Bitcoin Forum

Have you ever wondered how people do this, well here is your answer.
What I found in the B&H section today is a bit crazy.
A complete guide of how to manage 60+ bounties at the same time. The smart guy made it almost automated.
For me this is kind of cheating the managers by creating a list with generated texts, on the other hand no rules are broken.
So I have a mixed feelings what do you guys think?

Here's the guy:

From what I see day by day on Twitter, I have the feeling this is not the only one doing this. The texts are all pretty similar, many of them very short and badly translated.
And it's normal. The bounty managers don't look for any skills. They just need posters. And.. this is what they get.

So, as you also said, no rules are broken. It's up to bounty managers to act or not. And I somehow have a feeling that most of them will not care.
However, nice find :)

I know you think it is not possible to participate in 60+ campaign at a time. I want to tell you that it is possible to participate in 100+ social media bounty campaign. It's just ability to map out your strategy and follow it. Be ready to dedicate your time.

Some people are even on 200+ bounties, trust me!
Someone post even the number on the report, I think it can be a bot but never paid too much attention.

The more they spam, the more exposure the campaign gets, and the more they earn. It's a terrible system with terrible incentives.

That just means you're unleashing massive amounts of spam on Twitter and Facebook. I can't help but smile how big data gets a taste of what they've created :D

I doubt the bounty managers care as they only care about exposure. Probably doesn't warrant tagging as it should be up to the bounty managers to remove people like this if they think it's needed. But they just don't care as long as their name gets out there. I can't really blame people doing this either. 

The bounty managers aren't going to care if it's automated or manual.

I don't know how much people are earning from these bounties, and I used to think it was peanuts. However, it does seem people are willing to go extraordinary lengths in order to do it.

So what everybody is mostly suggesting is that the Bounty Managers need to be the ones who change? Like instead of focusing on accepting and accepting members they should take a look at their post quality before they get accepted in the campaign? The problem here is anyone can be a bounty manager and also anyone can post a Bounty Campaign thread, aside from removing all kinds bounty campaigns the way I see it is there is no other solution rather than limiting the Bounty Campaign managers who can post a Bounty Campaign thread, in which these bounty campaign managers are the ones who can be trusted that they are not accepting spammers and shitposters.

I don't like the idea of a centralized picking of the certain people who can run the bounty campaigns but something needs to be done about it even though I disagree with a centralized list of people I think it would be better than the current situation where anyone and their mother can create a bounty.

Maybe DefaultTrust can start tagging the bad bounty managers as they are promoting spam?

Why not then make a new additional rank for example : Bounty Manager, like the Copper Member. So only those ranked ones will be allowed to post in the bounty section.
There should be a procedure to apply for such position, based on different criteria,maybe same as the Merit sources today.
This will reduce the fake and scam projects and the spam too. Of course it makes everything more centralized.
I guess is too much time and work implementing those changes, and it will be easier just to remove the bounty section but, it's all about compromises.

Now that we have the merit system just limit the section to members+ and copper members is already a great solution to avoid the mass spam abusing on bounties.

 THE SCAMMER Guinness world record on bitcointalk 1 man 1000 accounts 150k+ usd!  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4139632.msg38185053#msg38185053)

Or warned them on making their threads spammy. There's a way on minimizing it, look at ALU's bounty campaigns. Using google form, they limit spammy thread(but still there are members that don't read rules) that most of the bounty managers are lack off.

IMHO, there's no need for applying. What if a scammer applies for it? It will be another additional work for the Admins just to check the application. Just leave the current system for now.

This doesn't really do anything about them managing the campaign though. All this does is puts a payment barrier for those who want to become a bounty manager. They could still pay the fee, and not moderate it. That's assuming your going to treat it like the Copper Membership.

If you are going to have some sort of criteria like the applicants of merit sources then I'm not sure how this would work either. What sort of data would they have to present to get accepted?

This won't work like I said literally anyone can become a bounty managers, some Bounty Campaigns are even run by Jr. Members with Copper Membership. Tagging them won't sold anything as literally anyone has the potential to post a Bounty Campaign thread and become a bounty campaign manager. If we can't stop this money driven bounty managers spam won't stop in the forum.

Of course, it's just an idea, not a solid solution to the problem. What if it is based on Trust since we are talking of distribution of wealth of some sort, then people has to be trustworthy.
Se an example with the escrows here, you will trust more the person with higher trust rating instead of newbie with no rating at all. You have to build yourself a reputation, why would you risk it later? So same can be implemented for the bounty managers, there can be a bounty score too. Managing good one campaign, your score rises. If you allow spamming your score will decrees.
Based on your rating you can have a higher fee for your work.
I can try to developed this idea more.

That's true maybe we could limit the announcement/bounty threads to higher ranked members then to prevent this issue and then default trust can weed out the bad ones.

I guess theymos wouldn't implement this because of the copper membership but I think this is the only way to do it other than removing bounties/signatures all together.

OK, I am this "smart guy" who tried to help people to automate a little their everyday work and all I received is a red trust because of this topic and now I could be disqualified from some of them for trying to be useful for community. Fair enough. I did not break any rules and did not suggest any bots, just wanted to share my way of managing campaigns using Microsoft Office.

As far as we can reasonably guess and judge from the recent events, Facebook had been using user data to target individual users for a long time. They have been generating a log of their activities and analyzing them to suggest ads, show similar updates and so on. I am sure these are targeted algorithms.
The spam generated by the Facebook and Twitter accounts pertaining to ICOs, will only ever be related to those particular users.

It would be safe to assume that most of these "accounts" consist of bot accounts or farming rings of 10,000- 20,000 people who are all in each others friend list and are all advertising ICOs to each other. The situation is hilarious actually.. ;D My point is , as much as I too would like to smile over ICOs screwing up their Big Data algorithms; i think the problem isn't as severe as you think and those people are smarter than we care to accept.. :-\


Too bad man. Although I know a way with which you can help the community wayyy more. You have the smarts to subvert the naturally justified methods of promotion which means you must also have the smarts to SPOT some of these people who are doing it. I am sure you can appreciate that this is a big problem for all the "hardworking" bounty hunters trying to make a "living" here. If someone with an army of bots and automated tools eats up 5k airdrop addresses and bounties (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4139632.0), just imagine what will be left for all the others here who can barely put together a sentence??!! The SMART ones will take away all their tokens...

"ALL YOUR TOKENS ARE BELONG TO US!!"  :D :D
Maybe you could try and help find some of these people.

---

As far as your present sentencing goes, well, "In cat we trust!"

I really don't know what reaction should I make, It maybe true in all aspects but still campaigns weren't supposed to be like this I think?
Then I guess, It was like committing a crime just to satisfy yourself and replenish your own needs. And while it was like that, then waiting for this forum to be absolutely spam-free will be just on our dreams.

That's how it works with the current system. Different accusations will turn out to be one, then suddenly misjudgement will soon arrived with a MARK of RED.
Just be on your positive side mate :) Nothing will be good if you stressed out yourself like that. Even if you received such unfairly feedbacks don't stop from sharing good infos :) Just think that you're doing the right thing and they just don't seem to see like the way you do.

I have a feeling that this is done with the help of staff. Once a person is able to get away with multiple accounts, he will try to expand to as much as possible.

We can only report such cases and hope that some action is taken by staff.

Multiple accounts is allowed, and staff don't moderate scams. Therefore, any reports made because of this will be marked as bad, and no action taken. The only time alt accounts may face consequences is when one of their accounts has been caught breaking the rules, and action has been taken. For example, if one of their accounts has been caught spamming or spreading ref links, and is banned for it. Only then will the alternate accounts be banned too, and that's assuming that the staff have enough evidence that the accounts are linked.

This isn't a moderation issue. Rather something that the bounty managers have to deal with themselves. The issue is that the bounty managers don't care. Possibly implementing restrictions on who can be bounty managers or post bounties/annoucement threads is the solution to the problem. But, it's no way a moderation issue.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, could you please understand me that I just wanted to share the tools of managing campaigns and now when one person decided that using Microsoft Office is abuse I will have a lot of difficulties. Could you please share with me your experience and advice what should I do to get my trust back, because I am doing my work qualitatively that's why some of projects use my posts on their official pages.
Thank you all in advance.

Yep, and it apparently isn't peanuts--especially if you live in the poorer parts of Asia or wherever.  It makes me wonder how these bounty participants are living in real life, because I suspect that some of them can earn enough money to actually purchase a house.  I don't know that for sure, but I'm very curious about their earnings.

No mixed feelings on my part.  I think these guys are basically variations on the typical e-mail inbox spammer, the kind of stuff you'd see before filters, advertising male enhancement crap and get-rich-quick schemes.  They spend their time and energy on activities which only benefit themselves and do nothing to benefit anyone else.  The sickening part is, as I've alluded to above, that they earn incredible amounts of money doing this.

We've been over this ground many times before.  Theymos needs to crack down on these project developers; bounty managers need to weed out alt accounts and neg-rated users; and bounty participants need to meet a minimum standard for posting on bitcointalk.  The social media aspect of this is less concerning for me, since it's up to FB/Twitter users to filter out spam--but this shit has gotten out of hand here and someone needs to slam on the brakes.

What I fail to understand is a lot of them don't even put in any effort at all. I don't know about you, but I find the majority of the population is motivated by money, and as a result if they are getting paid a good wage as opposed to other jobs then they would put in effort to keep that going. Especially, since there's a lot of competition in the 'market'. Instead they spew non English replies out, and quite often are found guilty of plagiarism.

Even though the above is a poor attitude it's better than making no effort at all. 

Try ASKING the one who gave you that RED TAG. If you're really at it (Doing some formal works without having abusing the rules) then maybe he will be able to remove it. But if the accusations we're definitely true and has a lot of evidence then sorry mate, There's also THE PHARMACIST whose gonna mark you also RED.

now the bounty participants began to develop and have a good mindset
they are trying to profit as much as possible using a variety of ways
but the wrong way, will accept its own risk
I think the manager is now more accurate in examining the contribution of their bounty work

You need advice to win back trust? I already gave it to you. Of course you ignored it because the associated task doesn't have anything to satisfy your greed for money. Maybe you missed my  reply  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4320682.msg38798091#msg38798091). By your own admission, you like to surf BCT and discuss topics. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3056062.msg37254098#msg37254098). You also think that knowledge is more important to you than money  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3177391.msg37089171#msg37089171). If you are really that interested in the forum, how is it that you have missed noticing the constant worry of the old members about the quality of forum due to bounty abusers and spammers?? You have then gone on to ENABLE generating this spam for all the "WORKERS who are already doing very hard work" at the forum.

Do you see the contradiction in your statements and actions?? You won't if all you continue to care about is your own need for moolah. Your post is shared and the damage has been done. Theymos introduced the merit system so people would focus on quality of posts. Posts that enabled spam wasn't exactly what he had in mind. As far as your account is concerned, rest assured that there is no love lost among the DT members who actively tag spammers and shitposters. You cannot even begin to understand the kind of loathing reserved for them. These lone vigilantes spend hours tagging these idiots but they keep coming back with a flood of Jr. Member spamming accounts, just like yours.

You should take inspiration from some of the better members who rose strictly because of their involvement and their contribution. You can apply signatures and earn bounties with a manageable number of campaigns. Of course, you won't earn as much as with 60 bounties but then you care about knowledge more, right?? Speaking of knowledge, maybe you can browse through some of the topics listed here. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4322078.0)

---

---

For shitposters and people who feign genuine interest in bitcoin while all they care about is money, it'd do you good to read this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0) and try to understand that this community project meant much more than enabling ICO spam.

Exactly. What you have here is greed preying upon greed. Most of the people claiming these bounties via twitter and facebook are doing so with fake accounts in their dozens so their actual worth to bounty campaigns are slim to none because they're advertising to either no real people or just hundreds of other bounty spammers. The followers of these accounts also consist of the same: other fake throwaway accounts or just more spammers who are following each other just to bolster their own numbers. Bounty campaigns don't really care because any advertising is better than nothing and it's free to them when they've pre-mined a crapcoin so what have they got to lose. All they want is exposure no matter what and of course there are thousands of bounty hunters with their dozens to hundreds of accounts each who are going to capitalise on this and thus the cycle of spam and greed continues.

This is predominant because people have a very large number of campaigns to keep up it. If this guy was doing his act ities manually, I'm sure he won't be able to be in such number of bounties. But in order to complete his task, he has to improvise. I want to even ask is his method wrong?

Yes, knowledge is more important for me and this forum wasn't my start point to cryptoworld. Sure I found and keep finding a lot of useful and interesting topics here but most part of the time I spend for reading articles, Solidity learning, listening to podcasts, etc. But let me clear something for you. You can think and you can say whatever you want and name things whatever you like but I've studied for 5 years and working for 12 hours a day now as an engineer for 400$ per month. And it is not because I am a bad specialist, its because my government is full of corrupted assholes who don't give a shit about young people like me. And I dont want to spend all my life working there so when I found out that I could earn the same amount of money or even more by promoting interesting projects spending about half of my work daytime...well it interested me. I thought that it could help me to quit the job and spend much more time with books and practice and I will focus on this sphere. But sure you are too experienced and know me very well to say that it is all is just my huge greed. That I just want to buy another house or car like someone said above. Do you think I can afford it on my 400$? No, I can't so don't judge me just for making a convenient way of managing campaigns. I did it all manually and spent much more time and now I made a system that allows me to spend less time and direct it to reading and learning. And I knew that this market already was full of bots and spammers and my tools did not make things worse but could help someone like me who sees the future in this technology and want to free some time. Since the cryptoworld became popular you should know that marketing will become a big part of this forum. Do I think that my post was useful and quality? Yes, I do but you find posts where some guy tells you about how many Merits Legendaries and Heroes spend per month or something like that much useful.

I have mixed feelings about this case. I hate spam, but I don't think "inventing" a more efficient method to join a bounty campaign is bad. That is, assuming the campaign requires dumb tasks such as "share on Facebook", "retweet" and "copy link into Google Forms". Plagiarism and fake entries are much worse for a campaign manager.

There are much worse spammers on the altcoin board than you. I've seen countless people enter total nonsense when they join campaigns, without reading anything. It's actually refreshing to see a "bounty hunter" who's intelligent and writes complete English sentences.

For what it's worth, I don't think you deserve the red trust. Especially because of this:

If you've found a way to join more campaigns in an easy way: good for you! I haven't seen any campaign that asks you to do dumb tasks manually. If your entries qualify, it shouldn't matter.
However, if people start (ab)using your method to join with dozens of accounts, it's not good. But that's been happening long before you posted it.

And yet, with "bounty hunters" spamming their own small circle, ICOs manage to raise several billion dollar per year. Somehow the spam just works for them.

I've manually checked thousands of bounty entries, and I can tell you that I'd love to automate that too! It feels more boring than working at a conveyor belt, and those too have been automated.
I don't think improving posting efficiency is bad for the bounty campaign. It beats the countless people who submit invalid entries.

I don't understand that either.  Even though I would be posting on bitcointalk if I wasn't in a signature campaign, I still try to put some extra effort into most of my posts because I'm being paid a pretty penny to post--and that was true in other campaigns I've been in for the past few years, including Yobit.  Yes, I've written some short posts that could be considered garbage, but by and large I think I do a decent job.  I don't just plop down something that takes seconds to think of and write, and yet that's exactly what a lot of these bounty shitposters do--and I know that in their countries, what they get paid from those bounties can buy a hell of a lot more than in my country.  My feeling is that they should at least try to do a good job for the amount of money they're making. 

But nope, in the end they're just spammers--and illiterate & lazy ones at that.

I didn't tag that guy, Lauda did.

It's not a problem when the majority of your posts are of stellar quality. Short posts don't always mean garbage neither but what some of these people are getting away with is criminal. In bounties it is common for some users to copy and paste previous replies in the same thread.

The updates and keeping tabs isn't much of an issue but its not as innocuous as you are making it sound Loyce. How do you feel about the automatic text-generation part??


200 random texts generated with the required tags inserted into the sentence. I think it is encouragement to spam/ plagiarism to use these pre-defined texts for all the projects. What are the other opinions?

---

---

To the OP, There are a lot of people here with the same problem of bad governments and low paying jobs. More than half the world has that problem. We are all in the same boat. You claimed to be genuinely interested in the forum while ignoring all the concerns being raised about spam due to ICO threads. If you had followed the forum, you'd know that joining 60 bounties isn't really what the forum is solely about.

Not all of these ICOs should be clubbed as useless but when there is no real discussion and people are only going to post generic shit, then where will the value come from? The spam and automated posts aggravates the problem of there being no way to distinguish between a fake project and a good one, in terms of the marketing space they gather. Crytpo is supposed to be a community thing. If all that the community does is get co-opted into scams by joining as many of these as possible, after being enabled to auto-post with pre-defined texts, then where will the self-regulation come from?

I did not want to be a "bad guy" in all this story and did not think that automation of the process is a negative thing while all the time the Humanity striving to automate everything to make life easier. I thought that my topic will help some people who really need it because true spammers and multi-account keepers do not give a shit about any threads except the bounty thread. But we all know that while the system allows you to get profit from these actions, from actions that could be automated - they will continue. I agree that the merit reform was a great idea, now another one concerning bounty campaigns is needed- when you will be paid for your own thoughts when there will be strict rules about the quality of shared content when you will need to prove your value for the project and the community. It doesn't scare me because I am ready to contribute my time if it worth it. But now it doesn't and I decided that my way will be much profitable and all I did was adapt to the system.

I don’t think there should be a fee in order to acquire a rank of “Bounty Manager”. It should probably be earned through trust or sort of like how merits are earned. The mods or DT members should be able to give them some points of some sort which establishes them as worthy to become a bounty manager because they are able to do their job well.

However, even if a system like that will be established, not all will choose to hire an “established” campaign/bounty manager for their campaigns especially if it will cost a high fee. It would be cheaper if they hired someone who offered low fees even if they are not well known, so long as its for a lower price. Quality post may not be so important for them because their aim is advertisement and promotion - a job that may be done through spamming.

But, if the community chooses to solely participte in campaigns managed by the “established” campaign managers because of their well known trust and integrity, then its possible that the allowance of anyone becoming a bounty manager will slowly dissipate. Quality posters will be known as a great way to advertise a signature because it has been payed for good money. Also, a good and quality post is always more attractive than a shitty/non-sensical one. Once a quality post is encountered, the likeliness for the signature to be clicked is increased and those seeking to run a campaign would now want to hire quality posters and not just users who post numerously.

So do I.


I think you’ve got a point here but you are making a lot of money thanks to a forum flooded with spam and you are contributing to it. I’ve been reading your posts and I think if you used your intelligence to become a good poster you would be very respected on this forum and you could join the highest earning signature campaigns. In the long-term though.

You are an engineer and you have automated such a system. Could you think of automating something helpful for this forum? Like an automated way to detect shitposters? If you found a way to do it and you made a post explaining it you would earn lots of merits and that would help you to rank up easily.

This thread was not intended to personally punish you, my idea was to draw a line between what is acceptable and what is wrong according to the DTs, because here in the forum there are already thousands of different abuse cases as almost everyone is trying to cheat the system one way or another.

edited:

Here is an example of what we are trying to stop:


At least he is asking if it is OK.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3466428.0

Most bounty managers don't care about this,  what they are actually after is the number of participants they have, check some of this tweet and facebook campaign spreadsheet, you will been seeing more than 3,000 participates, all spamming facebook and twitter.
In as much as you are not breaking any rules you are good to go, even if you grammar is bad, They don't care, just have the URL of their website and the required hash tags, you will get your stake.

I see no reason why we should be bothering ourselves on this.

I think this is not even about Bounty Managers at all, it's all about the ICO's Marketing team.

Unfortunately that's how MOST of the ICO buyers understand a successful ICO: High number of participants in Telegram, High Twitter Network, High Facebook Followers equals good ICO.
It's a weird formula (at least by how I understand)

STRONG SOCIAL MEDIA = TRUSTWORTHY ICO (????)

We all know it's true, we can find countless scam ICO's that were hugely big in their social medias, but turned out to be scams. That's because people that buy tokens in ICO's, at least at this point, care more about the visibility of the project in the social media: more followers equals more people interested, more people interested equal more potential buyers, more potential buyers equals more profit for me when I want to sell.
And, let's be honest, it kind of works that way... people get into ICOs to profit (mostly), not because of interest in the project itself.

So I think this whole situation is being caused by an ICO system that values spamming on social medias MUCH MORE than real interested people in the project.
It's a root cause... not very easy to change in the short term.

I have mixed feelings about this one too, I hate spammers and multi account campaign cheating bounty hunters.

From reading through all the post on here, what I can gather is most people are upset about the idea that he is using his 'system' to promote/help spam post on the forum. Now, reading the topic post in question and his responses, I can't see any where that mentions using it on the forum. Even the topic post for this and his post says social bounties.

The only reference I can see to BCT forum is when adding the campaign link to the spreadsheet.

3. Link to a bounty thread on BCT forum (for pasting formed reports, checking any changes in rules and all news about the project)

Now this next example that I seen posted earlier is clearly for custom text for Twitter and Facebook. Sure, to some degree it could be used on the forum, but again I don't see it mentioned for that use.

Text generator

The tab Texts includes 200+ texts examples which will be used for text generator with all project hashtags. Let me say that the quality of texts is low. I'm using other examples. If you want a good quality - make your own texts  Wink
!IMPORTANT! You should paste "(tag)" at the beginning of your text, it will be replaced by unique hashtag of the project. It is necessary for correct work of parser! Otherwise, the parser may not find a tweet/post!

Example of correct text: "(tag) project has an amazing potential and a solid team to realize the idea! #1 #2 #3"

The tab Hashtags - into the column Project fill in a project name; into the column Hashtags fill in all project hashtags which bounty manager asked to mention. !IMPORTANT! The first hashtag must be the unique hashtag. In most cases, the unique hashtag is the same as project name but not all the time. The column Autofill is filled in automatically.

The tab Generator - choose the project from the list, click the button choose random string - it will choose a random text, then click the button copy to clipboard. OK, now you could paste it into Twitter/Facebook/ect. new post window. The button copy only hashtags copies only hashtags of the chosen project.

I personally think he just thought he would be helping others out. Twitter and Facebook is just covered with spam like this and it annoys me but I can't see how he has broken the rules here, considering he doesn't mention using it on forum.
I think the spam on social media for bounties will have to be stopped by bounty managers at some stage. It will be hard when they have some campaigns with 10k+ bounty hunters in the Twitter section, that's a lot of work.

At first, I felt butthurt when reading that thread (it was in Meta before). Like c'mon, I'm using my imagination to shill that ICO and some smart ass using a random text generator! Then I thought that my way is unnecessary time consuming and nobody cares. If I want to earn a little bit more than peanuts, I need to choose a quantity over quality (because again nobody cares). So I started to appreciate this guy sharing with me his more advanced way. It's not cheating if one use 1 account per campaign. Now the only problem is to find 60 campaigns, heck, I'm even struggling to find 6. And it's not eliminating the hardest part of dealing with BM not counting your stakes (this is so common for Twitter bounty).