Bitcoin Forum

I don't know if anyone's noticed this, but there's a growing number of newbies who seem to be specifically targeting threads that are a year or two old and stealth necroing them and posting either completely incoherent or only slightly relevant post. How should we treat this? Is it spam? I'm inclined to believe so because of the way they respond but the problem is we'd have to dig through their post history because I think they've gotten better at writing English and are disguising their spam better.

These threads are often so old that they've become inactive and they seem to be deliberately trying to start them up again to bump up their post count and get people to respond, then you also have other newbies who are doing the same to bump up their post count as well so it seems like a legitimate conversation, the reason I know this is because I often see posts I've written back in 2012 on these threads and people are responding without looking at the dates.

I'm reporting them as I see them, and everyone else should too.

Necro bumps should be reported if there's no valuable or relevant information in them and are clearly a pointless post, but I don't know how someone can 'stealth necro' as bumping an old thread usually has the opposite effect and draws attention to the user as opposed to just posting regularly in a recent thread.

Necro bumping isn't forbidden, however, if the post breaks any other forum rules (like hilariouandco mentioned), report it.

Can the mods not lock the threads...? Not that I do, but if I wanted to post on an old thread - I would... That's the nature of forums.

Mods lock them or it will keep happening... :/

Why should it be locked, if the thread doesn't break the rules? There are tons of discussions that started in 2012 and have been active since. New threads get started to discuss older events. Although some responses might be outdated, I don't see any major reason why old threads should be an exception and get locked just because a user hasn't posted in said thread for X amount of days/months/years.

I'm not the one moaning... Perhaps people should just "deal with it" then...

I believe the OP's main concern was that some users maliciously attempt to pad their post count with posts like "I agree" or "This is scam", when the website has closed down. In such case, I'd suggest reporting any posts whose main intentione was to increase the amount of posts made.

Most of those newbies are in the sig campaign.

Well to be fair there are some threads of a few major scams that have never died. One example is the thread about withdrawal problems at GOX, I have seen that be active a number of times over the past several months and gox went down ~9 months ago. Another is the BFL scam accusation that has really been active even though it has been long established they are a scam (although they were only taken down recently)

all paid sig campaign do is encourage paid trolling, people use bots and multiple accounts to get paid more, sometimes i think 80-90% of posts are made to aid rewards. ban all paid signatures

Agreed, plus we can't be expected to lock every thread as it would be a ridiculous workload. The easiest and better solution is to just delete pointless necrobumps as and when they happen.


The few necrobumps that I saw this morning didn't have any signatures. Sometimes newbs just newb, though of course there is the possibility that their intention is to join a sig deal in the future, but regardless of that shitposters don't stick around for long. Just keep reporting them and they'll get dealt with.

Thanks for the clarification on that.

Lol elasticband, I don't have much against sig campaigns, as long as they have reasonable requirements they don't necessarily mean spam I think a lot of people have done well in bargaining down the sig campaign creators to using only flat fees and reasonable posting requirements. As for what other people are saying on what I've spotted, yes, it is basically some fairly generic posts I've seen that are being put up on old threads that were finished with a long time ago, ongoing information threads is one thing but these guys are targeting the ones that are from 2012 or sometimes earlier.

I'd say it's mostly people using bots or double accounts and they don't have signatures yet as they are working up the ranks and posts to be able to join the signature campaign

In theory it could be an automated process in which topics are automatically locked after "x" amount of time since the last post.

The problem with this is that some old topics will become relevant again when some new piece of information/news comes out (causing a need to either create a duplicate thread or to manually unlock old threads that are now relevant)

Yep as long as it is relevant its fine but report it otherwise
Old accounts have a bunch of those in our unread replies if someone posts something in a thread that's old so it's easy to determine when to flag one.

There are good dumps, like some made in the speculation subforum. So I think lock all topics after X time would not be a good thing to be made everywhere.


Maybe only in the "other" section, or only in off topic?

What can you do about it ? Use some technical way ?

If someone has an interest in a topic that has been dormant or dead for a while, so what ? I think that unless the new "necro" post is clearly pointless, that can be a good thing. Isn't that kind of the point of having memory ? This is the internet, storage is super cheap. My 2 sats.

I agree with that, it's just a question of being able to distinguish the pointless posts from the good ones and from the pattern of posting I've seen they're really just using them to bump the post count up because they don't seem interested in having a conversation with the other members that reply without looking at the date.

Edit: Pretty damn sure one of them just used this tactic on my business thread! So now I don't know whether that's a legit like for my stuff with them being a newbie or just an attempt to up their post count -_-

I've decided I will show no mercy to these guys because they're clearly spamming, if they have a problem with it they can show themselves as real users and complain.

I've banned several of that type so far. Reviving old threads is fine, there's been a lot of good discussion over the years, and it can be an interesting retrospective sometimes, but some are clearly just spamming. 

sometimes the discussion you are interested only appears in an older thread. not everyone is keen to begin new threads...but if the posts are meaningless...yes ban them. Is it a new wave of n00bs trying to create puppet accounts? would make more sense to post innocuously in existing active threads and not be noticed...these new guys are pretty easy to spot though...I'm even seeing a few with such idiosyncratic style of writing that you can spot them through several different accounts... wasnt the last wave of this BS related tpo the bearwhale incident?

Jeez all these nickle-dime losers are a real threat to my legit sig income...idiots.

It can be hard to tell sometimes, but some of these posters are being really obvious, they're bumping threads that were finished ages ago, definitely not innocent, the funny thing is sometimes they've restarted them and others have hopped onto the bandwagon without checking.

I don't think it matters if a conversation continues after it has temporarily ended many months ago as long as what is being discussed is related to the OP of the old thread. There is zero harm in doing this.

Spam has long been an issue for this forum (and I would expect other forums have similar problems). If you go to the last page of the media forum you will find two threads discussing the amount of spam from 2011.

Helping out with spam (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7817.msg114048#msg114048)

Advertisement Spam (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7818.msg114051#msg114051)

here are the two threads.