Bitcoin Forum

Example:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1278192.0

Thread tittle: Scrappily Decigramme Pooler Whorishness


That's all. Not a link to any scam, not a link to any dodgy software, not even a legit link from a referral campaign, or advertisement of a website, just nothing. What's the point of doing this? what's the agenda of someone deploying such useless bots? just to annoy mods? I just don't get it and im really curious.

Lol at first I thought you meant hilarious as in hilariousandco(Global Mod guy). This has been discussed in: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1275923.0
The agenda is I guess "revenge" , it was previously posting begging threads which were swiftly deleted by nuke bots, but as the content is not changing randomly it has to be done manually, so yeah, to annoy mods.

Just a troll trolling. They get nuked within seconds so just ignore them.

I just saw this, here's another thread, please delete it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1278250.0


But what trolling is this? For me trolling is signing in and saying how Bitcoin is doomed and everyone should just sell their coins because it's going to crash, but those guys don't even feel human, it's like automated random gibberish from a bot.


Oh so it's just to annoy mods I guess, what a cunt.

Pfft.  Not even a fun or a rage troll, just a scuntrazoidal tetrascunt. 

He's doing this manually, you say? 

Just report it.


Well they are both bots but these bots probably belong to NLC who normally does post the bitcoin is doomed trolling shit but he's just changed it up now. Not sure why but maybe the randomness is his way of trying to get around being auto-nuked.


If it is NLC then he's just annoyed that he got banned for posting the same nonsense and this is just his way of protest but if he's trying to annoy the mods then he's going about it the wrong way seeing as mods get paid to clean up his mess.


No.

The 2 tho, it is obvious that he has a bot involved in this (or group of +10? from different time zone? ) but besides from changing the bot's parameters (from mining to bitcoin discussion), i noticed that he may also created few accounts, i saw same style accounts names that didn't make any posts, was it banned by mods before posting? Or he just manually created it and left it for a reason? I doubt a normal guy plans to join bitcointalk with a weird name like the bot do.

Edit: thx for the answer hilariousandco :)

They're usually proxy-banned when he creates them so he has to pay a (small) fee, though he usually creates them in bulk to use whenever he feels like it but they usually get nuked within seconds/minutes as soon as he posts.

Pretty much this. My eyes have evolved to just skip past bull shit threads & posts, I don't even really notice them any more, just skip straight past them.

I find some of the schizophrenic word salad the bots use to be amusing, but now that crap is cluttering up the forum big time.  How do the admins handle that, short of just manually deleting each one as it appears. I mean how can you handle that?  Are there other ways?

It would be good idea to restrict newbs from opening new topic out side of newbies section. That would prevent lot of spam, begging and scam attempts.

That would be then unfair for those newbs who are here not to scam or spam but actually learn and want to interact with the bitcoin community.  I do think that newbies shouldn't be allowed to create a thread on the market place where scam attempts are happening most other than that, I don't think there are other places where they shoudn't be allowed to participate in.

I think it's a good idea. I know a forum that has a restriction to Newbies where they can't post anywhere unless to the specified section where they can ask questions and look around how the forum goes and until they reached a certain Activity, they can't post to an area like Marketplace.

Bitcointalk had it too, newbie jail was the term, it was removed sometime recently, 1-2 years back, most likely.

Just cleaned up the front page of which half of it was bot posts.


There are always ways but it's about finding a balance without punishing everyone else to harshley but things are being discussed.


There are pros and cons to it and I'm on the fence whether it should be brought back, but it is unfair and annoying to 99% of people who just want to join in the discussion elsewhere and a shame to have to bring it back just because of the idiotic 1% of spamtards.

most likely someone that hate this forum, or the admin, or he was banned for reason that he believe are not good enough, to invoke a ban

someone is mad at something, by the look of it

I would go even further. I would change rules so that you can't post anywhere except in the beginners&help section until you don't have a 28 activity points. This would prevent majority of the forum misuse in my opinion!

Well it might prevent it from being spread around the rest of the forum but the entire Beginners and Help section would then just be filled with people spamming rubbish just passing the time till they had 28 activity and it would put most people off if they had to wait a month just to be able to participate in the rest of the forum. That sub was already pretty bad when we used to make them make a few posts and wait a few hours so this would be exponetially worse.

Yes I agree this would trash a begginers&help section. Then again we might ask ourselves a question, should we sacrifice one thread for a good of the whole forum.

Or should we find some other solution, creating a thread just for these trashy posts but then we would essentially not be letting new people post for a month.

I don't know, I am just thinking out loud.

Spoiler alert: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223845.0

It is a good idea. For newbies, we have lots to learn, it is better not to be able to create a new thread. There are a lot of information in the forum already.

But sir, they/he/she keep doing it 'til now.
How can these Brand New(s) keep signing up a bunch of new accounts here?

With bots. Not difficult to create an account here and he's been doing it for months on and off. He's created thousands of accounts but they all meet the same fate pretty quickly.

I thought it made sense when it was in use but if it was getting endless spam it would make the noob area almost unreadable and give a bad impression, maybe noob posts only visible to full members? That could also improve the quality of support noobs receive as there was a fair bit of amplification of misconceptions when I was spending time in that section.

Something else I miss is the highlighted "ignore" button, it seemed a fairly reliable indicator but maybe it was being gamed, the current trust system certainly is but that's another story.

EDIT: That ignore button, I'm assuming mods get a number of ignores count for a user (or some function of it, ignores per month or uses of show/hide), that count linked to the time between posts counter could cut spam... or ramp up new spammer account creation :/

You have to wonder why though don't you, literally what's the point?

Surely he can't be getting paid for the trolling, FUD etc because it's not even successful making people sell & doesn't make the price go down based on his scare mongering etc.

Maybe he was paid before with the NLC account because it was a fairly high ranked account, senior or hero if I remember rightly, FUD coming from that account may have scared newbies into selling or not buying. Surely now though with all the low ranking accounts/shills/sock puppets it's pointless?

What the hell does he get from it?

He's obviously pretty tech savvy, his grammar is really good & at times seems pretty intelligent. He's really wasted on here, the amount of effort he puts in here he could do something constructive if applied elsewhere.

Well what im trying to do is to use the "report to moderator" as much as i can, i just hope that moderators do not become tired about me by reporting them all :P

Will be good if everybody try to "help" them in that way.

about, what's the point?, well i think that maybe they are doing it "for fun", because they do not gain anything by it, but dunno.

I've seen them around too.

A good captcha is needed when register, the forum registration has a shitty captcha that can probably be overpassed by any amateur hacker, and then send bots to register thousands of accounts.

funcaptcha for example? :) since the others are bypassed by bots without exception.
btw i noticed few spam posts in the chinese section, didn't report it but here is an example https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=681489;sa=showPosts
i saw another one deleted before few hours with repetitive sentences but i think it is made by a human not a bot

They are either for a sort of revenge, or the spammers are purposely making so many bots in the hope that the admins will miss one, and the spammer can sell the account before it gets nuked.

I have seen this type of bots on another forum too, they start out with garbage content <Think this is the testing phase> and then it gets replaced with Ad spamming. I was a moderator on that forum and it made me crazy to clean up all those posts manually.

I have to say, the mods on this forum are doing a damn fine job, protecting us from what could potentially be, Spam Hell.

Here is another obvious bot account = joshuatee (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=681224)

That is my take, fwiw. It is perhaps some kind of stress testing, probing for weakness, feasibility test, proof of concept, Lorem Ipsum... with the "real thing" to follow as it matures. Troll Evolution in action, I suppose.

In that vein, I've been fascinated watching the DASH altcoin ANN thread held hostage by a few trolls for many months now. A weird symbiotic relationship/truce seems to have built between the real posters (who say they value the trolls' page count boost) and the trolls (who value the white noise). Along the way, the trolls learned to report the real posters whenever the latter inadvertently broke a rule (short post, for example), but the real posters did not learn to report the trolls because the latter were usually on Ignore, and people don't report what they don't read. Cat and mouse reminder that trolls can and do learn how to use a site's own rules against it.

This isn't your grampa's trollfest any more. I'm glad I'm not a mod!          ;)

Who is NLC and what is the backstory? im curious now. Btw, I have checked in the members tab, ordered in date of registration, and the registration of new bot accounts is getting out of hand:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sort=registered;desc;start=0

Just today, there are 20 pages and most of the accounts are the same bot, easily recognizable in the nicknames.

NotLambchop https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=263109 (amongst others). Speculation troll who had his account(s) banned but seems to want his main one back and this botspam is his way of trying to do so (but it's not going to work).

That's definitely fine. When a post is deleted, the reports on that post are automatically marked "handled", so it's no extra work for mods. And if you happen to see something that mods don't, it helps.

At the same time, it is unlikely that these posts will be missed for very long, so don't worry too much about reporting them.

It happens everywhere we better get used to it :) If everything goes smoothly what would keep mods buzy here ;)

Just a troll with some sort of grudge against Theymos, I guess. Giving him and his moods/admins a hard time.

But now Theymos has a few bots of his own, they get nuked within the minute.

That guy was a case-study for anyone interested in psychology, absolutely no consciences and far from stupid. I'd wondered where he'd gone and his last posts answered that one fairly quickly, hard to know where the line is when it comes to free speech but he didn't leave room for doubt. There's a fair number of accounts that remind me of him, same writing style and use of images that play on the subconcience but only one or two on the same kind of level, a scary individual and glad he's gone.

Free speech seems to be the real issue, what's acceptable and what's not and that's not something that can be written down in black and white, some folks could find NLCs posts perfectly acceptable while others would be offended by an out of place comma. Forums would have to evolve an awful lot to accommodate that and allow a natural formation, separation and interlinking of communities, it's unlikely it'll ever be perfect and without that there will always be some degree of tension.

It seems that either the creation of new bots is now stronger or mods are away, we have right now tons of threads in the main forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282238.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282246.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282250.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282253.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282247.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282255.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282257.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1282241.0

Clean this mess please :(

Less said then done, use the report function from next time? Its there for a reason you know

Correct. To everyone: Please don't post about individual accounts/posts here because there are plenty of those. Just use the report function and hopefully it will get handled swiftly. There are too many accounts and it would just waste everyone's time.

It's easier to make a bot that makes similar posts/random ones than one that acts as a human and detects the latter. We're doing as much as we can.

Correct. Now the reports page is not as empty as usual.

Im reporting like crazy but it just keeps appearing, it's a never ending cleaning battle! I think the idea of going back to the newbie-prison model could solve this but it would also ruin the fun for legitimate newbies.

A single person should not be the cause for a significant rule change. Actually this is helping other people,
Patrollers: Get more share of the ad revenue, due to their work
Forum: Gets more pageviews and its not from the same IP address.
Me: Getting my report count up
Whatever happened to optimism people.
Its just a mild annoyance in the background, don't mind it, if you have to, ignore Bitcoin discussion as a whole so it doesn't show up in "Show unread posts since last visit. " , there isn't much of discussion going on there except Lauda's bit serious Scaling Bitcoin thread and the never ending Who is satoshi? threads

This guy probably has an agenda against Theymos. Ignore these bots; they get nuked within minutes. If you want, you can farm post reports off these. Heh.

These bots are so annoying but what they post is sometimes quite enjoyable to read. But now it's just spam bots posting in Spanish which is just very annoying. Hope the mods ban all of these bots. They get nuked in like 2 minutes though. lol.

Maybe some day they will create a beautiful haiku.

The format seems to be changing slightly. Maybe it's a learning algorithm, changing its parameters based on how long it takes for posts to be deleted. Pretty soon, it might be able to pass for the average sig campaigner here!

its happening. this is just the beginning.

---

https://i.gyazo.com/d93768440248f97d96023eab6cfcd00d.png

It's happening on various fronts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1277685.0

Some bots are sentient, some not so much.     ;)

The guy initially had an issue with KNC miners, claimed they made him lose his life earnings or so.
He then expected forum users to stand by him and get KNC to refund him somehow. Of course it does not work that way.
Then he switched to begging, and when those posted were removed as repetitive spam, he resorted to mindless drivel bot postings as a kind of revenge against the forum.

In reality, he's probably a poor guy bitten by his own bad investment decision, but his way of dealing with his situation is entirely unacceptable.

Onkel Paul

You know what they say, give enough moneys bots a typewriter forum and enough time and they will eventually recreate the entire works of Shakespeare.

can they not just make it that newbies have to fill out a captcha or something untill they hit 10 posts? The amount of spam is geting a bit mental.

Well this will not change anything for the bot. In the other hand, newbies (humans) have to solve 10 captchas in order to make 10 posts. Why? Simply because the bot is creating an account then make only 1 post with it before he get nuked.
The only thing effective seems to be another captcha system in registration and only 1 captcha verification for the first post.
I was thinking of changing captcha by a math equation or a simple questions to answer? Dunno how effective could be..

It will change something for the bot, The bot wont be able to solve the captcha to make a post so it wont make any posts? It would take human interaction on each account the bot makes to make an actual post.

I'd wondered about needing a multisig deposit to create an account before and losing it in the event of a ban but that would kind of defeat the purpose for a lot noobs, "how do I use bitcoin to leave a deposit to find out how to use bitcoin?" as well as opening up all sorts of "I woz scammed!" cans of worms. Maybe a deposit to leave the noob zone and noob posts only visible to non-noobs could work... idk.

There are plenty of services that a bot can use to have other humans complete captchas automatically for them for a small fee (down to about $0.5 per 1,000 captchas solved). Adding a captcha will not change anything for bots, and will only make it more annoying for humans to use the forum.

Having a captcha for the first 10 posts untill you make it out of newbie status isnt so bad, Its bout to help better than not having one at all? I mean atm there doesnt seem to be any bot protection.

Theymos?  You've got opinions on so much.  Got any for why you can't control these?

This is already discussed in another thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1278196.0 all you have to do if you see one is click the "Report to moderator" link at the lower left side of each post made by the bot.

the  explanation in this thread is false

it would be easy to stop them

How would it be easy to stop them?

Perhaps another good question is why doesn't a moderator just delete them as soon as they occur?

To the OP, if you want to reach Theymos faster you should post this to the Meta board.

I think there is a bot set up already to nuke those spam bots but looks like the number of created threads and accounts overwhelm the bot of BCT, nevertheless just hit Report to Moderator so you can help clean the community. BTW this should be in Meta section.

This is not really a issue, report it and ignore it... a mod will clean them up in no time... they need to sleep and work like everyone else, so be patient. This is most probably someone

testing the anti-bot features and testing their bot's effectiveness, or some user with some kind of vendetta against the forum. We just report it and they get deleted. No harm done.

This is not a problem experienced with this forum only, other forums struggle with the same thing.  >:(

Since captchas can be solved easily, how about we put up a few halting problems? Only for the first 10 posts.

No? Dont wana limit the board to people who can read code. ok, back to reporting.

He ain't heavy. He's my brother :'(

I think the mods want to leave this forum as minimal as possible which includes javascript not being needed to do anything so it means if they come up with something it would be able to get resolved without needing to turn javascript on.

In the meantime im reporting as much as as I can and hope everyone else is doing so as well.

Wasnt really serious with puting up halting problems. Its certainly increasing the reports counter though, but they are hardly up for longer than a few minutes.

The Bitcoin discussion subforum's 1st page is now mostly spam. I guess this is the time most of the mods are asleep.

Patrollers can handle them, but don't expect them to check their report pages and "Show unread posts since last visit. " every minute or so. Actively report them, and the few patrollers that are active will take care of them(most of the time in less than 5 mins)
Edit: WTF, gotta say, the spam is a bit too much right now. Kill em Mitchell and xandry
Edit 2:Half of them must've been mine  :P

Most probably are. Still early in Europe and there's usually a lot of reports for me to handle when I wake up. Just spent the past 20 minutes or so handling the 100+ reports on bots alone.

There is a small period of time when almost nobody is around. It can happen. It was not unusual for me to wake up to 20-50 reports when I had to head out really early.

I sometimes wonder if you have a life or ever go to bed? Good work though. :P

---

---

Update:
"Total time logged in: 250 days, 7 hours"; yeah 140 days *cough*.  :D Nothing offensive about "good work though".

Says someone who has spent over 140 days online on the forum  :P ,I wonder if that was meant to compliment me or was offensive. Just have too much energy to waste.
Thinking about it, is there any staff member from America?

There's a few from America (and maybe more I don't know about) but even that has a few different timezones I believe but the ones that are still seem to be on a lot of the time I am but there will obviously be various overlaps with mods wherever you are in the world and some are more active than others, and some have college/full time jobs where they're afk etc.

how would the bots react to an extra input field on the posting page, one hidden from humans? I expect renaming or rearranging the fields is out of the question since that would probably break all the "good" bots here as well.

This would probably stop them for a short time, though I expect that the bots would be quick to adapt and find a way around. It could be good as a temporary solution while the staff find a more permanent one.

Not sure if I understand you correctly but if it was hidden from humans how would anyone post or get around it themselves?


We're discussing things but it's about finding a comprimise with only minimal restrictions to everyone else which isn't easy.

I think he means similar to a honeypot. For example, create two 'Subject' bars when making a post, have one with the original name value ("subject") which is hidden to the user using CSS, then have another with a random string as it's name (Just a random SHA256 hash would do; the name doesn't need to have any significance) which is the one visible to the user and sends the actual subject value to the server to post. Any bots which have not been adjusted would submit to the original bar named "subject" and would be unable to make a post, but any user would be able to use the new, random bar fine and it would make no difference to their normal posting experience.

It would, at best, be a day or two before the bots could re-adjust to this, as more computational power would likely have to be involved to find the correct one (especially if there are several of the random value bars, only one being visible to the user), though it could buy some time for a more in-depth solution to be implemented.

Can't the mods preemptively nuke the accounts?
Based on the IP addresses from which these accounts were registered, and given that these accounts were probably registered in a bunch, it should be evident which accounts belong to this spammer. What stops the mods from nuking all those accounts before they start posting?

Obviously he's savvy enough to use VPN and TOR and whatnot.

Mostly different IPs. If there was something that could easily be done to stop it then it would have been implemented already.

I was just wondering if doing it would appear heavy-handed and hence the mods were not taking such actions. Glad to know that isn't the case.
I guess he would be raking up units of evil for all the different IPs that he has access to.

I checked the forum for a while and saw no bots, I thought, the war is over, we did it, but no, I pressed F5 and saw 3 new threads. They always come back no matter what. I feel like this when reporting these guys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVO6A2anEqI



At this rate wouldn't he run out of TOR nodes and VPN's? i mean who has enough time to keep finding new unbanned ips?

If he has access to a big combination of proxies, VPN's, tor nodes, and a botnet it would take him quite a while before he runs out of IPs.

The tragic comedy is that he's one of the funniest, most thoughtful contributors here. When he chooses to be.

Seems to have stopped, but it could just be a temporary lull.

Edit: Nevermind, no lull. I soon as i wrote the above, I looked again and new one popped up.

Oh, I understand that is hard to find something easy for true users and complicated for bots, i hope that you guys can find a good one solution, even if this will not help you, i will try also to think on a good one solution. :)



Yes they don't stop, but don't worry, mods are doing a good job and they are deleted within minutes.

I've been lurking at job and just arrived home and I haven't seen any single of the random word threads popping up. The guy that was doing this might have gotten bored of it since he wasn't getting nothing out of it, people wasn't even annoyed by it anymore since I saw the threads getting deleted pretty much instantly. Im glad we didn't have to implement some additional protection which would annoy legitimate newbies.

Nope it is still posting, I just reported one bot topic few minutes ago :)
Until yesterday the bot made many topics, dunno for today just saw one for the moment.
Btw, if anyone noticed that the bot is making longer and longer topics. Anyway gj staff members.

Edit:
Didn't really check who is online, I just report (try to be the 1st /beat you :P), sometimes i feel like I am a report bot when I am online with my repetitive two words ''spam bot'' (i even just write ''sp'' and my lovely semi-auto gun SwiftKey completes the rest when I was on my phone). Yesterday I remember i reported few then wrote ''spam bot / knock knock, many bot topics'' or something like that

Cyrus specifically, you can see the level of spam in the morning when he's not up

The mods have been doing an exceptional job keeping the spam down. I applaud them.

I really can't figure out why somebody would like to destroy this forum. There is really no valid point that I can think of.

Maybe he's insane?

Did no one seriously had a look at my thread? It was much more informative than this one , had some points as to why the person is causing the spam and most importantly created , before all of the similar threads

He's definitely back, and notice that the cunt has changed the template of the subject. Now he's switched "?" for "...". He uses a "The" at the start of a sentence and "..." at the end so you think you are reading a legitimate thread tittle but it's actually spam. If you see a subject starting with "The" and ending with "..." it's going to be spam. Maybe it could be automated so any thread starting with "The" and ending with "..." gets removed? I mean what are the chances that a legitimate user is going to unfortunately make a thread subject exactly like that.

If the amount of words used are always the same, I think It can be safely automated.

Honestly, I don't think this is a good idea.. Simply the bot owner will detect the automated thing then he will modify it. Only the legitimate users probably will suffer from this. Besides, removing the topic isn't a solution, the bot account need to be banned.
Imo if he continues like this, he will not find a single vpn ip without a fees.

I think its a social engineering attack to take down the forum. I hope the admins have backup of the databases because it seems that the attacks dont stop.

I strongly suggest a better captcha , because it seems that these are bots not humans,so it means that the captcha is very poor.

That's definitely a no. If we give in to a single bad actor, then the others will notice and will start doing similar things in order to achieve the same result. In other words, not going to happen. I

I don't think that's him. It's more likely the guy that was spamming his address and complaining about getting ripped off by whatever mining company.

Even if it were, it wouldn't matter. If it's not one person spamming it'll be another.

Life goes on. Can't imagine one is okay with wasting so much of their time, life is too short, but everyone values their time differently I guess.

I thought that was NLC? Either way it doesn't really matter I guess.

Sometimes when you negotiate with terrorists hostages get to live. :-\

You have to consider the amount of damage in those cases. What is this spammer achieving actually by doing this? Nothing. Basically the only thing that this causes is minor annoyance for the users and more work for the moderators, that's it. I actually don't mind the extra work because 90% (or more) of the time there are no reports to handle (there are quite a few of us that are very active).

For those saying that there is a pattern in the way the bots posts, he keeps changing it, so there is no way in determining if a thread is made by an human or by the bot by text content alone, it would require some sort of proof of work basically a captcha that is known to be resilient against bots, other than that we can't do nothing but report the threads as quick as possible.

Of course you're not wrong. I guess I just think permabans are harsh justice. I don't even know why it happened tbh; but as to OP's original question: what's the point? I'm pretty sure Hilarious was right, it's a form of protest.

And honestly given some of the virulent, clown-mouthed bigotry I've witnessed here, I don't see what's so offensive about a particularly literate beartroll in the first place.

Ooh the bot maker did a big mistake, posting spam in -ck's board.
P.S: See I told you guys it was the KNC miner guy

See, that is your personal opinion and it seems and you're quite soft (don't get me wrong). This is something that is present among moderators as well (some are softer and some are stricter). I actually don't mind permabans. One of the reasons for this is that I've done bad here too in the past which got me into trouble. However, after acknowledging my mistakes I've worked hard on improving my habits as much as I can. People who don't take their 1st/2nd warning seriously and don't do anything about it need to be permanently banned.

Maybe.

I'm a big softy. Point taken.  :P

maybe just for practice, some amateur's work to get used to

It looks like they are concentrating on the mining forum today.

ya, i already reported one post from there, i think the mods should just ban usernames that appear to be randomly generated

We aren't banning them until we are sure that they are spamming. In other words, we ban spammers such as him as soon as we seen the post. This is why reports from the community are very useful (sometimes I don't have time to Patrol but have enough time to handle reports if there are some).

I haven't seen one with a link in before.

I've just reported one that had a link to litecointalk:

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

Then you aren't really aware of what happened with the kncminer guy. He has spammed the forum in several different approaches (be it with links, BTC begging, randomized words, etc). You should not be surprised and we're really nuking a lot daily (both manually and the bot).

Still no verbs in these, or any semblance of grammar.

Just wait for it, someday they'll create an awesome haiku

Yeah I've seen a lot of it but not with an external link. I feel for you and the others mods / admins having to deal with this rubbish as I'm sure you've all got a million things better to do.

Its a shame you cant either block the guys IP or implement changes to the forum where a captcha of sorts needs to be used to sign up and / or make a first post or where a new accounts first post(s) need to be approved by a mod / admin before its posted. However I'm not sure if the latter feature is available on this forum software.

These ideas have probably been discussed before though. Bloody annoying which ever way you look at it.

Admins aren't dealing with this though, mostly patrollers. Anyhow, it's not a single IP as that can be blocked. He has access to a huge quantity of them. Captcha and similar features can be implemented but theymos does not think they would be effective at all (where I don't fully agree). I think that he could be drastically slowed down with a combination of features. We definitely need to think of something and not let this continue in the new forum.

Are you from Australia?

Why not just force new members fill captchas before they can post?

This suggestion was already discussed before and many users didn't appreciate it. If the bot is able to solve 1 captcha it will solve 10 and only the real newbies will suffer.
I am still supporting the idea of implementing new captcha in the registration and to solve only 1 captcha for the first post.

Well fingers crossed something is done soon.

No I'm in the UK, we use the word bloody quite a lot too :D.

Captchas wouldn't be a solution simply because anyone with basic technical prowess with bots will be able to set up a captcha solving service for a low cost. Let's say that you have to use a captcha to create an account, it would cost them about $0.5 to solve 1,000 captchas and make 1,000 accounts. Not to mention this would only slow them down by a second or two.

Bloody is a common term in the UK too. :P

They need to fill captchas when they register, if they can bypass it, then they will bypass the post captchas too, plus will be an annoyance to the legit newbies

I disagree with this. I've seen a captcha on a website that I wanted to register on in the past and it took me between 5-10 times to get it right. A bot would probably almost never get that one right unless they have reached a stage where they are better than a human (doubt it). Even if he was paying people to solve them, it would still slow them down.

Ah, you have a better accent anyways.

You still in the past eh? Humans are the ones that solve the captchas, bots can figure out much too but Humans always beat human made things.
Edit: BTW isn't there a simple solution to the new wave of spam? Just blacklist(ban the account who posted) the link(litecointalk link)

It is easy to manually make the accounts and then put the bots to post.
Having captchas for posting would block that.
It is true it would be annoyance for legit newbies, but spam bots posting is annoyance for all legit users, not just newbies.

Very true and lets be honest, 99.9% of new accounts are either scammers, spammers, trolls, alts or account farmers. Or in other words of absolutely no value to this forum whatsoever. The forum would be a cleaner better place without them.

Yes it would be a slight inconvenience for the rare genuine new account but they pale into insignificance when compared to the number of crap accounts being created every day.

I think the spammer is trying to farm Bitcointalk accounts through spam, so that he can make a profit when those accounts reach higher ranks.

The mods should make account farming against the rules, as it is the biggest cause of spam on this forum.

I see many new accounts with legit question or who are looking for support. Some are already annoyed by the post limit. Pestering them further with a captcha on top of that might drive them away. Id like to think that you get pretty good support here.

You really don't know what you're talking about. What good would he be at farming accounts when they get nuked after one post? If he wanted to farm them he would copy others posts and try blend in to avoid detection but this is the opposite. He's being blatant because he's doing nothing but trolling by being a nuisance. I don't think the accounts are even set up to make more than one post either.

Well the bot just moved on from Bitcoin Discussion to Mining. Now it's posting around 8 lines of speech/text every time, instead of 3-4 lines previously. Also within every post there is a link to a thread in litecointalk, as Hedgy mentioned.

Is he doing this so there's no consistency to the bot, so that each post has to be deleted manually instead of a possibility for an autoban?

AFA IK/Understand its being handled by a bot now, saw some , too true to have been done by moderator, nukes yesterday. Most likely this is in effect:Can the staff confirm?

I understand genuine new accounts would be annoyed by a captcha and / or post restrictions, but hey, tough shit, they'll get over it and understand if they're genuine. And whats more they'll understand if its cleaning up the forum. As already mentioned most new accounts are not real / genuine people. And how many posts does a brand new account have to make? If you're here to learn you read, read and read some more. Then if you feel confident enough you ask a question. In my experience that was hours or even days after joining a new forum. Most of these new accounts are posting within minutes with junk or basic questions that have already been answered a million times before, this is not the normal behavior of someone that's just joined a forum. It's of someone that's done it before and has ulterior motives.

I have signed up to many forums in the last 20 / 25 years with my other interests including football, cars, work related etc. and sometimes had to wait hours for my first posts to be approved and on some for the first replies to approved as well. This didn't bother me in the slightest because I was genuine and wanted to learn something. I also understood it eliminated the crap 100%.

Lets not forget this is by far the biggest bitcoin forum and the one everyone wants to join. Making it difficult for the trash will clean up the forum and give the genuine users a better experience. Also, being bitcoin related it attracts all the scum in cyber world like flies round shit.

I say lets get tough on new account sign ups because all the crap is driving genuine people away.

Sometimes people tend to forget that side, i mean that things should be friendly for legit users too and this is an important side, thats why stop all those spam bots are so difficult because is hard to find the balance between friendly for users and hard for bots.

So i agree 100% with you @shorena

Im not sure you are correct with your assessment of new users, on the other hand you, me and many of our "account age" suffered through newbie jail. Maybe my tolerance for shit is higher, but I rarely have the "this is so bad I dont want to be part of the human race anymore" feeling here. If I do, its mostly because higher ranked accounts that obviously post for their signature and have no idea what they are writing about. I dont think its bad enough to warrant more restrictions.

Maybe there will be new features on the improved forum.

If people want to be a member on here then they wont mind solving a captcha or waiting for a post to be approved. Those 2 things alone would cut out so much of the garbage.

Until that is done members have to keep reporting posts and moderators / admins have to check the report and delete the post and possibly the user. So in turn many people have to be involved and have their time wasted when the process could be pretty much automated by eliminating it from the start.

Still, never mind it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks its the powers that be that have the final say and if the new forum with its improvements ever gets made then we'll see. There's been talk of a new forum for ages now, I'm starting to wonder if it will ever happen.

I understand your point of view and have read the previous few posts that others have made. It's about looking at the pros and cons of various proposals. IMO captcha and first post approval should be okay (one or a combination of both) because your post would probably be approved pretty quickly because there are a lot of patrollers. However, this doesn't really reduce the workload because instead of so many reports we would be handling the same amount (or more since we have to approve every brand new user) of work.
I don't see a problem with captcha for the first post. It is better than doing nothing.

Looks like the bot switched to extortion mode, posting a btc address and "want it to stop". Should make it easy to set up a filter for it and ban automated.

Will work for a day or so I'd say, then he'd revert to the random spam.

Yeah that's a useless suggestion by the user (not trying to be offensive). Patterns only work for a certain amount of time. Luckily there are enough of us to nuke him manually constantly.

Aand he's back to the random spam. Anyway I guess we got the answer as to why the botmaker is doing this, extortion(well kinda)
Pssst, thats shorena

:)

I just brought it up because I think Mitchells bot works like that. I also noticed that posts with a clear pattern are faster removed, which led me to believe that Mitchell is still feeding the bot with new strings to match.

Well, staff has access to the bot. However it stills needs to be improved as it crashes from time to time.

Told you.

did he stop making posts? i have only seen two in the last 24 hours, also, what is the bitcoin address he posted?

No, just reported 5 now and yesterday I found many topics too. Don't think the spam will stop unless the (retard) kid behind it will not find any address without a fees to pay (or maybe with the new forum?)

I agree there have been a lot again recently but not with the pathetic begging "want me to stop" message.

Yeah same. I thought that's what he meant as well. I was pretty confused when I read that as well. These bots get nuked anyway so they aren't really a worry.

http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web

tl;dr?


 :-\

Nope. Sometimes he does stop for a short period of time but then continues the usual business.

In case you might've not noticed(highly unlikely, considering I've reported a bunch by now), now he's spamming topics with seemingly sensible titles like "Credibility" "Escrowing" etc on the Bitcoin discussion

Yes. He's constantly changing patterns thinking that it would slow us down but we've switched mostly to manual for him. I've noticed it because, at this very moment, I'm the most active patroller around (reports sometimes jump to 10+). I do wonder now who the actual person behind this is, they having access to a huge amount of IP's.

maybe he is buying proxies with fresh ip addresses, you guys should just temp ban people who join with suspicious usernames

The problem with that is that we would have a lot of false positives. There are 'normal' users that create accounts with weird usernames.

For some reason they want to flood the forum... It's not hurting us though... Just a little more work for the mods to do  :-\

Just ridiculous now, he is posting the same thing I did on  this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306301.msg13387814#msg13387814) with the title similar to the thread I posted it in. If anyone finds such a thread, report it

Haven't seen this type before:

https://i.imgur.com/n4ygREY.jpg

Really?? https://www.reddit.com/r/navysealcopypasta

I hate reddit, probably because I dont understand it and dont want to :-\.

They are posting nonsense just to pick up their post count to rank up their membership to either A) Sell the account or B) Use it for signature campaigns or C) Use it to scam.

Its not limited to reddit -> http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/copypasta


How do you A, B or C with an account that is banned after the first post?

"I'll give the wheel a final spin, and ask you to give me a letter"
Aaaand...it's D) Tommypug is trying either of those for his account.

This is not related to this thread.

All 3 points are false.

It is the same guy; he's just changing patterns.

Well he asked...

  :-X

Mrs.Lauda is correct. Not A, B, or C, or D
Pretty sure this guy was burned by kncminer and had a similar page (the one on litecointalk) deleted on this forum.
So, he is pissed. Just pissed off. And is trying really really hard to make sure nobody ever forgets what kncminer did, and this forum shut him up.
Yea, this might go on for a while.

I understand he's pissed off with kncminer but annoying bot posting on here isn't the answer, it wont get him anywhere.

Excellent first post.  ;)

Another person that thinks that I'm a woman  ???.

Considering that this is your first post the chances of you and the kncminer guy being the same person are high. You are approaching the situation wrongly if this is you. If you had made a normal thread, be it service discussion or scam accusation about KNC (and had you followed the rules; no begging for example) it would have stayed there are probably attracted a lot of attention. There is still time to correct this if the guy is reading this. Not sure if the admins would forgive the person that caused so much trouble, but it is worth a shot. His spam did nothing to benefit him, nothing at all.

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Update:
Yeah, I would never give in to such a person.

Perhaps its because your username is like Laura :). Sorry if you've herd that before, just trying to make light of the situation...

Hopefully if the poster is the same person doing the bot attack he might realise that its not the correct way to do things. If you are please stop the bot posing as its really annoying for normal forum users.

And before you ask, no I'm not going to pay a ransome for you to stop ;). At the end of the day we've all been burned by a scam of some sort and yours is no different. I feel for you but please stop the bot posting.

Apart from your user name, your avatar also plays a role in people thinking you are a girl.  ;)

Kitties and greasy cheeseburgers is how we roll!

The bots now have started to copy and paste paragraphs written by members... This is worrying...

Not at all, mods(patrollers specifically) can easily view the patrol page and nuke the users who seem to be the copiers(many hints as to who the bots are and who are the legitimate users, not listing , so that the botter doesn't change his pattern)

Correct. We usually hang out on the Patrol page (and so can any other member) or wait for reports in order to handle it. The spam is easily noticeable because it usually has something at the bottom (KNCMiner/link/other).

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I'm aware of that.

Nothing wrong with a kitty and her burger.

Always.

So can we say it's really over now? I haven't seen more of this crap in the main subforum, neither I have seen it in the mining subforum for the past couple of days, then again I haven't been very active due x-mas holidays.

Proposal :
Bat The Bot Contest
~~~~~~~~~~~~

If the mods decided to implement this, I'd put 0.01 BTC on the table for prize money for it.

Users can see a "this is a nonsensebot" button next to where the "-trust" button may appear for not too nooby users.
Every post has a reference number (already exists) and a "nonsensebot" count (proposed) and an array of up to four user uuid. (new, and invisible to forum users)
If you "nonsensebot" a post and if your uuid is not listed and its list is not full then your uuid is appended to the list for that post.
If when you "nonsensebot" a post yours is the 4th mark on the list
  then
    all four users on the list get a credit, which I vote be worth 1 Satoshi, from the prize pool
    the post is removed
    a nastybot message to the nonsensebot tells them where their post went and where they can go

The proposed prize of 0.01 BTC might remove 250,000 alleged nonsense posts at 1 Satoshi per confirmed accusation and be great fun for people who like the village fete game "bat the rat".

Can anyone propose improvements to this?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MK-IV RenewableTechnologyEvangalistBabbleBot

I create 4 bots that mark all posts and get rich.


Jokes aside, people that write reports get nothing for it. 1 Satoshi is hardly an incentive for those that do not write reports to start doing so. It is easily abused if automated, e.g. I can make 4 accounts and mark all yours posts out of spit. The person that wrote the spam bot can use them to mark all posts to cause havok with the new system.

IMHO what it boils down to is that you created another system that needs moderation.

OK.  so four accusations is not enough because four spambot users who'd bought "hero" accounts could collude or one whale could afford to buy four accounts and mark at will.
Is there a threshold of how many accusations would it take to be difficult to fake ?
Could the number of spambots so exceed the number of real users that any democratic counting falls down?

I might have proposed a duff idea so its back to the cartoon "bat the rat" app on an i-thingy for now.

Mabye limiting to Hero alone is enough, maybe you need 10, 100 or 1000. I would suspect that the majority of users are bots, alts or other accounts that would make a democratic process unfeasible

Until the new forum is done nothing this complex will be implemented anyway, so either its really simple or its not going to happen. IIRC theymos was also against anything that might result in the forum holding users funds.

What's this "new forum" that I keep hearing about? As far as I know, the "big forum update" already happened (after the avatar exploit was fixed) and there's nothing too radically new being worked on. I sure hope that the forum doesn't change into a more complex mess. I like the clean look, browsing without javascript is a must in a place where there's Bitcoin + potential scammers, you never know when you are clicking the wrong link.

https://beta.bitcointalk.org/

The same bots, now firing their cannons at knc?

Lambie ain't no bot.

He's a feature.

The majority of the bots that post noticeable spam are brand new accounts. However, I've seen some bots become even Hero members before someone notices that they're copying content from somewhere.

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Update: Yes, that has crossed my mind as well.

It is highly unlikely that any bot has become a Hero member by itself. Most will just post naturally over time or buy an account then get lazy/cheap and utilise a bot to make further posts.