Bitcoin Forum

That sol adoni,247news, 247poker guy is making several new accounts per day and spamming the forums. Please, do something about this.

I doubt Newbie jail would matter to persistent trolls such as him. He'll just make the five inconspicuous posts in newbie jail then move straight out.

The original newbie jail was indeed a deterrent.

It was more than four hours, you had to be log in for at least 6 hours or so as well as make five post.



~BCX~

+1, if it was required that newbies make so many posts, be logged in for several hours and visit at least "x" posts (including certain posts that include the rules) then the number of spam/scams will likely decrease. Yes it could still be manipulated with bots but would be somewhat more difficult to do so.

I cannot even count how many times someone posts an obvious scam that either ends up wasting someone's time because they were smart enough to ask to use escrow or ends up getting trolled by countless people

I do miss newbie jail the thread is still there
That said we removed it when we switched to user activity but the whitelist was fairly effective

what is newbie jail ? can i know it ?

New accounts were restricted to only posting in the Beginners & Help section until they made five posts and browsed the forum for x amount of time (think it was originally 4 hours but may have been lowered to just 1 before it was removed completely).

4 hours back in my days. I remember I waited about 3 months with registering an account because I didn't feel like sitting in newbie jail. So it sure is a deterrent.

I support this. The quality of this forum is deteriorating from Newbies making spam posts for sigs/selling their accounts.

In my opinion the 4 hour limit was a good deterrent, would be great if it was added back.

people can make scripts to auto reload page and increase the browsing time,

Or just press f5 from time to time.


Only effect would be the account spammers stressing more the server.

It seemed to work in the past.

I disagree. The amount of spammers and new accounts registered for spamming, bumping worthless post, conducting flame wars and out right annoyance have increased 50X since newbie jail was dropped.


~BCX~

Stats for the 50% increase? I'm on the fence about whether it should be brought back and could go either way. One thing for sure is persistent trolls or spammers will just wait it out or bypass any precautions we put in place and it'll annoy and potentially scare off genuine users who just want to post valid stuff elsewhere. That being said, it is good as a quarantine for spambots etc and all beginners questions are at least forced to be there rather than in the wrong forum. I'm 50/50.

It certainly does work, but it's also kind of unfair to all the legit people now signing up because they've heard of Bitcoin and want to talk about it or get help on using it so it's a bit of a tricky one to figure out really, I suppose as long as the requirements aren't steep maybe it should be brought back because I managed to get in when the newbie jail was around with not much of a problem.

I was talking only about the 4 hours browsing limit, not the post limit to leave the newbie jail

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=880973.0

.....Well?

Newbie jail wouldn't be a bad idea.

It kept me locked down in the beginning. I could only post like once every 45 seconds and was restricted to newbie section until I was online for a few hours. Gave me time to read topics I was interested in.

Yeah I think the same , we need it back at least for "obligate" the newbie to read the  various rules topics.

Yeah, I agree with this dude; it would decrease spammers, but for the genuine members, it could also act as a deterrent. On some other foruming sites, I didn't bother making an account since I'd have to post ~50 times or however specified before I could access a lot of the subforums.

Personally wasn't here when the newbie jail existed, but I don't think it's necessary. Does the staff do IP bans, or no (I understand it's easy to change IP addresses, but it still decreases the amount substantially).

I like this idea... Right now we have new accounts being made just so these scammers can bump\support their scam posts. Bringing back the noobie jail will help with this epidemic.

I support bring the newbie jail back as well. It will annoy genuine new bitcoiner users a bit, but I believe it will bring more goods than bads to the whole forum.

The difference here is access. There are some forums in which the information is kept private so you can't even read it unless you sign up (and others are even worse by showing only partial OP contents so they show up on web searches but nothing else). I don't bother signing up in those either, go to hell with your draconian rules, however bitcointalk is public and browseable without having an account. Then if you want to chime in, it's ok to have to jump a couple of hoops.

Can't his IP be banned from creating new accounts?
 Would be much easier than figuring out which accounts belong to him, and banning then one by one.

Futile banning IPs as persistent people will just use tor or proxies if they wern't already. It's very unlikely he was just using one IP or his 'home' connection anyway and if he was it probably has been added to the blacklist already.

Most of his accounts were nuked, which does include an IP ban.  He also created quite a few accounts when he first showed up, just banned a couple from June/July. IP bans don't affect already existing accounts.
Now he uses Tor. He's a plague on many forums, not just this one.   

I really agree.. have requirements to browse the forum a X amount of time before being able to post. This forum could really need this, I've seen a substantial increase in newbie troll or bump accounts as of lately. They are inevitable but a thing like this would decrease the amount of them, and contribute to better content here.

Another account by him https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=882034.0

Mm. That seems reasonable; I guess it'd just be a matter of determining the difficulty of such hoops

Can you make a poll on this, I believe it will get more attention with a nice ol fashioned poll...

Would anyone like to necro my, "Should newbs and Jr. members be barred from creating ALT ANN threads ?", thread/poll ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=627917.0

Oh thanks for reminding me , I've voted.  Maybe we will see these changes in the new forum software.

I necro'd it for you... let's stop this madness.

Another thread of another newbie posting spam

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=882166.0

I think he is trolling, not spamming,

But the newbie jail would also keep trolls at bay, so it is indifferent.

it would be good if newbie jail would be until
he moves to jr.member then no spaming would be made!

Imo the Beginners & Help board would just become a cesspool and legit newcomers might be thrown away.

With that logic the cesspool would them just be spread everywhere else. It wasn't that bad when we had the newbie jail and at least all the newbie questions were contained and quarantined in there then.

I agree it is starting to be a pain in the ass.

How about functionality or module to report someone with a drop-down or radio button of a list of common reasons (like spam, inappropriate behavior, etc)? If someone has been reported many times, the staff is able to research and give a temporary or permanent IP/email ban. The reports can not be seen publicly, and the number of reports decays over time. If people want to create new accounts with new emails/different ip address, then that's what they want to do. If new members are restricted to a section of the forums, that can get really frustrating and deter those who want to actually contribute and be part of the community. I do like the # of posts/time idea, but if that's going to be done, might as well do that for everyone.  :P

You can report posts already at the bottom right and state your reasons for doing so and if appropriate they will get a ban.

When you had newbie jail did you also have an epidemic of hero member accounts for sale? Now you could quite easily just buy your way out

Most newbies here don't have around 1btc to spend on a Hero account. More often than not they have little to nothing so couldn't even buy themselves a Jnr Member account to bypass this.

Hero accounts are going for much less than 1btc. The point remains that any incarcerated n00b with enough bits could just buy his way out.

And how about a Hero member jail for account sellers? :P

Notice I said around 1btc, but the actual price is irrelevant and my point still remains that the majority of newbs have little to no money to spend on any accounts of any rank or value and will likely just wait the required amount of time/posts to bypass the jail naturally.

Bring back newbie jail.

You're right. I was going off on an entirely seperate rant.

Sorry :-[

And now we have bots as well

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=889286.0

We've always had bots, any forum does.

Not if we had newbie jail. At least in the main sections.

Blocking everyone to stop the occasional bot that makes it through is a little overkill. Not really something to worry about. They get dealt with quickly enough, and if not, more moderators/patrollers is a better solution.

It's not to stop the occasional bot, it's to stop users from creating new accounts several times per day pretending to be somebody else. A side-effect of this is bots being stopped.

If I remember correctly the biggest unwanted side effect of the newbie jail was that you had people signing up to the forum to access the help/support threads of various services/manufacturers and then finding out they were unable to post.

If we brought it back we should allow them to post to these sections.

+1 to this, i fully agree we need newbie jail back!

I have to say that I miss it, but ... then again I wasn't moderating it.

There are a lot of OKAY posts by newbies... and also a lot of awful ones.  Maybe the newbie jail only really helped by decreasing new users in total-- if so, then it was a loss and we're better off without it.

I don't mind deleting the complete garbage, borderline stuff is a bit more annoying.

I think that it's better to take a bit more garbage than risk turning away good new users.

A quick flashback to my Diablo II days made me realize that any jail or posting restrictions would become useless if/when the forum account market tanks. eg. In and around 2002, market conditions made the level 50-95 trading/spam bots almost as common as the low level variety.

I agree with this; certain sections should be made available for those newblets that have genuine questions regarding BTC; if they can't ask about it in the most popular thread without waiting to fulfill the mandatory post/activity requirements, then they may decide it's not worth it