Bitcoin Forum

When you want to report a thread because it has like more than 50 pages and you think it should be locked or even trashed because any possible question about the subject has been answered, what post do you report? OP? The last post?

I mean like this one for example: I regret selling my bitcoin! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4861475.0)


If we are kind, we can think this is an honest question of someone who does what’s typical: buy high, sell low. Just the opposite you should do. So I don't want to report him, but, aren't 54 pages of replies enough?

The op.

same thing to this thread Lost my BTC, any ideas? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4958892.0) post #23 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4958892.msg44714180#msg44714180) by OP clearly stated that the problem was solved
and on the same page (2) I asked OP to lock and also reported/asked mod to delete off topic replies
but only one post was deleted (reported ones) and thread continues up to page 4 :-\
I think that thread needs to be locked, can any mod read this please lock it?

I wish it was possible to lock these threads but for some reason the moderators don't do it.

Also about reporting, not sure why but I got I think 10 out of 10 (100%) reporting accuracy, yet some posts I reported are still there, don't get this.

I've also thought about this. The right idea would probably to indeed report it, but one time in the past I didn't want to soil my good:bad reporting ratio. LOL

Probably a "request lock" thread button next to the reply button would be great for this? Not entirely sure how easy/difficult it is to implement such feature.

e.g. (excuse my l33t mockup skills)

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

In my opinion:

  An auto lock feature on selected sections like bitcoin/altcoin discussion or off topics is a must try. With a number range of 50 to a 100 replies. Or few number of pages.

⬆️ above suggestion is also a good one (request locked button). Or forum moderator send PM to OP to manually do it on its own.

Could do. But, would this be turned on by default? If not, then a lot of people wouldn't use it anyway, and would just ignore it.

I wouldn't worry too much about bad reports. I have a few hundred bad reports. You get over it once you've racked up a few :D

Instead of locking up threads, we could just archive them within bitcointalk, so that people could still refer to it in the future. The Op won't be thrashed either. It solves every issue, well, it just won't ever get implemented. Cool!

You have more bad reports than my total number of reports. yay!  :-X

Its better than straight up deletion in most cases. Not all threads that turn into a spam fest are worthy of deletion in my opinion, because they do have some decent discussion. I'll only remove threads that are completely trash. I'm not sure if moving them to a archive section would be better than locking though.

Yeah, I'm probably leading in the bad reports.

No, I am not asking for it to be moved to archival, it would make more sense,but if users have the ability to archive threads within that board itself,would make things more easier. Maybe not, I don't know.

I have a question, what should a reporter do,if the thread topic is a decent one, but spammers ruined it. Should the OP be reported or the spammers,especially if it is a megathread?

I would say it depends on the thread, and what should happen in your opinion.

I reported 3 or 4 threads today, based on the fact that they had run up to 20 pages. Most of them had a decent discussion early on, or had their questions answered and analysed by page 3. The rest became more of a post answering the title, or just the same speculation rehashed a thousand different ways. So I asked these to be locked, not sure if the Mods will agree I'll see. In this case I reported the OP, but made sure the reason was a reflection of the topics status.

If however it is just people spamming in between a good conversation/discussion, then I would report the spammers individually.

I've asked that same question myself, and that's why I merited the OP ;)

It's however a bit of a dilemma: If a megathread is deleted, then spammers select the "easiest" of the remaining threads for their spam posts, in many case ruining the discussion in decent or even interesting threads.

So it's maybe not a bad idea to let some few megathreads exist, until most of the spammers are banned, to avoid them to "contaminate" other threads. I have already proposed a feature to be able to ignore whole threads, but I don't know if it's easy technically within SMF (there are SMF extensions for similar purposes, but not exactly what I want).

How can you report a thread? I ask because I only know the normal "report to moderator" feature, but in this case it's the individual post that gets reported - you punish the OP for something he isn't the culprit.

Maybe a second report button/link ("Request archival") could be added?

I just use the report to moderator button. Based on this response I use the OP.


I can't remember what I used to do if it was the last post or the OP. Seeing as there are no negative consequences to having a thread locked for the OP, there is no punishment involved. The topics I'm reporting for the most part have long been abandoned by anyone interested in real discussion, including the OP. If someone were to remain active and report all shitposters within their own thread then that would be a different story, you might actually be able to keep a topic going for 20+ pages.

I have been thinking about the mega -thread issue quite a bit lately. In my mind one source of constant redundant shit topics, is BTC price, and whatever the movement of the day was. I think creating 1 or 2 megathreads, that do not allow signatures/advertising could be a nice solution to this problem. This way any topic created that falls under their umbrella could be trashed without a second thought. This would aslo not engourage shitposting just because they are going to be megathreads.

To avoid contamination, we just have to continue to push the report button, and hopefully make it no longer worth their while to spam the entire forum.

It will change nothing, a spammer (boT) will be always a spammer, if a thread will be locked, it will spam on another one, it makes no diffence at all.
This is not how we fix the spam, removing post from shitposter spammers. They uses bots, if they want, on the time that we ban one of them they will create 10 bots. This is a war we can't win at this stage, we need a restriction on posting, or registration (make harder?).

Thanks for clarification. If there are no negative consequences for the OPs of these posts, then it's a good workaround.

It doesn't solve the "interesting threads been taken over by spammers" issue, but that's another story. There are topics I started and then regretted to haven't set them to "self-moderated". Maybe it could be allowed to do that retroactively, if it's technically possible. Then if your thread gets "taken over" and you are interested in it to continue open, you change it to self-moderated; and if not, then it can be reported and archived.

Maybe this is not even necessary - one could simply enforce the "on topic" rule. The "Bitcoin price" discussions all belong into the Speculation forum. "Economics" also is full of these often pointless, trivial speculation threads.

One could even differentiate between "interesting threads" which get moved into "Speculation", and spam threads which are directly thrashed. However, it's maybe not easy to distinguish them, so it would mean some work for moderators. So a "Speculation threads get thrashed, publish them in the Speculation forum!" sticky thread maybe is the best option.

@coinlocket$: That's exactly what I meant.

You should not care about the ratio to be honest, as they say themselves: do not worry about your accuracy too much, one accurate report is worth many inaccurate reports.

OP is culprit of not closing it own thread after gathering enough responses and left the thread to grow on indefinitely. I believe in  most of these thread OP just start the thread and never return back to check answers or comment back.