless spam mega thread because when you visit the thread, although there's continue discussion ongoing, most of them are just worthless piece of junk. You see shitposter constantly using that particular thread to complete their weekly post qouta without adding any meaningful contributions.

Observe carefully you'll identity users that are making a genuine contributions to thread and those just doing so to 'fullfil all righteousness'. Not pointing fingers on the thread you gave as example but what I'm trying to say is, just because a thread is huge in gambling boards doesn't mean it isn't a spam mega thread.