Bitcoin Forum

Previously, anyone could vote in polls. Now you must be at least a Jr. Member. This should make vote manipulation more difficult, though you should still not rely on forum polls for real accuracy.

This came in so suddenly. At least will there be an option to make a poll open to everyone in the future?

Why would you want to allow polls that can be easily manipulated?

Agreed.  Anyone can create as many newbies accounts as they want to.  This isn't Ukraine.   ;)

Excellent news Theymos.

Not really suddenly, it was suggested a while back because people have been abusing it for some time, someone botted thousands of votes a while back with 0 post newbie accounts. Now at least they have to put some effort into it and will increase their chances of being caught.

Oh well, this sounds more reasonable now. I actuallydidn't know that someone created bots to abuse this.

That's a good idea.It prevents from people registering to vote just in the polls and therefore the result from the polls will be more plausible.

This sounds logical, probably newbies don't create any polls because mostly they have no knowledge about bicoin in case It's not bitcoin - related poll but It's true that people can create newbie accounts just to manipulate the poll and create misleading results for other people, so It's a good idea. Good work Theymos!  ;)

Great idea!

I think the next good idea would be limiting users to 1 account.

I think this is a good idea, especially if people were rigging votes with it.


Why's that? It's not something they can really enforce nor is it probably something they want to.

Why would they want one person with 100 sockpuppets?

What does it matter as long as they're not scamming or causing a nuisance? Plus, they probably would have a hard time telling if they used tor or VPNs etc.

Maybe a limit of like 10 accts. per IP?
There's plenty of legit uses for multiple accounts.

Yea thats a good idea too.

Then why put a limit on it? What if somebody needs 11 accounts to use legitimately? Plus you'll run into trouble with people legitimately using tor etc too.

Personally I don't think that there are any reasons for limit accounts per IP. I don't see any problem with that.

That's technically infeasible. Come tell us, how would you implement that?

It can't be done something like limiting person to get 1 account and I don't think it's neccessary.So it's good how the system's right now.

Actually it is probably impossible. I don't think that there is any way to implement it unless if you were to verify each account by some form of ID (which would be nonsense). If you restrict 1 registration per IP, that wouldn't actually do anything since one can use proxies and VPNs.

Why such a condescending tone? All I did was make a suggestion...

I personally think its slightly dishonest for someone to have 20 accounts, aquire the scammer tag then just move to the other sockpuppet. That to me is as bad as having 100 accounts just for voter fraud, which is obviously a problem worth caring about or we wouldnt have the new limitation of JR member status to slow down voter fraud. I'm not entirely positive on how you could enforce it 100% with out fault just like you wont be able to stop  vote scamming with this new fix. You could however... slow it down.

Because you suggested something that is impossible to do. Next time you suggest it, suggest a way to implement it too. Yes, you're right that having more accounts is being dishonest and all of that. But much can't be done here. You could only put restrictions to new accounts that are made to slow down the process (remember, they were removed).

Thanks theymos.

Just out of curiosity, how can someone get benefits from rigging a poll?

I don't think that works.
People can still get lots of accounts with dynamic IP.

Lol So you speak for him too?

It's not feasible if the forum is to remain open to the public.

You could achieve a close approximation in an invite-only forum.

If every member has to be invited in by another member then the list of accounts would form a tree.

Then you have a policy wherein if any account is ever determined to be a sockpuppet account, then the tree is pruned (mass bans) starting with the account of the person who invited the sockpuppet.

You could use a wide range of heuristics to scan the account db for likely duplicates and flag suspicious ones for manual review.

If there is a will there is a way. :)

This is something that has been beaten to death. Limiting sockpuppets is an impossible task. People always say, OH! But I'm a member of "insert forum name" and they limit people to one account! Well yes and no, people can get around any sort of account limiting restrictions if they have the knowhow. With the Bitcoin community, the majority have the knowhow, so putting in standard, or even some new advanced multi account fighting methods would just be deluding ourselves, and giving people a false sense of security from scammers with multiple accounts. There is also the fact that many users here use proxies/Tor because that is the mentality of a large portion of the users here. Going by IP doesn't really help when people can just change IPs in a blink of an eye, and then we end up banning others from using that same IP that are not involved. Thats why the "pay to unban by IP" feature was added, not to generate revenue, but so that people could pay an insignificant single fee but not insignificant for people creating thousands of accounts; to unblock a proxy that they use. Another factor, is that we don't necessarily want to restrict speech. Some people have professional accounts where they have to withold a certain standard, for example if you own a business and have strong political opinions, you wouldn't want your opinions to effect your sales, so that is a reason to legitimately own another account.

Its a double edged sword. People with tons of accounts can use them for nefarious purposes, but punishing everyone for something the few do is something we at least try to avoid. The restriction on not allowing newbies to vote doesn't really hurt many people. It is slightly inconvient for some, but not something major, and the benefit far outweighs the cons.

That's easily solved by having different account classes (business vs personal).

Atleast you had the ability to answer the question with out being condescending. Ty for taking your time to address my suggestion sensibly.

That doesn't fix the rest of the issues though. And having two categories of accounts creates tenfold more issues. Being allowed to have more than 1 account is here to stay. We are smart enough to realize you can't create a rule that is unenforceable.

I've seen a couple of polls where users have to vote who gets a certain bounty, so obviously people rig the results with bots in an attempt to win and claim it for themselves.

That's hard, I went through few previous threads about voting and couldn't vote  :(. What exactly do I need to become a jr.member (how many posts?)

It's not entirely based on how many posts but how much activity you have. To become a Jnr Member you need 30 activity. You get a max of 14 activity points every two week period as long as you make 14 posts. It's confusing but more details can be found here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178608.0 and here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495948.0

In my opinion, the people who want to vote cast their vote transferred and left in the forum.

I totally agree that voting or making a poll feature should be eligible only from Jr. Status, but I think everyone should be able to see results?

Pure speculation here:
Should this (good) move suggest us that in future some minor decisions could be put to the vote?
Has it ever happened in the past?

Just curious, and thanks to anyone can answer.

Polls are still pretty worthless, this just makes them slightly less worthless.

Ok, it seems like that my speculation didn't last too much. :)


I presume that viewing the results is still allowed to everyone, no mention about that in the OP.

You can view results even If you are a newbie but It was probably a bug because I couldn't see the results few days ago too, probably was a bug only for me : :-X