You really think you are the first person to say this in the month since the retroactive requirement for 1 merit to reach jr. member was introduced?

The reason it was made retroactive was to stop the immense amount of sig campaign spamming going on from jr. members who had yet to earn a single merit despite having made hundreds (in some cases thousands) of posts. If it wasn't made retroactive it only would have prevented new sig campaign shitposters from coming online; all the existing shitposters would still be able to ply their filthy trade.

Yeah, the approach currently being taken by the mods just isn't going to work. There's a new batch of bump-bots (apparently using stolen accounts; see next reply below), some of which aren't plagiarizing (yet), but clearly the conversation is manufactured. I mean, what are the chances than an ANN thread will have 10-100 pages of conversation among 6-12 users then when that group of users are banned the thread grinds to a complete halt only for a new batch of 6-12 users to show up and have the exact same style of low-value conversation once again?

I mean, any human can see these conversations are totally fake, but even when I nail some of the participants for plagiarism the reports are staying unhandled 2+ days later. One report of plagiarism with proof provided should be sufficient to get a user banned. Period. Since that isn't happening for me, I have to assume that mods either don't trust my reports (despite 99% good) or else they just aren't processing them. Regardless, it's getting rather difficult to believe anyone on the staff really cares about addressing the spam problem when the reports from people like me who take the time to investigate abuse on an organized/massive scale are ignored.

Really, at this point the NEOGAME.IO, SafeInsure, BIOHAL, DBX and Neluns threads should be locked, if not totally nuked, as they all are filled with fake conversation between bump-bots and precious little real discussion.

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Yeah, we figured most if not all of these accounts are stolen, as many of them date back to 2014 but with little or no post history until this year (likely the older posts were wiped to cover up a glaring change in style or language used).

Ooo, ooo, I know too!1!!

Oddly enough, the initial trigger was that the post seemed out of context with the current discussion - merit has been around for nearly 9 months so "predicting" that most people are going to have trouble getting merit is no prediction at all. It was only after I had already decided to see if the post was plagiarized that I noticed the disparity in grammar between the first two sentences and that barely literate phrase tacked on the end.

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Have no fear, I *always* report plagiarism when I find it! But more reports are always better, as I have recently learned.

I want the current rumor among the spamming-class that "meta is the place to get dem maritz" to turn into "meta is the place to get yourself banned."

Not my job, technically, but I would suggest that the project management not hire any thread bumping services because now that you are on the mod's radar the next step may very well getting banned and trashing the entire thread.

Outstanding! I was hoping to recruit a few more people this go around because, yes, it is a never-ending battle. One possibly good thing is that all of these accounts are <30 activity newbies so should be much easier to get banned (over 30 and a global mod or admin has to do it).

Oh, and I owed you a merit for your earlier suggestion about requiring more than one report, but the above post is worthy, too.

Bad news... a new crop of bump-bots have been brought online and shilling has once again resumed on the following threads:

Neluns
DBX
SafeInsure
Biohal - not sure about this one; just 2 new shitposts by newbies.

So far there is no new bump-bot activity (nor really much activity at all) on the EvenCoin and Neogame.io threads, but I'm watching them closely.

The new bump-bot suspects are:

adamkiev
nof21 - reported 2 times
appotus
doggie
microman14 - reported 2 times
maxi23 - reported 1 times
sade12 - reported 2 times
MinceCraft111 - reported 1 times
sigma45 - reported 2 times
drugrehablocator - reported 3 times
Maison - reported 1 times

I think at this point the better strategy might be to get the threads nuked, rather than try to chase down an infinite supply of bump-bot conscripts.

EDIT - update reported counts on above list of suspected bump-bots.

Are you not paying attention? These bots are copying each other and recycling the same sentences/posts over and over again. It's so obvious what they are doing that you would either have to be stupid or else playing stupid to not see it, and note that if the global mods determine that the bots were being used get around the "only one bump per 24 hours" rule rather than just generate artificial buzz then the entire thread can be nuked and the OP banned.

Also note that a new group of bump-bots have been brought online in the other threads that were targeted along with yours... And I am obviously watching for this.

Jeez, what a dumbass - I suspected plagiarism and, yep... turns out this post is a direct copy of one that was made earlier in this thread:


buh-bye.

Like SteamTyme says, this is not on-topic for meta and seems more like a poorly-disguised hunt for merits.

Also, you need to fix the sources for this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5047547.msg46719364#msg46719364 or you are going to get nailed for plagiarism.

At first I thought all these plagiarists either had no moral qualms about what they were doing or else didn't think they would get caught, but I'm starting to come around to your perspective that they might not see anything wrong with it in the first place. It reminds me of this excellent book I read a few years ago about the perils of moving your manufacturing to China titled, appropriately enough, "Poorly Made in China." Basically, the Chinese care as much about product quality as you do, and how they evaluate your level of care is by the effort you put into supervising their work. They also tend to play fast and loose with promises of any kind, like when something will be done, how much it will cost, etc. They take capitalism to an entirely new level of ruthlessness and if they ever were to develop an intrinsic pride of workmanship such like the Japanese or Germans are known for we are all well and truly doomed.

Not that suchmoon didn't give you a most excellent answer already, but... the usual way I find plagiarism is by entering a "statistically improbable phrase" from a post into a google search limited to just this site. E.g. -


If more than one result is returned then I click on a few at random to confirm plagiarism and report the original post (as well as some of the search result hits, depending on how old they are).

Huh? How do you decentralize a web store, much less put it on a blockchain? 

No content was plagiarized, you say? Well, here's just one example in which Tiny_Prism:


Copied from amanai:


This starts on page 2 of your thread - boomertoo, specifically - and continues from thereon out. Basically, about 90% of this thread is just bump-bots talking to each other.

Lol, whatever, shill. Before you try to pull a fast one like this you might want to make sure your post history doesn't all but prove you are involved in the project:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4921462.msg44312681#msg44312681

For those of us that don't speak Russian and/or aren't on Telegram, can you explain what is going on? That last sentence above implies that the old EDL/EDC coins are once again worth something (if even just 1 sat), which would be a big change from the last 5 months or so.

If you can, do try to convince Ludwig or whomever to come back to this thread and update us. If nothing else it ought to provide some entertainment value (I long since wrote off the electricity used to mine this coin - fortunately I never threw too much hashpower at it since it seemed sketch from the beginning).

It's a cruel hilarious joke that theymos plays on people who get banned: it gives you the illusion you can somehow be the exception among the rest of the rabble that get banned for plagiarism on a daily basis, just like the "close doors" button in an elevator or the "push to cross" button at a stoplight.



It's amazing how similar these threads appealing a ban for plagiarism tend to be. The OP professes ignorance of what he's done; other users dig up examples of plagiarism; OP claims this isn't a big deal and ought to be given a second chance; users laugh as they relish the delicious schadenfreude; OP either leaves in disgust or starts calling us "dog" [sic] (and then leaves in disgust).

Yes, just one instance of plagiarism is enough to get banned. It is a form of theft, after all - stealing someone else's writing and passing it off as your own.

Yeah, we understood that part. What you don't seem to understand is that begging for merits is more likely to get you red-trust than any merits.

Yep, it looks like the bump-bot ring has been well and truly busted! I'm kind of surprised the shilling went on as long as it did - it started on the very first page of the EvenCoin, SafeInsure, Neluns & DBX threads, page 2 of the Biohal thread, and page 4 of the Neogame.io thread. Pretty much all of those threads are just bots talking to bots.

Two other interesting tidbits: the Neogame.io OP is claiming innocence while the SafeInsure OP only has 3 posts and last posted on Sep 18th (also the day he/she/it joined).


Indeed they are profitable... as long as bots are doing the typing, anyway: I recall seeing an ad that charged 0.5 ETH per day to keep your thread in the top 10 in the ANN section; that's not really a lot of money to have to type out messages every 5-10 minutes (hence why real people aren't doing it).


I hope that requiring 2+ plagiarism reports and/or more than one person reporting the same post isn't necessary in general. Just one example of plagiarism should be sufficient to be banned. Perhaps we just aren't at a high enough rank for a single report from us to be sufficient, or maybe this is the reason for thread here in meta to report plagiarism - I thought it was redundant/superfluous, but if the idea is to get multiple people reporting each post then it makes sense.