Bitcoin Forum

Forum spammers have somewhat reduced compared to the madness that was here in 2017 thanks to the Merit system and the bear market that has been there for a while but the spammers will keep coming back in large numbers especially if Bitcoin starts making headlines again.

So I was thinking, What if there was away to encourage members to report spam and scam.
Like if someone who reports and reaches a given successful report milestone gets airdropped merits for that milestone.
e.g. 20 successful reports = 1 merit(could any other number)

Now the downside could be abuse through creating fake accounts then making fake spam posts through other alts and then reporting them.
Solution I thought about was to maybe restrict the merit airdrop to higher ranks or considered some sort of activity... This would make it harder for the account farmers

What do you think?

This can be abused, I can create 1000 accounts to spam the forum and report them with my main to increase merit on my main.

Also, some users have over 10k good reports and this can create a problem with a huge number of airdropped merit.

Don't think that can work. If it was, same thing would still have happened because I am pretty sure I read somewhere in the forum if you report many posts with high accuracy, you can be a staff member of the forum.

If what you said was possible, people would have spammed their way to staff members. I know what you are thinking now: "Maybe they did?" No they didn't because it is too much work and it'll be very obvious to the forum mods.

Regardless of that, the idea isn't a good one.

Like I said. You are already being rewarded for your reports. It doesn't happen instantly and you need many successful reports and even then it doesn't guarantee a reward but there is a chance.

If you want merits just post quality content.

The purpose is to encourage members to report scam and spam as soon as they see it.
Post quality is atleast already catered for with the current system

I would much rather a separate reward scheme for reporting, such as the reporter badges (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4742257.0) that theymos proposed a while ago.

As mentioned, this would make ranking up far too easy for shitposters, especially if there was no punishment for bad reports. I could go to most threads in the altcoin boards and just report every post as spam without paying any attention to whether the reports were being marked good or bad, and still get thousands of good reports a day.

I also read somewhere about it, and also if I recall correctly then someone has been appointed as a mod or staff in the past (2016 or 2017) for his huge number of reports with 100% accuracy.


I like this idea what theymos proposed, just hope theymos won't take 5 years to implement this feature. It's almost 9 months since he proposed it.

I think let's just leave the reporting the way it is now. Don't worry too much, there are members who genuinely care about the forum and member's safety and continually make reports even without getting anything back.

Whenever there is a reward, some people tend to abuse it. It will just complicate things and add more work to mods.

Exactly. This will potentially lead to another kind of abusement in the forum, as well as increasing bad posts again.
Before getting reported, and deleted, we will definitely have to see massive bad posts from abusers, and it is truly annoying.
Badge for good reporters (suggested by theymos) is good solution. Remember that it likely is a non-profit badge, so people won't have reason to abuse the report button.

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The forum has been abused from time to time, from system to system, so I won't see reason to start a new one (with benefits, rewards) , and create a new chance for abusers to exploit it.

Like everyone else is saying reporting posts is not equal to writting good ones and receiving merit. However maybe if you report 10 posts with 100% accuracy you could receive 1 smerit . While that could also be abused. I think giving smerit for it would be less likely to be abused than the latter

It was already suggested before and many people conclude that it could leads to abuse of merit system.So we don't have to confuse merit with reports,merit is for contributing to the form while you are also rank up but the reporting is just a voluntary thing.

It will only be true if the report badge don't bring users any benefits from it. There are potential benefits, there are also potential abusements.
By now, I don't see theymos really have real intention to add such report badges, and the OP started by theymos to ask for community opinions on report badges does not mention any benefits from those badges, as I saw.

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What @coinlocket$ meant likely double-benefits from abusements on the report button. If abusers spend their time to visit such abundantly spamming places, they can find spam posts and report them, but they can easily to do it themselves, with spam-bots, and maybe report-bots to make their works easier. It's just my envision on potential new abusements with report button and report badges, in case there are something beneficial to reporters with report badges.

It will be a single post by theymos and you will find something changed in the forum in that moment only.
Might be spam is in controllable level that's why theymos  gone first working on DT  requirement.

But you never know, when theymos just come with a post saying "implemented".

@OP, I guess you already understood by above replies how easily this can be abused, specially we have user here having 300+activity ,1000+ post and do not earned a single merit.

Abuse is the main issue and everybody is talking about it... I too even talked about it in the OP.
How about in order to avoid the abuse or reduce it to minimum.

1. We can for example have Lower ranks like Brand New, Newbie and Jr Members not eligible for merit airdrop for reports
2. A certain amount of earned Merit per rank to be able to eligible for the privilege (killing 2 birds with one stone. Encourage members to report and also make quality posts/help community)
3. Airdropped Merit for reporting would not be spendable.

Of course, not every implementation is 100% perfect, we have seen abuses on the merit system, trust and other things around the forum but it would just be a step into the direction of fighting scam and spam

1 merit to those who learn how to use the Search Engine... jk

This should have been implemented when the merit system came, now it's way too late, to many were hunting for the reporter badges and it's quite possible that someone with bad intentions is already meeting the criteria for the airdrop.

Let's just report for the good of the forum and not for rewards.

very good and positive thoughts, awards, no. Report fraud for the good of the forum, yes.
I think there are hundreds of members working on this forum, it's voluntary without expecting any feedback from the Forum, maybe working even harder in deleting, scamer in the search button.
In this life there are two choices, death and life.
Spamer, infectious and deadly disease.

Try not to be a successful human being but try to be a useful human being.

This would partly resolve the problem of abuse, but it would be almost impossible to control such a system of rewards. Some users control probably dozens or perhaps hundreds of accounts with Member rank and above, so excluding lower rank users would not help. Nothing would stop Member+ ranks to create new accounts, spam with them and then report such post with Member+ accounts.

Merits are for rewarding good posts, and they should not be used for other purposes.