Bitcoin Forum

I have seen this kind of spam few times on the 'Bitcoin Discussion' board, and I had reported those posts when I see them. Those posts more or less, looked like this: http://archive.is/JJwUA.

So a solution to deal with this kind of spam, is to limit the ability of newbies posting links to external websites (except some BTC related website such as blockchain.info so they can ask for problems on their transactions)? Or make a character limit for them?

I know it is hard for moderators deleting them one by one. Implementing this could help decreasing the workload of them.

They are bots and not real people and they are definitely doing this in different websites in order to gain some backlinks . Solution you gave might actually work but It would be unfair as both Altcoin sections and Service announcements are full of newbies who advertise their services . IMO, registration procedure should be harder where filling a captcha and verifying your email address is necessary and I guess It's already planned for the new forum software .

I guess they'll rather  create new accounts to spam rather than use their old reputable accounts and get banned.

No, it is most certainly not hard. You only have to keep reporting them as soon as you see one of them, and it will get handled quickly. The problem is that we are fighting a consistent symptoms, and not trying to prevent the disease (thus making the 'fight' infinitely long).

No. This has nothing to do with existing users (most likely). They are just accounts created by bots.

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OP the best solution is to bring back something like the newbie jail, but this was already discussed a few times. I'm not sure what the general consensus forit is.

Posting spammers are a real nuisance. I've had to close my guestbooks, and make my forum an invitation only one.

One possible solution would be a site that changes links for sponsors who support spammers.

So a solution may be limiting the ability of posting link in specific boards only? (Services as posted by would probably have no one to trust in, as there were many scams operated by newbies)
If they use old accounts (or buy them), at least there'll be a cost to them to advertise something...
These spam posts are very annoying, and not even bitcoin-related... And the newbie jail (of 360s wait between each post) is annoying but effective. Or adding a procedure that require user to sign a message with a bitcoin address that had transaction(s) in it so it is harder to create an account for those non-bitcoin spammers?
Bitcointalk needs not to be a invite-only forum, there're many new, real people joining here every day.

I was not talking about time between posts, which still exists and is good for other reasons (but has no effect on this problem). I was talking about this Whitelist Requests (Want out of here?)] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.0). People were limited to B&H until certain conditions were met. Implementing a variant of something like this would at least confine this type of spam into a singular section, which would make it easier to locate and handle.

That was a solution for me, and not for Bitcoin talk.

My suggestion was for a third part site to provide redirection of the sites of spamming promoting sponsors, and that could go to BT sponsors. This may provide a disincentive for spam promoters, and could provide some small benefit to BT,

Maybe adding a warning in between bitcointalk and the link (i.e. after clicking the link, instead of opening the site directly, it will display a warning message of something like 'You're going to an external website which is not moderated by the forum moderators. Never send bitcoins to sites unless you found it trusted. You'll be redirected in 10 seconds') would help? Some other sites I've seen is already using methods like that (like blockchain.info).

I see this topic is started by 'Anonymous'. How was that possible?

I definitely do understand what are you trying to impart the thing here is that should you really have to post two similar topics as well? If those topics only refers to spamming than i guess you only should have to discuss it on one certain thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1722225.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1722225.0)

That thread is focused on old topics being bumped, and that needs another set of solution. Limiting the ability of users bumping up old threads cannot stop bots from creating accounts and spam advertisement here. And vice versa.

P.S. If the products they're spamming to sell do accept bitcoin, we'd kindly accept those posts as long as they're posted in appropriate boards, however they don't even have the word 'bitcoin' on the site...

IMO theymos should restrict creating new accounts over a period, for instance, you may only create 1 account in 5 minutes (this combats the bots).

if it was required to approve all the posts/ threads before they could be posted, it would be a disaster of moderators including ban abuse, biased wars. as well, the censorship drives out the majority.

i would wish to know if we could bump some old threads which is now useful, like WTS which are to be live again.

Ugh yes! Bring the newbie jail back! I hadn't heard of that before. Even if it's still your second round of activity (so after 14 activity you can leave)That'd save a lot of time wasting going into a thread only to see its a brand new account trying to sell Netflix or some other scam.

The problem with this is that spammers can easily use different proxy or IPs. Theymos has implemented the system which requires the user to pay a fee before using the forum on the tor nodes but it is impossible to do so on proxy IPs since they are harder to find.

I bumped my escrow thread after I left it there for a year(?) or at least half a year. It should be fine if you are the OP and you are planning to sell it again. Please don't bump other threads that are left untouched for a long time, just PM the OP if you want to know if the goods are still available.

It doesn't even have to be like the old newbie jail if people don't like that. Even if only the first post that you make had to be in B&H, it would prevent this kind of spam spreading everywhere. I highly doubt that the standardizes bot software would adopt solely because of BTCT.

That is correct. I don't think the same bot is behind multiple accounts in a small time-span anyways (excluding cases such as the Speculation section bot in the past).

This has been brought up in the past and I'm not sure what the official answer was, but from what I can imagine that would be a large bandwidth strain for a forum that goes down regularly anyway. I agree that it should be implemented, but the forum should be able to handle its self in all situations before that happens.

Theymos used to delete accounts a long time ago on request. If an account was deleted, the author of all of their posts were chaned to Anonymous, if the posts weren't deleted.
The real OP of that topic is a person called Atlas I believe.

I disagree. Spam is spam, regardless of whether or not the product being spammed accepts BTC. Posts like that should always be deleted.

It isn't just TOR nodes, it is any IP address that has previously been used by a banned account. However, due to the nature of proxies there are a lot more proxies than are being banned by the forum.

Personally, I think a decent solution to this problem would be two things. Bring back Newbie jail for a few posts, and disallow URLs to be used as thread titles. This would probably make it a lot harder for these sorts of bots to clog up the forum.