Bitcoin Forum

Today theymos publicly announced (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5360879.msg57980000#msg57980000) a raw list for forum contributors willing to report spam posts or low-quality posts for to be removed by mod. They are users who actually care quite a bit about the quality of this forum and they have also filtered hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of posts in the last year to report. That's pretty awesome and they seem to work pretty hard every day or every time they do activity on the forum.

From the names on the list that theymos announced (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5360879.msg57980000#msg57980000), I found that some of them had not earned enough merit to rank up to become Members, Full Members, Hero, and Legendary. I don't know if all of them are quality posters or not. But regardless of how quality their posts have been so far, their contribution to keeping the forum clean of spammers and low quality posts should be greatly appreciated. So do the names I mention deserve more merit as a condition to move up to a higher rank from now on for their hard work so far?

In my opinion, to appreciate their contribution to the good report in the last year, the names of the contributors in the list below should be appreciated with some merits from you. But that doesn't mean users with high "Legendary" ratings don't deserve a lot of credit for their contributions.

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Merits is earned!!! Yes, we can all agree that they did a fantastic job, but giving them merits wouldn't make a difference in the long run. Perhaps a badge for the top reporter at the end of the year would suffice. That's just my opinion.

Maybe you're right, but at least the merit will help them rank up for their contributions to the forum. Reporting posts to mods may be done secretly without many people knowing unless the user is willing to make it public themselves such as acmyname or the list is made by the admin. Forum badge? Yeah, that seems like a good idea igehhh. But I think it will cost some money.

No, they shouldn't pump the ranks of those of us that are not there yet. The only people that care about rank are usually low value contributors that care only for bounty campaigns.

Most of the members mentioned in the OP would just rank up in no time based on their merit history in the last 120 days. Forum badge is sufficient enough as what igehhh mentioned.

I agree that those top reporters don't deserve merits for their effort, because that isn't what the merit system is for--but as I said in Theymos's thread, I do think they deserve some sort of recognition beyond having their names mentioned publicly.  That's up to Theymos himself, though.

I disagree with your second statement about rank, because there are certainly members who've cared or do care about their rank who aren't bounty-hunting shitposters.  Having a rank of Hero or Legendary is a source of pride for some members, because it shows how much the forum means to them--whether they're getting paid to post or not.

I agree, they did a great job and they should be proud. But that doesn't make them good posters.

If it would be to rank them up, Theymos could just "airdrop" them some merit, I guess. But just meriting some "random" posts for that... it's not OK.
Or they can get some sort of badge. Maybe better stats could come first and then the badge will come just natural.

Instead of just giving them merit for been such good reporters, why not suggest their post history get review. We have so many descents posters that their posts don't get merited and that's not because they're not worth it but they haven't been seen by users having smerits to spare and most of them don't even care because they didn't join the forum for the rewards and virtual recognition it brings.

Also merits earned are more appreciated than those gotten without meriting them. I'm pretty sure there would be some decent posts within this users that needs to be highlighted.

In fact I've guessed that not all of us have the same idea of ​​how contributors should be rewarded like "merit or badge" for their contributions to the forum. I don't expect you all to agree with my idea and that's not the main point of the question I'm asking. Here I just want to exchange opinions with most of the forum contributors and all of you so that we can really interact well with each other, appreciate user contributions and others. I agree that forum badge are great for them and it's probably one of the brightest ideas I've ever heard after they announced the names of contributors on the list.

I just think that if users who contribute a lot for good reporting get badge, then I also hope users who contribute a lot as scammer hunters or cheat hunters and other contributors who support this forum to stay clean should also get badges. It shouldn't be a bad idea, but in the end the admin will decide everything.

Because we are not alone here, then someone or some of us can do it for them. That's the reason why I link all the username in the list directly to their profile so people can review that user's post history if they want.

Promising merits to reporters could potentially be problematic as it could attract users spamming reports and overloading the mods in an attempt to get some extra merits. A user can simply go to a spam mega thread with lots of meaningless messages and drop reports there to boost their report statistics while making mods waste their time on low priority cases.

Badges is a good suggestion and is a sufficient reward in my opinion.

The thing is, if other users or maybe even merit sources are going to review their post histories, then it should only be cause the said users make quality posts and are maybe undermerited or maybe just a few merits short of a new rank, and not cause of how effective they have been making good reports, if that's to come to play, then what they deserve is a reporters badge; that's exactly what other users above are trying to say.
Don't you think this could be a very good reason why Theymos has applied the brakes on creating a reporters badge, cause forum users could start requesting badges for absolutely (m)any thing(s).

I was a bit hesitant to reply to this thread since I'm one of the users that got to be mentioned on theymos list and my username also appears on your list, but I guess I'll share my opinion regarding your idea : While I understand your point of view - and thank you for the detailed thread information - I would much prefer that users don't end up meriting other users just because they've appeared on some list (even if that list contributes to the overall wealth / balance of a website). This is mostly related with four arguments:

• I've been reporting without any hope of it being recognized and I'll continue to do so- I don't have particular good skills that can help the forum directly - I don't code (at least not as the likes of TryNinja for example) so I can't make awesome tools, and I don't consider myself to be very "design" orientated. So by reporting threads/replies I feel like I'm contributing to the forum in the most direct way that I can, and the reward is almost immediate - to see that my report has gone from unhandled to "good" is an awesome feeling (and that, by itself, is already great!)
• Being a good reporter doesn't directly correlates with generating useful / contributing / high-quality posts - "I" (as a figurative example) can be an awesome user in detecting users breaking forum rules but at the same time my contributions to the forum may not be up to the standards that it should be. This can have a multiple of reasons - from simply not wanting to post detailed replies, or to don't have the "time" to help whoever is in need of help. And that is OK to be honest, I guess each of us has a role within the forum and as long we're doing our part without disrupting the overall quality of it, that's good. In this case one user can't simply just merit random threads/replies simply because the user got mentioned elsewhere. That would make new users (that already have their share of issues with the merit system) simply look into those "no content" replies and have more arguments to say - "Oh no, merit system is broken, this reply wasn't high-quality (debatable) and it got 5 merits!". I'm sure that we got a fair share of users like my example, we don't need to give them even more wood for the fire...
• We would be acting against one of the main reasons the merit system was created - As theymos[1] puts it:
  
  Quote
  I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
   - Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
• Whoever reports on a daily basis, doesn't look at their overall merit score a.k.a isn't in need to rush "Legendary" status - This doesn't mean that one simply doesn't care about it, I would say instead that the users aren't "obsessed" with it. I'm most certain that all the members that aren't Legendary and are on that list will eventually reach there - If they care about the forum to have such an active role in reporting and cleaning up threads, I'm sure that they don't worry too much about their "daily" merit KPI and they'll eventually contribute to the forum in ways that will allow them to reach upper classes.

As for me, I am already way overwhelmed by the recognition and that is already the best "present" that I could have. I'm a sucker for badges[3](my pie badge failed :( )  though, so I wouldn't say no to them - even though I do believe it would be unfair for users of past years, that I'm sure that also did a tremendous job. Perhaps making badges for certain level as it has been suggested[2] in the past?

As a final note, on a more not-so-serious level, even though my report numbers aren't high, I guess I could say that:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/028/021/work.jpg

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[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.0)
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4742257.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4742257.0)
[3]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5315458.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5315458.0)

A similar badge
https://i.imgur.com/4wWi7Rb.jpg

Something like that wouldn't cost anything, but I believe Lovesmayfamiliis deserves some sort of recognition from theymos for her dedication to discovering scam projects and reporting scammers and spammers on a daily basis; I doubt she'd be interested anyways. She adores the forum

this is the point. Reporting posts had nothing with merit and cannot be a reason for that kind of rewarding.
nutildah pointed vareole (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=2816771) from "top reporter" lists, users with many scam accusations and active flags against them. perhaps the next suggestion might be to remove negative ratings on his profile due to a high number of good reports.

Exactly, good reports would only be effective in choosing moderators or patrollers in various boards.
If someone knows how to report effectively, they would possibly also know how to discern how to handle reports. I believe this was how the current moderators were chosen.

I agree with Upgrade00.  Incentivizing reports will overload the mods with bad reports.  May be a better idea to eventually incentivize top reporters based on both number of good posts and percentage of accuracy?  But even then, spam still happens.

Earning a badge is better for everyone overall.  It keeps the spammers away as there is no way to profit from this, signature campaigns and bounties do not accept users based on non-rank badges.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I'm surprised that my name even made it to the list, but I agree that we don't need to incentivize reports with any Merits. All it takes is just a two clicks and voila, one report.

A badge would be nice though.

On a side note, I do care about my report accuracy since mine's been hovering around 99% for a long time so I won't be those that make the mods flip their tables ;D

I agree with most of the responses that merit, which should be earned by posts alone, should not be mixed with reporting. Aside from a badge or something else that could be awarded to recognize their work, I understand that when there is a moderator position, the amount of correct reports of the person who applies is taken into account, which is a way of recognizing their good contribution as well.

If you start meriting users for their contributions by report numbers, then you invite a corrupting incentive. Some call it a 'cobra effect'.

Imagine a user trying to stay ahead of the metric, "most good reports" by creating spam to easily report, thereby making reporting worse off entirely. Considering the financial association with rank, signatures, and merit, you're tempting the devil indeed.

Halab aren't wrong...

ShowOff, your question has been answered by some of the users above and actually I see most of us disagree with it for quite a reasonable reason. I agree with your approach but not all of them have to get it because the merit system works for the quality of user posts. They will get merit if they are able to post quality things, this is the basis why quality posts are needed to get merit and rank up even though they have really contributed to the forum.

In comparison, you might find it easier to suggest merit sources for distributing merit if the people on your list do something like actmyname. He has his own thread regarding deleted user post report activity, I saw it update every time period. If you find that most of the names on the list are the same, then I think you can ask to review their posts on merit sources in the thread LoyceV has provided. Even though right now everyone on the list still needed merit to move up the rank, but if they could post quality stuff then naturally they would get it. I'm sure about that because merit won't stop them from rank.

May be. Clearly. But even so, it will be beneficial for the forum. The more good reports, the cleaner will the forum be, isn't it?
And it doesn't have to be on levels (for becoming "a dick contest"), only a "Top Reporter" badge will do (with no visible numbers under it).
Then I'd expect that the result will be even more reports. Nothing wrong with that.

I'll throw in my 2 sats too: Merit is meant for good posts, if theymos wanted people to earn Merit from reporting, he would have added it as a feature.

I checked only the first user on your list (bluspirit): he barely makes any posts, which explains the lack of Merit. Nothing wrong with a user who reads a lot, reports spam, and doesn't post much :)

If I'm correct, there was a few threads (at least one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3307118.msg34587560#msg34587560)) where user proposed merit for each good report. You are proposing the same. I don’t think it’s a good idea to pour merit to the top reporters.
Someone spending a huge time on reporting a lot posts doesn’t necessarily mean they should be gifted merit. They/everyone on the forum have to earn it by posting merit worthy contents, by contributing in the forum by posting. I don’t think your proposal is a good one.

You didn’t check the 2nd one, miner29? He has 1000 post and earned 59 merit only. He has joined the forum in 2019 means after the merit system introduced. He seems quite active in the mining (altcoin). By any means, is it possible that Altcoin Mining board is lack of enough merit sources? I'm not sure, haven’t checked any data but that seems to be the case. I didn’t read his post but they seems worthy to be meritable by first look.

No (that is what I said).

Or the whole altcoin mining board just isn't interesting enough for most people. I can imagine there's a lot of spam on those boards, so that explains he's in the list.

That's the problem: I don't want to read 1000 posts on altcoin mining.
He doesn't look like a spammer though, so I believe Merit shouldn't be holding him back. I've taken the lazy approach: re-Merit some of his already Merited posts. He's in avatar territory now :)
I now see I slightly overdid it: 7 Merit more than I intended.

Despite all other people's thoughts and opinions on my idea of ​​creating this thread, what you actually do is my main goal. I want people who are willing to review their posts to at least get some quality posts for merit.

So while not all of you agree with what I'm saying, I'm really glad you didn't ignore me and were willing to give your opinion on my question and Congratulations to @bluspirit made it to the rank after @LoyceV was willing to review some of your posts. And for the other users on my list above, you will all get your ranking sooner or later depending on how quality your posts are.

Thank you all for your contributions, because without you I might not have realized that quality posts are so much needed on this forum. I've been temporarily banned before because too many posts were deleted in 24 hours, so for those of you who have reported my spam posts in the past, I say a big thank you. You've made me realize and since then I just want to do better. Specifically @acmyname, I just hope I'm not included in the many ignore lists of many other users on the forum because I've been on yours list. There's no point in regretting it now, but the changes and improvement quality post that was proof that I really wanted to change.