Bitcoin Forum

Old story, it repeats again.

Spammers and shit posters (nothing wrong to call them like this) use this approach to hit post quota and manage to earn money from their shit posts.

How do they do that?

• Posting reserved posts. Likely they do it because the time of weekly post counting in their campaign is ending
• Returning back, minutes or hours later, to edit those posts with zero-valued contents.

• Posting reserve? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5228475.0) (old story, 2 years ago)
• New story (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4720640.msg60624862#msg60624862). It is bad as the user is from 1xbit campaign
• I believe we can find more in 1xbit campaign
• Another example: (AndySt) The next abuser of stake campaign? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402584.0)

I think if campaign managers see such shit posts that were edited, they would have one more reason to not count those posts for weekly payment.

For other members, we can report such posts as spam.

1xbit campaign is a scam contest, and users who apply and participate in it willfully promote such scams, to the detriment of their profile.
It is really little surprise that such dishonest members would try to cheat the campaign. The manager of the campaign most probably would not care about such edited posts, they just want to be in peoples faces, with the way they are throwing money into advertisement on different platforms.

I have a question about reporting such posts, If the user edits the post before a moderator can check out the report, what would be an appropriate response to it? Especially if the new post is not worth deleting.

Manager (and forum users) can only see edited if they visit a specific topic to see that post. If the manager only count posts in post history of a participant, it is impossible to know that post was edited or not.

First, such reserved post is non-sense and should be trashed.
Second, moderators can check content history of a post.
Third, they can use unofficial resource to check, like from https://loyce.club/archive/posts/

I am aware of this, I was trying to say that the 1xBit campaign manager might not care about how the participants go about the campaign, as long as they keep on spamming. Many of the posts and replies advertising them are low value, but they are all accepted.

You are newbie but your posts make me curious. Too knowledgeable about forum and 1xbit campaign, then checking shows that

Your first post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5396460.msg59988934#msg59988934) (1 day after your account registration day) in this forum is jumping to Meta and answering questions about forum rules.  ???

I do not see how that is relevant here, I was not even trolling you. Besides, I stated that I had done a bit of reading around the forum before making my first post.

-replying to your edit: I would not say I am very knowledgeable, the 1xBit debacle is not easy to miss, for someone who frequent the forum. My goal is to learn about bitcoin, but first I need to get familiar with the forum features.

I'd imagine the post would include and could be reported for plagiarism (especially if it's done near the start of the thread).

Mods are normally fairly happy to remove posts that don't add value to a topic or mention something new/different (that could count as plagiarism - in this case they might be copying from someone else but rephrasing entirely what was said so the two don't look identical).

Solosanz caught a user behaving like this a while back: (AndySt) The next abuser of stake campaign? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402584.0)

I think it's a bad habit for signature campaign participant. This campaign pays participants to spread awareness on their site which should be done evenly over 7 days, but this way I believe they have hired the wrong people.

If it happens to the 1xbit campaign, then let it be because I don't think we should help the scammer who was scammed by his signature participant. For other campaigns, yes I will agree with your suggestion.

Since we are talking 1xbit campaign, I think there is no chance that manager of their campaign will pay attention and take some actions. But there is another problem - such posts don't add any value to discussion and it goes against forum rules. It's not even some generic shit writen, it's just empty post. So, it should be reported to moderators. I don't know how much time it takes for him to fill post with content after he published it, but if mod will act fast enough, such posts will be removed.
If it would be normal campaign, such user would lose his spot soon, but 1xbit don't really care about it.

It is not difficult to catch this kind of campaign cheating techniques, even if they managed to edit their blank posts before the moderator checked, we have tools that help to visualize un-edited post from any user. However, just in case I took the liberty to report seveal of their blank posts to moderators.

Even it is difficult for the moderators to find and punish these cheaters as they will have to look for the previous version of every reported post. Since there are too many posts being reported, it may be time consuming for the mods to use third party tools.

My suggestion is that if anyone sees any such "Reverse posts", they should mention that profile here and also take that blank post screenshot. All members can then keep track of their posts and report them. When there will be many reports against the same post, mods will definitely take action against them.

I think that there are very few people who try to fight spam in general, and when someone uses such insidious techniques, then the matter becomes even more difficult because people have a hard time deciding on any action. I personally haven't seen too much spam regarding the sig campaign mentioned above, which means that they chose parts of the forum that are not the focus of active reporters.

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A problem arises for the moderator, because the post is obviously not what it was initially reported for, and it all boils down to whether the moderator wants to check it in the database of archived posts, or whether the reporter archived it and added a link to the description of the reported post. I'm not sure what the moderator would do in such a case, but it seems to me that the majority would leave such a report unhandled or maybe even mark it as bad.

Thank you for the response Lucius. As I understand it, the mods would act on their discretion.
Would the report being marked as bad or unhandled affect the users ratings, like succeeding reports not being taken as serious, or is it of no importance.?
Can I also see the status of my reports to the moderator?

Can I comment here as a "so what".
1X and a few campaigns really don't care.

The better campaign managers like DarkStar_ , Hhampuz , Yahoo62278 , and many others would bounce out out so fast your head would spin.

It's a bit of a self correcting system. If your manager does not care, you spend money for crap posts that get you nothing, you don't generate more business so you leave.
There are of course exceptions to that, like 1X that are doing it for different reasons. They just want their name out there to scam people.

-Dave

Another example. I think they come from a same farm so they have same posting behavior. When weekly time is ending, they make such reserved posts to avoid missing weekly payment. Then, they will return to edit it with zero value content.

With this style, they can do it 7 days a week. If a manager requires to spread posts in 5 or 7 days a week, they still can do it. No issue from lazy participants like this.

They even don't know about that. Very few members in forum know about that approach from shit posters, not only campaign managers.

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When you see such posts, there are two possibilities:

• Misclick
• To reserve weekly posts

Maybe we should have a rule that only the OP can add "reserved" posts into his topic and a bot should have a list of keywords and report the rest of "reserved" posts at sight?
.. Just an idea I've got now...

Edit: of course, if mods choose to not remove those, not much that can be done.

Exactly, although they have some kind of guidelines by which they act, each of them has their own personal attitude towards how they act in a certain situation.


If nothing has changed, you can see the report history in the last 30 days only after 300 reports, and as for the percentage of success, of course it changes with the number of good/bad/unhandled reports. Although I only have a little more than 20 bad reports, my accuracy level is 100%, so you can have a few bad reports that will not affect that part of the statistics if it is important to you.

LoyceV has a scraper for unedited post (free) and a paid service for signature campaign managers.

• LoyceV's convenient (paid) service for signature campaign managers (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5273876.0)
• 60M posts! View unedited/deleted posts (search per post, per user or per topic) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167469.0)

I believe he can do it easily and it will help managers to have a list of suspicious reserved posts. Then they can compare it to editing time, check content more carefully for post count, etc.

It is normal if a user reserves posts in a single topic (for updates, etc.) but it is abnormal if a user reserve many posts in many topics in short period of time.

However, it should be a paid service, not free one. So I think managers will less likely to use it.

I expect good managers find that out. Actually good managers may not allow such users into campaign in the first place...
Bad managers don't care already, so they won't pay for such a feature.

All we can do is for the sake of the forum (since such behavior is abnormal and leads to shitposts) and clean the weed, but, in my idea, an actual rule is also needed so the mods have the reason to actually remove those when reported. A bot will be a later step (some mods have their own bots too helping in the cleanup work).

Definitely; I would encourage everyone to report "reserved" posts or ones with ellipses (og kush420 didn't even write a full ellipsis, just two periods, lol) to the mods. 

I realize this is probably just one campaign we're talking about here (1xbit), but how can any campaign manager accept an unfinished post for payment at the end of the pay period?  I'm a bit out of the loop: who's managing the 1xbit campaign, anyway?  It almost looks like the old Yobit campaign style of management, which was to skip having a manager altogether and just rely on post count via an automated bot.

I rarely venture outside of the few sections I frequent, but if I were an active browser of sections like Bitcoin Discussion or the altcoin sections, seeing people get paid for making a post that consists entirely of ".." would infuriate me--and in the past, it's done exactly that.  The years from 2015-2018 to be exact, which is the time I spent on the forum prior to the merit system.  I used to get so pissed at these shitposting idiots that I'd tag them as a spammer.  You can't do that anymore, but my point is that it's annoying at the very least to a lot of people, myself included.

If Theymos allowed me (or DT members in general) to start negging these morons into oblivion, I'd be spending hours each day doing it.  Unfortunately, that wouldn't do much good for 1xbit's collection of shitposters, since the one OP pointed out (og kush420) has lots of red trust, and not even for his posting.  There's a tag from Vod (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1967796.0) from a few years ago involving an actual scam by that user, and obviously 1xbit doesn't give a shit about who's advertising for them.

It might help with shitposters in other campaigns/bounties, though.  But it's still not a good use of the trust system, hence why people stopped doing it.

Certainly we can report such reserved posts, even if they were edited mins or hours later.

Assume they return and edit such posts a few hours later, it is off-context. Because that discussion should go beyond the one happened around that reserved post. I don't say it is off-topic but off-context. Another minus point is edited content is always low or zero value, shit-post actually.

1xbit and Stake.com campaigns. However, I don't aim at any specific campaign here. It is probably more posters like that and matter is we did not detect them.

I have been in this forum for more than 1 year, but some posts would make me think that I am just a few weeks old in the forum. This place is like Zee world - extraordinary everyday ;D
The idea of posting shit and editing later is an idea only lazy pals will come up with. The stress of returning to same post and trying to get a new idea to augment what was posted is not worth it. To me it is more time wasting than typing once. We have 7days in a week, with better planning anyone could post upto 50 without being overtaken by time.

But since the accused is a promoter of 1xbit, we shouldn't be that surprised.

I have no idea how the 1xbit are conducting their signature campaign but Stake.com signature is designed to make more posts. They are encouraging users to post in gambling section. I don't want to bring the campaign manager name but this is clearly mentioned in their campaign thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5400828.0

When someone is chasing for 100 (example number) posts a week then obviously there will be no quality but numbers.

It's old, too old LOL

On a forum with over 3 million active users with this number growing day after day, I personally would be very surprised if everyone single user on the forum is a perfect poster.
I also would be very surprised if every single user is so honest to the point that they don't try to game the forum or even the signature campaign they are participating in.
What am I saying....
I am saying that, In every 12(twelve), there is a judas,
In every family, there is that one person who makes him or herself the black sheep of the family.  ;D.

But the good thing is that this set of spammers/gamers are always caught at the end of the day and given the treatment they deserve.


Good characteristics of an alt account maybe  ;D, or an account used to evade forum ban  ;D.
Nothing serious, just saying.

Misclick, that's definitely rare but possible if the finger quickly pressed ALT+S instead of ALT+P.
I think I've also misclicked in the past but I immediately edited the post before it even reached 1-2 minutes. But if the date has changed, then I believe it is a reserve weekly posts.

We can help managers by reporting users for review mainly because of their habits. If it's about a campaign, let the manager decide what's best. In AndySt's case, I think the manager took the appropriate action.

If they reserved posts to get post quota that means post counting time is mostly ending. I am sure they will return a few minutes or hours later to edit their posts. Very likely that they make reserved posts for their farm and after they done with reserved posts, they will return to each account for editing.

I don't think they will spend days to come back and edit.

As you have already concluded, red tags are not something that would prevent such members from doing the same things they are still doing today. If you are already ready to spend the whole day leaving red tags in their profiles, it would be much more useful to use the "report to moderator" option and hit them where it hurts the most, in the number of deleted posts.

I kicked out several shitposters from the Bitcoin discussion that way, they simply realized that it is not worth it for them to write posts that will be deleted.

That's really good but it would be much better if we have ban option like temporary from the forum mods if a person receives beyond certain number of deleted posts in short time frame so this can be a lesson for the members who is not giving much concentration about the quality of the posts they were making.

And another thing, people who are posting below those reserved post can be more effective in these cases so anyone who see such posts should give some attention to the post and if the person is doing such kind of thing more often then they should be reported to the campaign managers.

For 1xbit there is no comment because they never going to care anything so we can only hope that mods can take some actions.

I know from personal experience that in the case of a large number of deleted posts of an individual user, a temporary ban is issued - especially if the user, regardless of the deleted posts, continues to violate the rules of the forum. Just recently, I had one such case where I reported more than 50 posts of one user, after which he became inactive - I assume he got a temporary ban.

This is the only way to send a clear message to the user, and it is up to the user to decide whether he wants to change his behavior or go for a permanent ban.

Two main factors:

• Total posts made or total messages sent
• Intensity of that activity

If there is same total posts/ messages, the more intensively you do it, you will likely get a more serious ban. I knew it from the case of BitcoinFX.

Here but as I know, it is flexible and moderator can ban you after your second time if they consider your case is serious and period of a temporary ban is flexible too. It does not have to be 7, 14 or 30 days.

I see that working for a while until these spammers realize what kind of keywords get their posts deleted and they simply change it up a bit. "Reserved" becomes "Rezerved" or "R e s e r v e d", etc.

Theymos could add a minimum character requirement for anyone that isn't the OP. That way, If I wanted to post a single word, I wouldn't be able to. But even that would be abused. Instead of one meaningless word, they will pair it with a few more and job done.   

If such posts are from participants of the famed scam site - 1xbit, I think it's pointless wasting efforts in reporting them. Those who are enrolled there and the project they promote deserve each other.

Oh, really? Then that could be a major reason I shockingly find shitposters in some reputable campaigns. Reading isolated posts without following the stream of thought in the thread is likely not going to expose even off topic posts, the same way it won't expose edited posts too. It should behoove managers to do thorough jobs and monitor what their participants post. After all, they say that what is worth doing at all should be worth doing well.

Yep, the rules will need to be adjusted every now and then. A silly cat and mouse "game", but I don't see better option.


As soon as they know what's the rule, they can abuse it...


On the other hand, the fact they find out the rules can mean that they've read the forum (i.e. one step forward). Of course, there can be that only their "master" have read the forum and the "puppets" only follow its rules.

I would also say so if it had become a habit. But I won't think much about how to prevent it because if we come across such users then reporting to moderator is the key solution for handle with them. The habit may not be a violation for the forum, but the bad work ethic of the signature campaign participants is not exemplary.

Red tags are also not the right solution in such cases ^{[as they say],} but it's probably worth expecting the maintainer to blacklist the violator and exclude him from future campaign. But it looks like this thread will change their habit of not getting caught, and it looks like we're going to have a hard time pinpointing the violator.

I just reported a couple of posts by mm2543363580 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=155420) which consisted of "..", so obviously this shit is still an ongoing problem.

Oddly enough, the main reason I noticed this was because I browse the forum by looking at my unread threads page, and the above joker had been the last poster in multiple recent threads and that prompted me to take a look at what he was doing.  Anyone else noticing members posting ellipses as placeholders?

He doesn't have a signature, only an avatar. That makes the account look as if it's banned, but it's not (https://bitcointalk.org/modlog.php).
I checked 6 of his last posts, all were edited. I checked my unedited post archive (https://loyce.club/archive/members/15/155420.html), and this month he made about 27 posts in which he responds to a quote with "..", "...", "...." or ".....". He should be banned.