Bitcoin Forum

CoinIdol News, JessicaVL, CryptoBry, acquafredda, Vladdirescu87, the list is endless. Somehow, CoinIdol News still isn't banned yet.

The Spammer of the Month this month goes to waybesuricata. Of the most recently created 37 threads on the front page of Press, he has created 26 of them, generating a grand total of only 26 replies between them all. Almost all of his links come from Coin Telegraph, so I can only assume he is being paid by them.

Given that we have been complaining about the state of the Press board for literally years, and there have never been any moves whatsoever to even attempt to fix it, then why don't we just formalize what it has turned in to and change the name. Then at least it will stop new people venturing in to it thinking that is actually a place for discussion.

I didn’t check that board for a long time. If I'm correct, it was almost a year ago when I last checked and the board haven’t changed at all. It's still the same I have seen back then, in fact, it got worst than previous.
I think theymos should introduce some restrictions on this board. The better I can propose is to- having a requirement of X received merit to be eligible to post in the board.

He's currently down to only 24 out of 37 topics on the first page. Would it be an option to remove signatures on that board?

The Press (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=77.0) board description is this:
The problem is: none of those topics are worth reading! It's now just a few people copying "news" from a few sites. Mod jgarzik (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=541) made only a few posts in the past years, and hasn't been online for more than a year.
I think this board (like Bitcoin discussion) could benefit from scricter moderation. Since o_e_l_e_o brought it up: can he get a delete button for the Press board?

That's the problem, it should be an interesting board to stay up to date in recent developments, but it's not.

There are some users even legendary accounts from 2011 do the same. The usual practice they do is they will post one or two line of the article and then drop the link.

The brand new users or lower rank users will do this obviously but I would like to see a list of Higher rank users who are doing this from years. You can include me too. In return you will get a F off 😂

Come on folks. Give the mods a break. They're too busy banning users at scammer's behest so surely they don't have time for Press board plus they certainly most definitely can't keep track how many times the same user is reported.

The entire forum should be renamed to scamandspamtalk to taper the expectations a little bit. It hasn't been about Bitcoin for a while, has it.

Or maybe a hard fork can fix it. Bitcointalk SV. Yeah, that's the ticket.

We already have a board like this. I can't see theymos expanding those restrictions to other boards. Too much like newbie jail.

Don't need a signature when you can just spam links to your employer's "news" site in the body of your post.

We've been asking for this for years. Since we apparently are neither going to moderate it nor lock/trash it altogether, we should at least rename it to more accurately reflect what it actually is. I can't remember the last time I saw a thread in there which would qualify as a "notable press hit".

I think this is part of the problem - Even though the jgarzik stated[1] that all articles should try their best to follow the definition of Notability[2] this basically boils down to whoever is reading the news and how it interprets it. This "subject to my own opinion" argument coupled with the absence of moderation leads the sub to its current state I guess. I also think that we get to see similar news being spread in other sections of the forum, where they generate a somewhat good level of discussion, and it seems that whenever they fall in this sub users basically ignore it (most of them) - This probably already means that we've lost faith in this particular sub of the forum.

I totally understand the original purpose of it - after all in 2012 and before users would had to try really hard to find news regarding BTC - but nowadays considering the hype around it we just blink and we have dozens of websites telling us the same thing but in a different set of words. Should we perhaps limit the amount of times users are able to post in that particular sub? Per month all users would have 5 links that they could post there and to prevent double-triple-quadruple accounts I would say that only ranks above or equal to Hero would be able to post there. I know this implies coding and that may be something that wouldn't be a top priority, but other than closing the sub I don't see any more "real" action that could be done - Other than adding more mods to it considering the influx of threads it has.

---

[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76487.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76487.0)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)

If signatures will be removed on press board, I'm pretty sure he will move to other board (Bitcoin Discussion) and continue spamming about news... so I have to disagree.

Just like this guy, it's posted on Bitcoin discussion and he doesn't add anything.


I'd think mods should more strict against low value post rule, so those post will be deleted. Or the manager shouldn't count his post, but the manager (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366613.0) itself isn't really trustworthy so it is what it is.

In previous threads regarding the Press board (and there have been several), it was generally widely agreed upon that any news from a site which is solely dedicated to crypto news - CoinIdol, CoinTelegraph, CoinDesk, etc. - did not constitute a notable press hit and should be removed. These sites are all click bait trash, and the quality of the articles from them is somewhere between very low and non-existent.

It was also widely agreed that any post consisting of just copy and pasting and slapping a link on the end should be deleted. If you can't be bothered to actually formulate your own opinion to stimulate discussion, then there is no need for your post. Anyone who wants to read such sites can just visit the site in question; they don't need you to copy and paste every article to the Press board.

These are two very basic rules which, if adhered to, would clean up >90% of the spam on that board.

I fully subscribe to your reply o_e_l_e_o since that was also an option that I ended up giving. We both agree then that what is lacking is moderation right? I'm not even talking about removing the current moderator, how about adding a new one? How does this process usually goes by here? If memory serves me right I believe that some time ago theymos was looking for a moderator for (Japanese??) local board? I assume this is something that "is asked to you and not so much as being voted on a particular list of individuals" ...

I don't even visit Press section anymore and I would be more than happy to see it closed and moved to archive.
Bitcoin Discussion section is now full of news, press and bunch on nonsense, and nobody posted anything in Important Announcements for years, so I don't get it why it still exist there.
I think we need a major cleanup in forum, but I guess that is not coming with new forum software  :D

SCAM is not moderated in this forum, but moving of topics is and it is punished by death ban by hanging, even if that is not written anywhere in the law rules, but if you pissed off the judge mod than you need to suffer.
I know much worse cases of breaking forum rules and member didn't get banned.

I don't expect this to happen (for reasons (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533)).

Question @o_e_l_e_o: have you reported those topics? If so, do they get deleted? I don't expect Global Mods to check all boards by themselves if posts don't get reported.

On the 1st 2 pages of Press I have 5 topics that I started.
2 only have 1 or 2 replies the other there all have more then 6 or 7 replies.
BUT I don't post just to post, I really thought that they ALL would have more discussion then they do.

Possibly changing the default sorting to more like the altcoin announcements? Where you need some form of bump power?
And if someone does see something that they think is worth discussion they can bump it or reply to it.

There was one topic that I figured would go on for pages that did not. I think that falls under what is important to ME may not be important to YOU.

But yes I do think the continual posting of these crap articles from the same source are worthless.

-Dave

I’ve tried to do something about it, but the result of it all is mostly that the reports stays unhandled, which of course completely demotivates me or anyone else trying to clean that board.

https://i.imgur.com/IbEb89l.png
https://i.imgur.com/9jWLbGR.png

This news is not only far from the notable press news category, but also has no direct connection to Bitcoin, and it is not clear to me why no one wants to moderate such things.

If it's important, I don't check for it on the Press board.

I think there are several issues with the press board.

1 - The board gets very little traffic. This results in threads about interesting articles getting few views (and replies). This is not something the mods can address, but I think the reason for this is most news about bitcoin is often discussed in other subs. For example 26 of the threads on the first page have less than 3 dozen views, and 20 of the first page threads have less than two dozen views.
2 - The press board appears to have been created in or around 2012. At that time, it would be unusual for any news outlet to write about bitcoin or crypto. Today there is a whole niche industry dedicated to writing about bitcoin, and there are articles about bitcoin in the MSM almost every day. CNBC for example displays the price of bitcoin prominently on it's rotating ticker tape. I think this might imply that the press board is outdated and should be closed
3 - As there are several companies dedicated to writing nearly exclusively about bitcoin (coindesk, cointelegraph, etc.), the press board gives these companies a way to effectively advertise and get additional backlinks for free.

IMO the best course of action would be to close the press board. If there is interesting news in the bitcoin world, there will likely be dozens of articles written about it. As such, if there is interesting news, a thread can be opened to discuss the news, press articles could potentially be cited, but there should not be a new thread for every article.

An alternative would be to limit the number of threads someone can open in a given timeframe. A thread can not count against the limit if it gets at least x number of replies from y different users. This could prevent someone from opening several uninteresting threads, but someone who creates many threads that get a lot of attention can create threads as long as they continue getting attention.

I mean, there are a bunch of boards across the forums with inactive moderators who have not logged in for years. There is no doubt they should at least be removed, if not replaced.

Which is more and more the case for senior users who actually contribute to discussions, leading to a downward spiral. The board needs complete overhaul or just trashed entirely.

Similar story to Lucius as above: I gave up on reporting on the Press board when all my reports started sitting unhandled and users like CoinIdol News can have upwards of 100 topics deleted and yet continue to spam.

Even without long discussion, doesn't mean a thread should be trashed or is low value. The difference is that all your topics use a news story as a spark to start a discussion, and don't just copy and paste spam to reach a posting quota.

Point 1 is largely because it is a spamfest and so most senior users avoid it, as I mentioned above. Fix the spam and turn it in to a place for real discussion, and its traffic will increase. Point 2 and 3 would be solved by actually enforcing the rule "notable press hits", and not "literally any old shit".

Maybe that's a better name for it, actually. The "Literally any old shit" board. Or maybe the "You can plagiarize here without punishment" board.

Like I said, it used to be a big deal when any news article was written about bitcoin. That is no longer true. I want to talk about the news, not the news article.

I get the sense the positions are more ceremonial or honorary these days.  A 'preserved for posterity' kinda deal.  This place likes its history.



Yep.  I've been calling for this for a while now.

Having a "press" website myself, I could moderate the board (not for free though - don't have time for most nonprofit endeavors these days) since I can tell if a page (source) is up to journalistic standards or not.

Well, let's start with the fact that you have to be a person who is difficult to surprise, since keeping the section clean you will have to delete 95% of the content. Frankly, I myself would have published VERY interesting content in the first person in this section, if this section were put in order. Because I often see uninteresting superficial crypto news that becomes fascinating if you get to the source.

For example, the McAfee archive ... has it already been decrypted? Not so long ago, I added a bookmark a post with links, but I feel it would be much more interesting if this information was in the news section, (analyzing the details together is much more fun). In addition, Theymos does not pay a fixed salary (this is probably the main thing), and for sure he will not agree to give authority to a person who is primarily interested in money ... although in vain.

I'm one of the persons tired to report posts on the Pressboard and less and less interested to read it over the months. It looks more like my RSS than a place to discuss the latest news. I complained several times, and probably once on a topic I created but nothing change.

Look at the guys posting useless stuff, sometimes not even related to Bitcoin. "Not related to Bitcoin" is probably the most used reason I gave while reporting (and I reported so many). I don't believe (for a reason) they're rewarded by a website to post their blog posts, but guess who should we blame again ??.? 
This section is easy to 'spam': just copy past a TLTR AND and a link and voila!

The board isn't active as some others but at least it's one of the few where we can get a discussion without seeing shitpots all over the thread
I prefer to read a thread with just 4-5 replies than a thread with 10 pages full of parrots

I don't think I've looked at Press in well over 4 years, and honestly I forgot that section even existed until just now.  Lol.  And to think that I get 99.9% of my crypto news from this forum.  You'd think I'd leave a section like that un-ignored, but nope.  It ought to be one of the best ones, but just like Bitcoin Discussion it's turned into a travesty of what it's supposed to be.

Not having seen what's going on in Press, I can't attest to how spammy it's become as of late, but I tend to believe Leo when he says it's pretty bad. 

That's unfortunate, and why is it that this forum, with all the money it has at its disposal, can't afford to pay a sufficient number of moderators to keep boards like Press and all of the other spam pits clean and shiny?  If a mod has gone inactive, I'm pretty sure there are at least 3-5 members who'd jump at the chance to be a mod--and I'd imagine that Theymos has a mental list of members he'd consider, so why are sections allowed to go unmoderated?  I just don't get it.

This I do not understand.
Updates usually take an awful long time to be implemented on the forum and within that time period, the forum would likely have already lost a lot of members who for one reason or the other didn't find the forum welcoming or they couldn't cope with the tons of garbage posts. Lots of boards have become spam fests and the only solution is to put them on ignore;

Bitcoin discussion which should be the top board on s forum like this (and indeed is the top board by arrangement) has become almost impossible to read through, Economics board which was also one of my favorites had also been run over.

These are urgent issues, but the response to them is not so urgent or non existent.

No, or you have to remove signatures everywhere. Besides, I remember seeing spammers without signatures, just spamming their blogs and websites.
The solution for this problem is easy, warning then temporarily ban, not sure if we can disable posting there for spammers.

It is a honorary title for jgarzik rather than a position. That is what I told by a mod or an admin in the past. I can't remember anymore.
The problem with the press sub is having duplicated topics with the bitcoin discussion section. People prefer to post there because most signatures campaign accept it rather than the press sub. At the end, we have few members posting and having few spammers there will look exaggerated.
I blame partially the staff for the current situation. I should say that I reported so many infractions in the past when I was more active and they dealt with it in few hours but what I was frustrated about is that they don't ban them when they repeat several times their intentional mistakes like coinidol.
I don't want to see the press sub closing because the quality of the dozen posts there is better than the hundreds spam I see in the bitcoin discussion topics.
Good luck for everyone trying to fix it.

jgarzik is not currently a mod, the same way that MiningBuddy is not a mod or the newbie section. If you look at each of their profiles, you will see they do not have a staff title. Listing someone as a mod of a section is different than someone actually having mod authority over the section. For whatever reason, Theymos has not removed their names from the header of the sub.

Yeah. It's a real shame, because the usual one line sig spammers tend to avoid the Press board for whatever reason, presumably because it is easier to churn out nonsense in Bitcoin Discussion or Altcoin Discussion. On the odd occasion someone like DaveF posts a good topic, then you get a good discussion with minimal spam. The spammers who have taken over the Press board are a different breed as I highlighted in the first post in this thread.

And so goes on the downward spiral. Spam isn't addressed, non-spamming users put it on ignore, the spam worsens even further, more users ignore it, and so on, until we reach where we are now where it is pretty much an unusable board.

I've been saying this for literally years (see my post below from 3 years ago), but for some reason we have done absolutely nothing to address it and Bitcoin Discussion is still a spamfest:

I gave up hoping to see some major changes some time back, I now only just read through and try to use a filter to choose what to interact with and what not to (I personally do not like the idea of ignoring a user or a board).
It's sort of ironic that as Bitcoin (the network) rises and gets more popular, bitcointalk (the chat forum), gradually declines, or at least a part of it does.

Maybe they are paying him, but somehow I doubt they need such type of marketing here. He is wearing a signature, so that's where the motivation for spam might come from. Copy-pasting existing articles, adding maybe a sentence or two, and you are done. On to the next post. It's an easy way to up your post count.

That would just cause the spam to spill over to other subs.

At one point in time, we had better moderation in the Bitcoin Discussion board, but I don't think the admins view the Press sub as an important board of this forum anymore to want to do anything to change it. You can get your daily crypto news anywhere you want now. The press board is of minor importance nowadays.   

The thing is, in a balanced world, you (and other users) shouldn't feel like that. How many users have "gave up" on either reporting spamming users, stop visiting some board due to its spam/"robot" posting and even stop interacting with the forum itself due to their efforts/call of attention "apparently" being unanswered? I totally understand the forum mission to be "as free as possible" but there is a fine balance between "free as possible" and pass the feeling to the community that something is always being done to prevent this escalate of douple-triple post users and spammer one line posts (while keeping the forum motto true to its roots).

Don't take me wrong here - I'm sure that there are a lot of things that go by "in the background" of the forum structure that most of us don't even know that it exists - after all the forum already has a considerable hierarchy and I'm sure there are some kind of meetings/reunions that take place to evaluate everything : from the current workload of the mods to the state of specific boards. If this indeed does happen, one question that I totally believe some of us would make is : "If they are fully aware of the current status - in this case of the Press board for example - why aren't they doing anything about it?". I can't really give you the answer that we're looking for but I do believe that we are able to keep the forum mission alive and still manage to bring back the trust of our users regarding some subs that should be in their radar (such as Bitcoin discussion). What about having yearly, or bi-yearly meetings to really evaluate the moderation of each board and see if it's either enough / the mod is inactive / it needs another mod? We've already reached a dimension that we truly need a balanced level of help running in the background making sure that we are still captivating to new users (that is easy at the moment but mostly for the bad reasons (bounty campagins cough cough)) but also still encourage long time users to continue with us.

I believe that our staff members truly do an impeccable job of running the forum - I can't imagine what it would look like without them. I just think that it's bad to know that for some users some parts of the forum are being put on the ignore list simply due to how "spammy" they have become isn't something really healthy for any of us. I do know that finding moderators or, even better, users that could be trusted in order to run things in here is something that should be carefully assessed, but from what I see there are some reputable members that have shown solidarity and that are willing to help the forum , being in the role of a moderator or just like a "helper" of the moderation team.

---

[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533)

I'm all for free speech and freedom to post anything you like, and have defended both on multiple occasions on these forums, but I draw a line when your posts start affecting other users' ability to actually use the forum for discussion. We don't need any new rules or restrictions to clean up this mess, but rather we just need to enforce the ones we already have.

Interesting you should reference this post:

Is that not the situation we find ourselves in more and more? The barrier to participation at the moment is wading through pages and pages of spam to find a topic worth reading or an interesting discussion. Many of the best people aren't going to go to the trouble of doing this, they'll just find a less spammy community. The people who are willing to wade through pages and pages of spam are the spammers themselves who are only here to try to make a quick buck.

It's not easy (nor practical) to enforce the current rules. As long as someone incentivizes Joe to earn few bucks by copy-pasting articles to the Press board, it's pointless to continue reporting. Even if both sides, you as a member and the moderators, report and delete frequently, this mess isn't going to be tackled. It's like squashing the water.

What we do need is a radical change which will retain free speech, but will, alongside, discourage those users from shitposting.

Maybe an update to Mitchell's bot that reports threads with OPs that use hashtags or links to the same page (not domain) - eg. A bunch of posts that all link to https:// cointelegraph .com

I don't understand the connection between free speech and bombarding the forum with low-effort posts. A copy-pasted article is a low-effort post, especially one that doesn't include a personal opinion or additional analysis of any kind. Spam and low-effort posts are against the rules and should be deleted.

But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".     

I doubt that this helps the forum. It gives backlinks and therefore possibly some search engine boost to those "news" sites but seems unlikely to work the other way. I tried googling some of the titles from the Press board and in many cases Bitcointalk is not in the results and sure as shit none of those sites will link to Bitcointalk.

Not all publicity is good publicity in my opinion.
Most of the traffic generated in those boards (press and altcoin) are from spammers and bounty hunters who do not care about the forum, but are only interested in reaching a certain post quota inorder to get a couple of tokens, this is net negative to the forum as it does not improve the quality of discussions, it makes the forum unappealing to older members and puts lots of work on the mods.

I'm starting to think the problem runs deeper.  Why are we struggling to generate stimulating discussion on topical events?  I feel like it's something that should come naturally.  But lately it isn't.  How can we better facilitate engagement?

Is it purely because the topics in the press board are largely low quality copypasta which links to utter dross masquerading as news?  I think it would help to clarify what actually qualifies when it comes to "notability" and to mandate that topic starters in that sub include their own thoughts an opinions to accompany the quoted segments they're posting.  But I still don't know if that will actually fix the problem.

Is there a chance it just boils down to apathy?  Imagine if there were plenty of good quality topics with in-depth analysis.  The kind of thing we all say we want to see.  Those would naturally drown out the low-effort, low-quality topics we're seeing.  And yet there's no reason I can see why we don't have topics like that.  Aside from just the obvious fact, which is that not many people are making them.  Is it possible we're simply leaving the door wide open for shit topics because we're not making enough good ones?

This shouldn't be a competition. Shit topics shouldn't exist. If good topics don't exist either then we have a dead board, no big deal but at least we know there is no interest. Now it's not clear if there is no interest, or if good posters are discouraged to step into the pile of shit.

Keep in mind that producing shit is much easier than producing non-shit so you can't really win against shit on any kind of pseudo-level playing field.

Because, like Bitcoin Discussion, many good members ignore the board entirely because it is overrun with spammers. Get rid of the spammers, and they will slowly migrate back again.

Anything from a site solely for crypto news should be banned, since these sites churn out non newsworthy click bait a dime a dozen, since that is their business model. If anyone just copies and pastes a bit of an article, then that is a low value post and should be deleted.

I just did a quick experiment on applying those two rules to the current first page of Press (ignoring the 3 stickied topics). It cuts the number of topics from 40 down to just 3, and the number of total replies from 117 to 55. That's nearly half of all the replies in just 7.5% of the topics. Unsurprisingly, those 3 topics are first, second, and third in terms of total number of replies. Those topics are where the good discussion is. If we trashed all the spam as I have suggested above, then almost the entire front page of the board would comprise good quality topics like that, which would slowly but surely attract back good users.

Here's the problem with that: The spammer of the month will churn out 4-5 new topics a day with ease. If you want to drown those out, then you need somewhere approaching 10 new good topics each day. There are not 10 newsworthy things happening to bitcoin every week, let alone every day.

There are good quality topics on that board, but they only come along when something notable happens. In the meantime, we get drowned out with non newsworthy spam.

And when do people link to the same, exact page?

You will pay no attention to a thread that is fulfilled with low quality posts, because you'll consider it pointless. However, some may had a dialogue which is:

1. Constantly interrupted.
2. Doesn't have your opinion in it which may otherwise had.

In other words, you're discouraged to speak out sometimes.

---

I was going to say this;

You can't beat them this way; the game is theirs. We have to get rid of this dirtiness in order to welcome good quality content.

Then spammer will choose Bitcointalk and Bitcointalk SV will be ignored 😉. Because scam fork of Bitcoin so-called Bitcoin SV has ignored by the community.

Anyway, often I do not visit that press section unless I manage any campaign. Because nothing useful there. Just spamming from various sources. Rank limit to making a post in the press section is only the way to reduce spam. Let only allow the above Hero Member to make a post there but keep open for reading to all users.

Playing Devil’s advocate… All the posts seem to have legitimate content and seem to be providing some sort of value to the forum as well as being in the appropriate section. I’m not sure what the complaint is after reading the heavily merited OP. That people are providing too many news articles? I could see if you were posting legitimate news links and then someone blindly posted the same subject, but if the press links are legitimate and not duplicates, should we not be thanking the people posting them?

How do you feel when see a user called 'waybesuricata' making posts continuously? Sharing potential news posts isn't bad, but doesn't mean we should create multiple threads for each short of news. They are just getting news from a site and sharing it here. What's the problem if you merge all today's news to one thread and add the link. So the reader could click the link to read desired news. That's the issue. One or more news sites just spamming with their links. As a result, a few potential news went down and down.

I am curious, did you read all the news provided by waybesuricata? If not who are reading actually?

The press board generates very little traffic. I noted previously that most threads have less than three dozen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5370706.msg58423818#msg58423818) page views.

I might apply a similar rule that is applied when theymos decides if a new sub is needed. That is to measure the number of threads on the first two pages.

Topics on the first page of the press board have the most recent reply as early as October 25, almost three weeks ago. The second page goes back to Seppember 17, nearly two months ago. Based on the above, I don't think it is accurate to say that what you describe as "spam threads" are drowning out higher-quality threads.

---

It sounds like your main concern is that the press board is deserted. If I find any interesting articles about bitcoin this week, I will post them, and will try to find interesting threads and reply to them. Hopefully those who find my posts interesting will read my posts and more traffic will be attracted to the press sub.

How do I feel about it? I guess appreciative that someone is taking the time to document all these articles for the forum.

It seems like it’s being done that way so that if people want to search for specific articles or dates they can easily. Just a guess. I have no idea what the motivation is.

I haven’t read many articles from that section. The only time I ever end up there is when I’m searching for something specific.

That makes sense, reaching the NY Times is much more notable than some site with "coin" in it's name.

How about moving any topic created from a site with "coin" in their URL and more than a few topics per month to one thread in the Press section dedicated to that site? Call it "Press releases from Coinxxxxxx.com" and it stops flooding the board with useless topics.

You can always create self-moderated threads, moderate them however you want, and delete everything you don't want to see there without having to explain to anyone why you are doing that. The forum supports local rules, so if you have your only blacklist, you can even add rules that prevents those you consider spammers from participating in discussions. That way you will engage a better group of people in discussion or your topics will die because members will be afraid to post in them. Ignoring a whole sub-board doesn't seem like a proper solution.

It's a good suggestion. If links from that site appear 5 or more times in the first 1-2 pages in the Press board, a dedicated thread just for that news site should be created. But will admins be interested in moderating it that way? We should get some feedback from them...

If someone wants to read cointelegraph.com (or whichever site the spammer of the month is spamming), then they can simply go to cointelegraph.com. They don't need someone to copy and paste 5 articles a day to the Press board. The fact that these threads generally have 10-20 views and 0-2 replies is proof that they are not generating any discussion and no one actually cares about them.

Not a bad idea, but it requires buy-in from admin and mods, and since we apparently don't care enough about Press to delete blatant spam there, then I can't see this happening either. Hence my proposal to just name it what it is.

Yes, but this only helps on threads you create. You still aren't going to use a board if for every 1 good thread self moderated by an intelligent user there are 20+ spam threads you have to wade through first.

I really hope it is just that.  And I'd really like to find out.  Aside from this topic existing, how else can we get the ball rolling on this?  Seems like the only people who are happy with the Press board in its current state are the spammers. 

Come on admins.  Just two little extra rules.  No cryptomedia sites.  Independent thoughts and commentary from the OP are required to accompany the quoted article.

Let's make it happen.

If at least a few users reported each problematic thread each day, there might be some effect and the reports would not remain unhandled. 1 or 2 users can't make any difference, that's something I'm sure of. My last 5 reports against the biggest spammer in that board have been resolved positively though.

Bumping just to see if there's any more support.  Topics should have some substance to them.  A new thread containing nothing more than a link and a quote should be considered "low quality".  It's just lazy posting.

Perhaps it's time to blame the persons who manage a campaign and accept such shitposers who give almost nothing other than bringing down the value of the forum (at least the content/discussion)

See another example a bit different https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=215813;sa=showPosts
How that's good for the forum and its users (us)

I doubt Theymos will change something for the Press board, the problem is not enough important to deserve a change. Not enough users complaining. But it's normal since we're not a lot using the board, it's subjective.

The best we could do is to report the posts to moderators as low-quality. Because it's the press board it doesn't mean you can copy-paste a description with a link and nothing else. At least, give an opinion, engage in a discussion.
Not even sure it helps, depending on who's moderating and what the person thinks about your argument.

I doubt that any of the popular managers who manage Bitcoin-paying signature campaigns would accept such posts knowingly. If some of them do get counted, it might just be that they are not aware of it. A simple PM informing them about what is happening in the Press board could change that.

When we are talking about the majority of altcoin bounties that include signature campaigns, I am sure that they don't care about the quality their participants produce one bit. It's all about the visibility of their signatures. One could try to inform them and advice them not to count such posts, but I think that's just a waste of time.

What else can be done? Tagging them for mismanaging campaigns? I doubt spammers care that the campaigns they participate in are managed by someone with red paint on his profile.   

I PMed theymos the day I opened this thread, explaining in more detail the issues with the Press board and linking to this thread. I have had no response, which I can only assume means he is content with the current situation. Given that, and that we have also had no response in this thread or any of the many previous threads about the Press board, there is probably no point in us continuing to push to try to clean the board up.

I remain confused why we are happy to let spammers run bitcointalk in to the ground and push away good users and good discussion in the name of free speech. I will continue to always defend free speech, but there is a very obvious difference between protecting controversial thoughts and ideas and allowing utter spam to ruin the forum.

If he was, he would have replied to you in a well established manner. Judging by the arguments said in this thread and that he left you on read seems more like he doesn't care.

Perhaps the standards are softening more and more because the forum has less and less active users and each is starting to be important from the perspective of the administration, especially if it is not a newbie which can be nuked very easily if he did something wrong. I don't know how else to explain that someone has hundreds of posts deleted by a moderator and still not permabanned - it has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to disable signatures in the Press board, and this is not something that would require major technical intervention by admin. Our main spammer in that board would probably give up right away if that happened.

Huh. That news Reporters Know that Bitcointalk is the biggest Crypto traffic source for them. And they don't want to miss the opportunity. They will come back with theirs alts if you ban them.

I haven't visited the Press board in my entire Bitcointalk life before saw your thread. I just checked the board and I just figured out they are doing whatever they want and no one can stop them. lol.
IDK if they understand that "No experienced members go to That boards to read their shit news". Only a few Newbies like me visited that board and they trying to find if there is any income source. Most of the comments are like "Nice Report sir"  ;D ;D

IDK if merit source visit that board. I would like to suggest they do not waste their valuable time there. I believe they cannot find a post for merit. xD.

Where can I find the stats on the number of active users? The stats on https://ninjastic.space regarding the number of posts per month show that we are significantly higher than we were a year ago. Still, if good users are leaving or not signing up to the forum because of the spam issue, then giving spammers free reign to spam isn't exactly going to help the issue.

I've said this before, but this is not a solution. Many of the spammer accounts in the Press board are owned, operated, employed or paid by various crypto "news" sites such as CoinIdol or CoinTelegraph. As long as they can get their links in to each post, then they don't care about having a signature.

I am a merit source. I visit the board not infrequently. Any merit I award is invariably to a thoughtful reply, and never to one of these topic spammers.

In my opinion, the best source for this information is @LoyceV Active users, top posters and most active topics in the past 1h, 24h and 7d (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5178726.0). Statistics for the last 7 days say that we had a total of 6663 active users, but of that 1576 Brand new, and 2684 Newbie. It would be interesting to compare this data with years ago, but my subjective impression is that we have a lot less active users than before


I doubt that's why people leave, although for some the forum is probably not as interesting as before, not only because of the quality, but also because it may no longer be profitable for them unlike before.


You may be right, but at least we would take away their ability to earn double (from links and signature campaigns).

I have argued previously that the press board is sufficiently empty that the spammers are not crowding out the legitimate members from posting. Your response was that the spammers are enticing legitimate members away from posting.

I think the above is a fair argument, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.

I would also point out that threads in the press board is a function of news articles about bitcoin. I might ask which news articles you would like to see discussed in the press board? In the past few weeks, I have created threads (actually thread, singular) about an article I found in a reputable news organization.

Really since bcash split from bitcoin, there has been very little drama, or contention about the future of bitcoin. There really haven’t been any contentious BIP proposals that split the community. As you are aware, bitcoin had no “leader”, so there is no single person that bitcoin writers will write about that affects bitcoin.

I think the reality is that there is little that will or could happen in the bitcoin world that would potentially make front page news. There is the price, but that is about it. Difficulty changes are automatic, halvings are a fun celebration for those who are involved in bitcoin because of their infrequency, but is really not news. It is difficult to write a news article about some upgrade that ~everyone agrees on.

Anything that is newsworthy enough to appear in a mainstream/large/reputable news sources, and not simply in a crypto-only site. Thinking of recent developments, things such as Taproot and the US house passing the infrastructure bill and its related crypto provisions would definitely qualify as newsworthy and notable enough to be discussed. Looking at some of the recently created threads in the Press board by our spammer of the month, things such as the opinion of one person that Ethereum is better than Bitcoin, or the opinion of one legislature that bitcoin should be a payment option, are not newsworthy in the slightest.

As I discussed somewhere earlier in this thread, I think that is part of the issue here. The number of actually newsworthy things happening to bitcoin or involving bitcoin is far smaller than the number of things you can scrape off the bottom of the barrel and churn out some completely trash click bait article about. Unless we clamp down on the spam, it will always outnumber and drown out the good/newsworthy topics.

---

On a side note, good to see our Spammer of the Month^TM is branching out in to one liners as well now! Gotta farm those sweet, sweet shitcoin payments!


Since we aren't going to moderate it, can we just close this board already?

And IMO this is also causing some people not to post there.
They take a look at something and think that it might be worth posting in press and then take a look at what is actually in the press board and not bother.

I used to post more in other sections and read more sections and have over time have really cut back where I go here due to spam / junk.
Some boards are just such a disaster it's not worth digging through the piles to get to something good. I don't think I am the only one in this situation.

-Dave

I think that the silence of theymos doesn't necessarily means that he isn't working/thinking on making changes on the Press board. I think that it can be interpreted from two, very different, point of views:

• A - He took note of the concerns of numerous members and he's currently discussing what to do with other staff members. Perhaps he's analyzing the history of the board and evaluating our claims with them;
• B - Free speech is free speech and (we) can't do nothing that goes against it.

If indeed the path being follow is route A then I think that a simple message like - "We are listening to your concerns and are evaluating the current state of the board" - would be enough to at least have some sort of feedback regarding our concerns. If this was just a claim from a random user it would be understandable to be "ignored" but we are talking about numerous members and, at the same time, these members are passionate and dedicated to our forum, so I don't see anything wrong in at least balancing out the problems that we've highlighted with the sub and at least give us feedback in what the staff thinks about them. Because we could be totally wrong - I doubt it - and if that's the case then I would very much like to know why, even that would lead to counter argument from our part.

If the path chosen was B then I still would like to get a reason why. I get free speech and I think it's one of the pillars of modern society, but doesn't the board content goes directly against the "Forum Moderation policy"[1]? Should we respect one rule in favor or ruining others? Where's the balance in that equation being made?

What I think that is also in the table is the fact that if a decision is made regarding the board, it would set a precedent to do the same to other boards (Discussions like "If you did to Board X this set of things, why don't you do the same to Board Y?). But I don't think this is necessarily bad since a review from time to the regarding the forum activity is actually beneficial to it (from my point of view of course). It is specially true when our forum has the vast dimension that it currently owns. I do believe that any kind of review that any board is subjected to, has to have a consensus - similar to how BTC network operates - regarding its current state and this "review" period - where staff gathers feedback and evaluates the board status - should be long enough in order to implement grounded and justified actions.

Otherwise this just discredits that specific board leading to more active users completely ignore it because they know almost nothing good comes out of it. Does it really make sense to have it a board just for the pure sake of having it?

I think he's a big boy and can easily post or PM a couple of sentences himself instead of leaving everyone guessing and speculating.

Until that happens, Occam's razor says that no one cares. Mods don't care to clean it up, admins don't care to make any changes (hire/replace mods, restructure boards, etc) to make it easier to clean it up, and users don't care to report posts because it's a pointless waste of time.

This isn't the first time this has been brought up or the only board with issues. The whole idea of Bitcoin Discussion being one of the shittiest boards on the Bitcoin forum should be a matter of grave concern for... someone, but apparently it isn't.

When I think of Bitcointalk, for some reason, altcoins are at the forefront of the traffic and activity. I wonder: have we already crossed the point to where the noise-to-signal ratio overflowed into the negatives, and now we think everything is peachy?

The forum will continue on, but what is the actual purpose of using it anymore, if not to spam, scam, or continue in circlejerk topics about nothing?

As of this post, the list of rules has been viewed 736769 times, with a member count of 3398535. Bear in mind, those are not unique views. For some reason, the forum is most unfriendly to new users despite having removed the Newbie jail system years ago.

As a guest, you can't view trust, and thus all marketplace threads (where trust is viewable and relevant) should ideally be blocked off to such users or have a giant warning that gives them prerequisite knowledge. Flags are the only preventative measure for this subset of users, and of those only the yellow ones could be applied without the existence of a victim.

Once you sign up, you receive the great privilege of seeing DefaultTrust metrics but if you never learned about rules, trust, or anything that should have been taught immediately after registration, then once your seven-day grace period is up, you no longer see those yellow flags. I wonder if there should be some "remove type-1 flag" button that requires user confirmation, to indicate their experience and knowledge of the system, rather than an arbitrary time-based metric?

Thankfully, we have an intuitive forum where all users are responsible for their stupidity when they can't find the rules or when they play at websites that everyone (but them) knows is a scam or become frustrated, spam, and banned when they finally do learn about the convoluted mess that is Bitcointalk.

The issues with the Press board have been going on for years and have been discussed for years. See this thread from Foxpup 6 years ago: New Board Suggestion: "Actual Press" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1300732.0). See also all these threads discussing the mess that is the Press board:

December 2020 - @Best_Change spams in the Press section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5296205.0)
June 2020 - Moderation of @CoinIdolNews constantly shitting in the Press board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5253793.0)
August 2019 - New guidelines are needed for the Press board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5172693.0)
June 2019 - Press Board - Limit Number Threads Per User Per Day. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5150707.0)
July 2018 - News spamming in the press subforum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4588339.0)
February 2018 - Let's retire the Bitcoin Discussion > Press sub-forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3019217.0)
November 2017 - The Press Board - Moderation Required (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2367425.0)
February 2016 - Bunch of idiots/bots spamming the hell out of press board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1354201.0)

6 years we have had complaints for this board of legalized plagiarism in which >90% of topics are simply advertising spam for crypto "news" sites. If after 6 years of complaints there is not even a response, then the only logical conclusion is either satisfaction with the current situation or complete apathy towards that board. Either way, it doesn't seem worth our time to continue to push to clean it up.

As I've said above and as I've shown many times on this forum, I will always argue in defense of free speech, even when that speech is particularly stupid or repulsive. But there is a very obvious difference between protecting controversial speech and ideas, and allowing someone to stand up in the middle of a debate with a megaphone and repeatedly shout "VISIT MY WEBSITE", drowning out all sensible discussion and resulting in the majority of people present getting up and leaving, which is effectively what these spammers are doing.

It's both encouraging and disappointing that six years now, there's protest about this board and still, no action has been taken.

Besides theymos and Cyrus who else belongs to the administrating team? Who are those who should come into agreement to make the change? I've noticed hilariousetc did talk about this and was against on having it which makes me think the moderators don't have much opinion on how will the forum operate besides approving/disapproving the reports.

Thank you so much for that o_e_l_e_o. While I registered in 2018, it was only during this year that I started being more active. I wasn't aware of the history of reports similar to the same one that we are discussing now and honestly I'm baffled to the - apparently - lack of feedback from the administrators. What leaves me even more baffled is that, after reading all those threads posted by o_e_l_e_o, at least some moderators seem to be on the opinion that the Press board needs something to be done to it. Here's one of the most interesting quotes from hilariousandco:
There are two interesting facts regarding this pool:

• Staff clearly reckon that there's something wrong with it - 75 % is a strong indicator
• No one agrees that the board should be left as is - 0 % of the votes

And yet, almost one year after nothing was done to follow up this poll. I reckon that the poll was just made to have a generous knowledge of how each staff member felt regarding the board, but I'm finding it really hard to believe that they went with all that discussion to have it let rest for a whole year - after all they all agreed that it was something to be looked into. I wonder if we could have an insight on the follow up from this meeting/poll? I reckon that most of us are open to counter arguments, that's just how discussions happen and it's totally fine to have them. I think that its worse when we don't ear anything back, it kinda makes us feel that we aren't being listened, while we're just expressing our thoughts regarding this current scenario.

Here are more replies from hilariousandco - from different threads linked by o_e_l_e_o - that, from my reading, happen to be aligned with most points being discussed here (quotes presented in a descending order):

If we're all so well aligned with staff members - in what concerns that something needs to be done - why hasn't been any sort of feedback regarding this issue or even a thread created by anyone of them to openly discuss this? Is there something that I'm missing that's making me make a bad evaluation of the situation that we have?

There were two (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5371662.0) threads (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5371104.0) about articles that mentioned taproot. I did a google news search for "taproot" and reviewed the first 5 pages of results -- the only article I found was one published (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/14/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade-what-it-means-for-investors.html) by CNBC, and isn't much better (IMO) than the two that were already posted.

I might ask my question another way and ask if you have a specific news article that you would have liked to discuss? (not a topic)

Again, currently there are threads that have a last post made on Nov 1 on the first page of the press sub. If there is a thread about a legitimate news article being drowned out, it is taking a month for the thread to get drowned out.

I think the amount of activity (or the lack thereof) on the Press sub is a function of a lack of overall interesting news articles about bitcoin/crypto. There are simply not a lot of interesting news articles about bitcoin.

Note that that poll is actually from 2017 - hilarious' reference to it is from 2020. So in 4 years since unanimous agreement from the staff that something needs to change, nothing has changed.

It's not a case of them being pushed off the front page - it's a case that many members aren't even going to bother to visit a board when they know >90% of the topics are plagiarized trash.

Then the board has served its purpose and should be closed entirely, rather than just letting the Spammer of the Month rack up free advertising and free signature payments.

Except that we can complain here forever and probably nothing will happen, how many participants of this topic made at least one report to moderator in Press board? I know many will say it’s a waste of time, but right now it’s the only way to discourage spammers from abusing that board.

I have about a dozen successfully handled reports recently in that board, and as of today, I am reporting all posts with the comment "no notable source/shilling" (insert two sites that make 99% of all links).

I don't think I did. It is indeed a waste of time, but worse: it's such a waste I don't even read the board.

If the board becomes readable again, I'll join :)

It is a waste of time. I have hundreds of good reports from that board. I have hundreds of good reports against individual users, such as CoinIdol News. The board is no better for it, it is no more usable, it has not attracted back good users, and CoinIdol News still isn't permabanned, despite having 100% of his posts deleted. Add all that to the fact that when I gave up reporting in the Press board, it was because many of my reports were going unhandled for threads which were just the usual copy and paste plagiarism with a link slapped on the end from the spammer of the month being employed by CoinTelegraph or whoever.

We have been reporting posts and discussing these issues for 6 years and the board is still a mess. If we aren't going to moderate it properly, then no amount of reports will fix that and we should just close the board entirely. As much as I would like a properly moderated board to discuss newsworthy developments, I'd rather have no board at all then have this legalized plagiarism spamfest.

The user you mention no longer post in that board means that the reports were effective - and if we could somehow prevent only two spammers (currently) from making a mess on that board, the situation would return to normal to some extent.


There is an alternative solution for you and anyone who is bothered by what is happening there, just set the board to ignore and forget that it even exists.

---

I will then waste my time and try to clean up the mess, someone still has to get their hands dirty - we know big gentlemen don’t like deep mud ;)

He was temporarily banned only after multiple users started threads complaining about him. As soon as his ban ran out he came back and started spamming exactly he had done before, and again, it took multiple posts in Meta before he was temp banned again. This has happened a couple of times, and given that he still isn't perma banned, means I suspect it will happen again. If you want to take over the role of reporting the same user 100+ times, be my guest, but I'd rather just shut the board entirely.

Until next month. There's always another Spammer of the Month!

The worst thing is we could easily have a consensus on the problem, but there seems to be no determination from the administration to fix it.
And rarely a word from a moderator, we feel more like we're being ignored and talking in a hole. It's like fighting a war against the wind, you may have the biggest army,  the wind will always be there.

Maybe it's time to take it to another level and to complain about the people running campaigns and accepting this type of spammer. Risking their reputation on this job is risking their business. Follow the money. If they accepted 1-2 users like them, there are surely a lot of others crawling around different boards.

I wonder, could we make a bot that automatically reports in the Press board whenever a topic, with these details, is created? I'd thinking of a bot that does this in the entire forum, but having it just in the Press would be a good startup.

It could search the post and if it found that the user is just copying (plagiarizing) from an external source, it reports it. That way, we'll discourage them to continue doing this without having to actually change something in the rules. (And no one wastes their time by reporting)

You can complain, but making them disapproving these users is a much harder thing to do. (And requires a little work (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355808.msg57750420#msg57750420) from the admins' side)

What gets me is the number of removed topics and no ban.
I know he is active on other boards so that might be a factor, but I would like to think that if I started that many topics wherever I would get a vacation from the forum for a few weeks.
But, as others have said, the mods / admins don't seem to care.

-Dave

I'd even go deeper in the rabbit hole and say that there's not either enough staff currently moderating the forum and/or the current staff doesn't want to waste their time moderating.

There's too many spam in way too many sections; the Press board is a good example, but as already pointed out, the same thing applies to the Bitcoin discussion board, Gambling too, not to go into the altcoin whole section... There's way too many spam being generated to be handled accordingly, and we may even be at a point in which only exemplary measures may have some impact. And that does not go against freedom of speech. Keeping things clean doesn't mean people can't express their oppinions, they simply should actually have an oppinion instead of regurgitating a quote or a completely empty post consisting on a few sentences that are only meant to reach the signature quota.

They simply have to step up their game; after X posts deleted for being completely empty or void of any argument, a short ban. If that keeps happening, a longer temp to end up with a perma-ban for literally spamming. Another twist; the bans should actually say the reason for it: you've had X posts deleted for being a signature campaign spam.

But seeing how most if not any proposal to tidy up the forum or X boards have ended, we can only wish Santa will bring us some of this for Xmas...

You can also ask the admin to close some other boards like Bitcoin Discussion or Alternate cryptocurrencies, and I'm sure there are more which we can consider a spam paradise. When I read the posts in this thread it seems to me that I am doing something wrong by fighting spam and shitposting, but unlike endless discussions, I can at least show some concrete results - no matter what you and some other members call it a waste of time.

https://i.imgur.com/FerUBx4.png

It might be because we don't have consensus on the solution.  Sounds as though everyone recognises there is a problem, but we have many different suggestions about how to resolve it.  Some people think more rules are needed, others think more users need to be banned, some say lock the board completely, while others still think more moderators will help.  Even I'm starting to wonder what would be the most effective fix.

Some of those options are offered as alternatives only because nothing is being done, e.g. lock the board if no one's gonna fix it, or clarify the rules if that's what's stopping mods from cleaning it up. I don't think there is much disagreement that the shitty copypasta needs to be removed, and deleting those posts and banning repeat offenders is the only real solution if we want the board to mean something.

Hear me out.  This might sound totally crazy at first, possibly even insane...  BUT...  I have a solution.  We could all just go on living normally and not let too many news articles being posted in the news section ruin our lives.

I know I'm nuts, but it's worth a try.  If Phoebe can do it...

https://tv.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/0d1691cf-ac7a-4edb-8d32-2923f091667c

QFT. This is not a difficult distinction to make. I don't understand why we continue to let spammers rules the forum.

Agree with suchmoon. Enforce the rules/moderate it properly/ban the spammers are essentially the same thing. If we aren't going to do that (which it seems we aren't) then just close the board.

And surrender yet another board over to the spammers. Soon we'll be down to just Dev, Mining, and Tech as being the only actually usable boards on the forum.

That's my thinking as well and I believe I said something similar either in this thread or somewhere else.

I hope that doesn't happen. I would much rather not see the spam in the Press board by not visiting it, than seeing it in the subs dedicated to proper and technical discussions. Let's try and contain it there and report those who break the rules. If the admins don't want to do anything about it, we will know that the issue isn't as important to them as it is to some members.   

Or he switches to a different board and continues in the same way, possibly making simple alterations. 

I guess it depends on the sub. I also feel like there is less discussion in some of the subs I frequent. I remember that in the Hardware wallet child board it was possible to see 5-10 posts each time I came online. Now, there are days where it seems that we have just 1 or 2. 

Maybe "Allow the bad posters to continue doing bad things" is your default response, but some of us would prefer it if the forum was slightly nicer than a cesspit.

Honestly, I don't get it.  Are you being contrary for the sake of it?  Or do you have a vested interest in opposing improvements?  I want to read topics that promote healthy discussion.  If someone approached you in person, face to face, and quoted an article verbatim and then said nothing else, would you engage them in conversation?  Or would you assume they had suffered some form of brain damage and conclude they need to stop wasting peoples' time?

It's a forum, not RSS.

I don't believe that for a second.  Many of the people complaining about news articles being posted are the same idiots who support Vod's spreading of lies, abuse of the trust system, and ultimately trying to extort me for $50,000,000.  If people want to stop people from doing bad things, you can start with cleaning up the trust network which has been overtaken by forum users who don't even trade or interact with others on the blockchain at all but finagled their way in by teaming up as a method of bullying others.  I personally think there is value in lots of news articles being placed there in a uniform format to document Bitcoin's media coverage over the years.  Complaining about it doesn't have value, although we're all getting paid to spam here so enjoy the hypocrite show.  Until I see some of the blowhards in here posting legitimate news articles on a regular basis in a way they deem appropriate, then I think everyone should give up the Karen act and quit criticizing those who do put forth an honest effort.

Honestly, I've got tired of reporting (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5253793.msg55375963#msg55375963) the above mentioned... As o_e_l_e_o said, I observed it's useless... At some point I remember that even CoinIdol News' boss got involved in here, asking why her bot's posts are deleted (facepalm).


I'll make a counter offer² (don't take it personal, NotATether :)): I am willing myself to moderate that board for free. It causes too much pain.

If anyone in charge is interested, I would do it under some conditions / guidelines:
- I would not allow topics simply quoting a URL without trying to open any real discussion about the subject
- I would do, in my free time, a thorough check through all topics (this may take months or even years) and delete the junk
- I would suggest to allow posting only the users with a specific rank (let's say Full Members?)
- I would suggest to remove signatures from that board
- I'd be open to suggestions from other users signaling a shitty topic¹⁾
- I'd try to enforce these guidelines:


- I'd try to enforce this description: "Notable press hits"; obviously, this would mean the allowed articles will be affected by my subjectivity
- I'd do all these in the limits of my free time.

¹⁾ I am not asking for a rank of Moderator by doing this, only for a powerful "Delete" button within the respective section. I am not sure how this will work out, considering that my free time is currently a rara avis since my baby was born (  ::) ) but I think it'll be something better than nothing. With all due respect to jgarzik, considering his absence since more than 1 year, it's hard to keep that board clean without a constant monitoring. Not that it matters too much on this subject, but I just observed that he has a negative feedback (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=541) from gmaxwell.

²⁾ In case many users would object to this proposal, I will step back and I will apologize.

To sum-up, if theymos reads this, I am willing to do a free service, on my free time, in order to help the forum. I am not making this post for merits; I am merely trying to give a hand of help on a matter which caused me enough irritation as well until now and I am sure it's a big pain for many others...

If my proposal is accepted, I'd gladly try to help. If it's not accepted -- at least I tried. If it's accepted but I will see myself that I am unable to perform the duty (due to various reasons but, most likely, due to lack of time; nevertheless, I may find myself incompetent for the respective job; or, other issues may appear, hindering me in moderating Press board) then I will inform that I have to cease doing it due to the respective reason...

Not in vain as most claim, it is enough to look at the Press board and see that the spammer of the month received an award from the mods - although it is a pity that not all threads are deleted, the mods still took into account that this would delete a lot of posts from users that post in that threads. I did my part - a waste of time? I can survive without those few minutes I spent there.

https://i.imgur.com/08trtrD.png

It doesn't solve the problem because another user will come again in a few days to do the same thing. And again the topics will have to be reported and so on... It will never end and that's exactly what makes us tired. After reporting several posts from the same users, another level of moderation should be done (a temporary ban of 2-3 days or something similar I don't know).
How many reports did it take until we got rid of CoinIdiot News?

Maybe after 5 reports a moderator could send to the person a PM asking to improve his posts and after 10 reports other sanctions, etc...
By the way, go to see who's back there, it exactly shows my point: no end...

I understand it can be difficult to determine if the post should be deleted or not because the rules are not clear and it is subjective depending on the person's point of view.
But in fact, if there were more clear and strict guidelines, there wouldn't even be a need to debate, it becomes objective.

I don't know who suggested disabling the signature space in the board but I now start to think it could be the best thing to do

If the role of the Press board is now "contain the spammers", then all the more reason to rename it as I originally suggested.

You have an exceptionally low bar for what constitutes "honest effort" if you are quite happy to include in that definition repeatedly copy and pasting someone else's work without a single original thought or comment.

Locking these threads doesn't make the Press board any more readable though, and you still have to search through all this trash to find meaningful threads. And it also does nothing to disincentivize the spammer in question, since he still gets paid for spamming for CoinTelegraph. And without any actual enforcement and bans from higher up, then you will eventually get bored of reporting the same user literally hundreds of times, as has happened to plenty of other people posting in this thread. I don't mean to discourage you, but this is not a long term solution.

---

I will be locking this thread in a couple of days. With still no response at all from theymos in this thread or via PM, it is clear nothing is going to change. There is no point wasting our time discussing changes which will never happen.

Some threads have been deleted, others have not, it is the decision of the moderator who handles the reports. At this point, it was obviously not possible to achieve better than this.


As far as I can see the user in question is no longer active on the Press board, last thread was posted 7 days ago - so I would not agree that he will continue with what he did before. This is not a long-term solution, but it sends a message to anyone who tries something similar that it will not pay off.

Oh, right.  I forgot you view every topic through the lens of your ongoing feud with someone who no longer posts here to carry on the dispute.  Maybe get over it and stop allowing it to cloud your judgement on subjects which have nothing to do with that?



Clearly you and I have very different perspectives around what constitutes "effort".  The entire point of this discussion is to define copypasta as "low-effort".  None of your biases against other forum users are valid arguments to challenge that.  If you have any relevant arguments to support the notion that copypasta somehow involves effort, feel free to present them.  Otherwise, please find another topic in which to whine about Vod.

I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy.  I get that people don't like it when their own bully act is turned around on them.  Don't act like you don't appreciate the opportunity to respond to earn your little $1 for your spam though, which I might add has no value whatsoever unlike the news articles you are complaining about...  

We must have different views on a lot of things.  For example, I think you are the signature spammer who is making valueless posts, not the people documenting articles in a specific format so those who search topics years from now can easily gather information about them.  As for whining about Vod, I'm actually complaining about the hypocrisy of your spammer crew, not Vod's lunatic behavior that has been endorsed by them.  

Containing it in the Press board might have not been the best use of words. But the fact is that there is spam in that board. To fight that spam, the admins could make some drastic changes like disabling signatures. If that was to be done, the virus would just spread elsewhere and infect other parts of the forum and then we would have to have a discussion on how to fight the spammers in boards X and Y.

I am sorry, but I think that certain boards are beyond saving. :-\ At least with all the freedoms we are given here. Choosing to be a spamming or scamming member is allowed, even though spamming is against the rules. What constitutes spam remains debatable. It seems that the Press board isn't something the admins find alarming unfortunately.   

I would accept that as a valid argument *IF* the articles weren't mostly crypto-blog sites.  Who in their right mind wants an archive of the dross those sites churn out?  I can see value in something that serves to document actual media coverage, tracking progress of how Bitcoin is perceived in the wider world, but also feel it would be better still if those topics also served a function of generating stimulating conversations.  The only reason we don't have that is because the people posting them are seemingly too preoccupied with searching for the next trash-blog to copy that they can't find time to provide their own insights on the subject (assuming they even have any). 

Aside from the part where you clearly don't like us very much, what is your justification for opposing the suggestion that posters add their own commentary to their quoted articles? 

Surely if someone cares enough to share something newsworthy, then they must have some sort of view regarding it which can be expressed in words?  If they don't, then I tend to assume they don't care about the content of the article.  In which case, they must be posting it for another reason.



If all I cared about was getting paid, I'd just do what the people I'm complaining about are doing.  It's not exactly difficult.  This is something I care about.  I'm fairly sure I put more effort into putting forth my arguments here than these Press spammers do in pressing the 'Post' button without a single thought entering their heads.  I wouldn't say your posts here are without value, but I do believe them to be seriously misguided and counter-productive to the goal of making a better Press board.

https://www.treetopzencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/pointing-finger-1922074_960_720.png

"I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy.  I get that people don't like it when their own bully act is turned around on them.  Don't act like you don't appreciate the opportunity to respond to earn your little $1 for your spam though"

"We must have different views on a lot of things.  For example, I think you are the signature spammer who is making valueless posts, not the people documenting articles in a specific format so those who search topics years from now can easily gather information about them."

"As for whining about Vod, I'm actually complaining about the hypocrisy of you"

Quoted by OgNasty of the Bitcointalk Forum in the topic above link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5370706.msg58622022#msg58622022

https://www.treetopzencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/pointing-finger-1922074_960_720.png

What is really interesting about this post is that I need to think of a couple more words to get it padded enough and I can earn my signature money.