Theymos, can we do some of these in the 'ok' category? Things like the welcome message, enforcing sig campaign guidelines, assigning more sub board mods and admins surely can be done now or soon enough? Things are getting way out of hand and the longer we leave things the worse it gets. I'd also really appreciate if you can take some time out to give the reasons for some of the 'no's' or 'not yets' when you get chance. Things like removing signatures from lower ranks and/or requiring merit to become a Junior would help things tremendously in my opinion. I'm not going to respond here in detail to all of these ideas. It'd be extremely long. I will classify them as OK/maybe/no: • A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.
• Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).
• More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.
• Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).
• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.
• A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.
• A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.
• More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.
• A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).
• Require email verification for new accounts.
• Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.
• A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).
• Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.
• More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).
• Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.
• Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).
• Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying. OK in principle, would require thought/adjustment/implementation. Many of these things are more complex than they look at first glance. Maybe. • A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).
• Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).
• Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).
• More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).
• Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).
• Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).
• Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).
No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified. |
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Based on the fact that I now felt that the driving force behind theymos' decisions was not $
Right, I don't care about making money from the forum personally. (I've actually thought about getting rid of the forum ads, since it's often a big headache and the forum has enough reserves for a long time, but operating at a significant loss while there's money basically just sitting on the table feels wrong, even if the level of loss is sustainable for quite a while.) I don't disbelieve you when you say that you don't care that much about making money from here as there could have been numerous ways that you could have personally enriched yourself both legitimately and illegitimately from the forum over the years and I've even suggested that you pay yourself a reasonable wage and do admin duties here full time before because one is badly needed, but saying things like you've thought about getting rid of ad slots baffles me. Why? Because they're too much of a hassle and headache for you to organise? If so, can't you either automate the procedure of people buying them or delegate a staff member to be in charge of advertisements instead of just considering removing them completely? Delegating workload to various people will seriously free up your time to do much more productive things and stop you from being pestered about things you don't have the time or energy to do (and other staff members are then pestered who don't even have the means or authority to help). The forum shouldn't be losing money or throwing it away and even more ad slots wouldn't hurt (especially when the forum is covered by sig ads that the vast majority only contribute to the deterioration of the board). Even if we don't need the money the reserve funds won't last forever, but you could even put the money made to good use. Use it to finance worthwhile projects that will benefit bitcoin or even the world, or even give it all away to charity. Nearly 500 people died in floods in Kerala, India last month. We could make sure it gets into the hands of people who actually need it there. What's even worse is that you always get scumbags popping up here trying to use various tragedies to scam by asking for donations. Happens with every natural disaster. I'm sure if we had some sort of official donation drive many people would contribute to it in knowing that the money will actually get to the right people and make a difference. The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom. This forum is probably one of the most free and liberal on the internet, but there are rules here and without rules or when they're not enforced efficiently it just descends into pure chaos and anarchy and that is what we have now. There needs to be some basic laws for a functioning society and this forum is a perfect example of what happens when you do away with law and order and let people do largely whatever they want. You say you don't want to destroy the economy, but the forum has already practically been destroyed as it's unfit for its original purpose and is now mostly populated just by spammers and scammers. This shouldn't be the culture here and it can change, but it won't as long as we do nothing. There are numerous compromises we can make that don't even encroach on anyone's freedom to post here. Everyone should be able to post and I agree with your reasoning for removing things like Newbie jail, but I don't think everyone should be able to earn here straight away and especially by contributing little to nothing, especially those who literally have no idea or interest in bitcoin other than somebody has just told them they can earn money here for posting. This is what leads to the wall-to-wall illiterate spamming and copy and pasting which ruins the true purpose of this forum in the first place. What do you even expect them to do? If you have little to no interest in bitcoin and can't speak English very well if at all but you want to get paid here then that's a recipe for disaster. That's why we should look at things like punishing ICO campaigns that are financing it in the first place and removing signatures completely from Junior Members and/or requiring them to get a minimal amount of merit to become one. That is not too much to ask and isn't restrictive to anyone posting here at all. We really should start 'reshaping the environment' before it's too late. I don't think we should ever fully ban signature campaigns, especially when a compromise can be found without impinging on anybodies right to post, but if we continue to do nothing then removing them will likely be our only option eventually. To make that work efficiently though you would also have to remove avatars and personal texts because people would still utilise them for adverts. The logical explanation to me is to do something about it now and we can do so in various ways that are not at all oppressive to people posting. It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money. I agree, but the problem is that not many people are doing it constructively. I've always said I think it's awesome that people can earn here, but there needs to be a compromise and we can't just let both ICOs and spammers and bots do whatever they want. People can't be getting paid for generic one liners and bots copy and pasting content over x amount of accounts each. Where do we draw the line and when do we say enough is enough? I've been saying for years that's it's not going to be long before the only people posting here are spammers and bots just earning their 'daily needs', but that already happened long ago. Go into any thread and spend a few minutes reading the replies and you'll see this how bad it is. This is probably the best example I've seen recently about how bad things have got here:  There's so many things wrong with that post: 1) He's a haiki/doge bot. 2) He's a Junior Member. 3) He's on a signature campaign. 4) He's posting in the Howeycoins thread about how great it and its team are: A non-existent fake ICO with a non-existent team. 5) That will just be one of dozens/hundreds/possibly thousands that never get looked into. How many others is he getting paid on? This is another: I received a PM today with a typical excuse: Hello sir, I'm representing my friends to appeal about our accounts that you give negative trust due to this post. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4650049.0I wish to inform you that those accounts not belong to a single person, we are making a community to perform bounty campaign. Does working on bounty campaign with our own individual account against the rules? About the those wallet that are connected to each other, we used it to safe the fee of transaction.Some of our team today (the other member are working at home, at the moment):  here is our website : http://kidoelkempoel.com/index.htmlPlease kindly reconsider, and please remove the negative trust on our account. Thank you. That's a picture someone provided to prove that they weren't alts and are all separate people posting away. Just check their posting history. All generic one/two liner spam. Sadly, the forum has actually become some sort of "worldwide welfare organization" and that is literal picture proof of it. The longer we sit back and do nothing the worse it gets. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community. But what about when the barriers to join are too low and anyone can get paid just by singing up with an account here? A bot can even do it and get paid as evidenced by the haiku/doge bot above. Also, what about all those who come here to actually discuss bitcoin or get some help and they just leave because it's useless and full of barely decipherable spam and wrong information? I've lost count of how many times I've seen people giving wrong advice on something they know nothing about or complaining about all the lazy, generic crap that gets posted everywhere purely for payment or ranking up. The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.
It annoys everyone other than those making and profiting from it, but I don't think it is difficult to curb. If you keep paying people to spam then you're not allowed to advertise here. Simples. If you remove signatures from lower ranks like Juniors or require some sort of merit amount to become one then that stops the worse of the worst getting paid to bot and spam. Those are two very simple suggestions that could be implemented today and would have a tremendous effect on lowering spam and stopping people from earning by posting drivel. It's acceptable to do this because we allow it. Please change this culture before it's too late. |
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These bots or spammers aren't anything new and it has been going on a while in various guises by different parties with different motivations. There's unlikely anything to be done about it anytime soon, but hopefully on the new forum there will be several preventative measures that we've suggested. At least theymos didn't write all the suggestions off we've made so I still have hope. Captchas wouldn't stop this or bots fully though. Manually whitelisting would catch most of them however. Without changes to how ICOs and their bounties and signature campaigns can operate here though there will be little change and things will only get worse the longer we leave it. Measures such as punishing badly run ICOs and campaigns can start now though as well as removing signatures from lower ranks or making a merit requirement to move up to Junior. This is probably the best example I've seen recently about how bad things have got here: There's so many things wrong with that: 1) He's a haiki/doge bot. 2) He's a Junior Member. 3) He's on a signature campaign. 4) He's posting in the Howeycoins thread about how great it and its team are: A non-existent fake ICO with a non-existent team. If it wasn't for staff then these bots would be getting paid, and the ones we miss will be, but staff shouldn't have to be policing every campaign that is too lazy to do anything. It is them that are destroying the forum and making it unfit for purpose and there should be some repercussions and punishments for that. If you allow people to get away with murder then they will continue to do so until there's some laws and punishments to prevent it. |
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I think this thread is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with bitcointalk these days. People are obviously just reading the title and responding because I have little to no idea what the op is even asking: what is actually our mission gathered in this bitcointalk forum, what just looking for money what the fraternity between countries or between cities .. please his explanation  Is he asking what the original purpose of the forum was or why do people come here? And whether people come here just to earn or associate with like-minded individuals who share the same enthusiasm for a new idea/tech? Well, this forum was certainly created for the latter but now it's been taken over by the former all due to bounties and signature campaigns which are big bucks. Theymos commented on the current state of the forum here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.
Sadly, the forum has actually become some sort of "worldwide welfare organization" and this is literal picture proof of it. The longer we sit back and do nothing the worse it gets. There can be compromise found here however. |
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Surely this is copy and pasted from somewhere or jumbled up maybe: Worst management from the Indian governments,they fell in each part and increase their crime rates after the Narendra Modi becomes the Prime minister of India.The lost amounts were collected from all the citizen by increasing the taxes to every products that people using everyday but they are getting no benefits from paying taxes to that country.So all the Indians need to think well before voting in the common elections of they want good future.
91 people died in queues outside ATMs and banks On November 08, 2016, Indian Prime minister made a sudden announcement that Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes will be invalid from November 09, 2016. The Indian government's plan was to destroy all black money/unpaid taxes hidden by Indians in cash in the form of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. Indian people were given time till November 23, 2016 to exchange the old currency notes at all the banks in India. So there were long queues outside Banks in India for depositing money and also for withdrawing money. I was in the queue at the bank for 2 hours and 30 minutes. Later Indian Congress leader "Rahul Gandhi" said "91 people had died in queues outside banks and ATM's" which was the result of sudden announcement by PM Narendra Modi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is very proud of his actions @hilariousetc
Keep trashing the trash and while you're at it, why not at least temp ban those that bump their sales threads 3-5 times per day? If you look through a few of these, they are using alts to carry on a conversation to keep their threads at the top.
I sometimes do, but I'm starting to give up here. Pointless banning people when they just evade their ban on alts. Some people clearly have multiple accounts to sell the same thing but there's little I can do about it and it's pointless wasting time on it unless things change which I can't see ever happening. |
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Is your concern that he might make more money than others while contributing to conversations in the forum?
No. My concerns are that he's breaking the rules. Ban evasion and using alts to get around the no multiposting rule. I suspect those accounts belong to someone who has been farming accounts for a while and has multiple ones banned before but that can't be proved or disproved. It's suspicious, definitely. Most of those accounts are not even Jr. Member yet, so it looks like they're slowly being ranked up, and my guess is that they're going to be entered into bounties eventually. Since it appears he's not in a rush to do this, I bet there are many other accounts that weren't caught here.
Hence why we should keep an eye on them. I agree those are almost all the same person. Text analysis alone implicates them by their speech patterns, phrasing, vocabulary use. There's several more metrics one can use to deduce that.
I would say some are definitely not the same person as the farmer, unless they intentionally only switched their writing style a couple times. Seems unlikely... Agreed. There could be multiple people controlling them or at least another person has took over on posting from some of them. It's going to be hard for him to rank them all up by himself. With the merit system now even good to great posters will struggle to achieve ranks so not sure what he's going to do with them. Probably not much of a market for Junior Member accounts and you'd be better using a bot to create them instead of wasting time making original posts. You never know though. The question though is what do you do with them? Monitor their activity in a month to see if post history has changed and then neg them for acc sales?
I guess just keep an eye on them for now. He's obviously going to do something with them but the question is what? If they all start joining bounties they'll be busted pretty fast. Passwords start changing then we'll know they're likely being sold. |
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snip
You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them. Same feeling here. After looking a post from Theymos on how do he thinks about the suggestion, i am making a confused face. Why does he put 1 merit requirement in the label "Ok and might needed some fix/changes" and then disappear again. We cant win this war because we are just people facing the bots and other people, plus the number of people who care about this spam matters is minority in the forum. hillariousetc, do you have any guess of the reason why Theymos said that to the suggestion ? No idea. Theymos didn't respond when I asked him both publicly and privately. All we can do is hope that he explains his reasoning at some point. My best guess is he doesn't think it will help much or is too restrictive or something, but I would disagree on all fronts. Hopefully he just thinks it needs some tweaking to be effective. Cyrus said this about the matter though: Requiring Merit to get to Jr. Member isn't probably the best approach: begging and the sense of need of increase in community oversight over Merit abuse are two things that come to mind. Which my response to that was: I would disagree. If this was the case we would see such with Juniors begging for ten merit to become Members which doesn't happen often. People who do beg for merit though are handled like any other beggar and their threads are trashed and they often get negative feedback from the community. The longer we do nothing the worse things get. It's not going to be long before the only people who are posting here are bounty hunters, sig spammers, copy and pasters and bots, if that hasn't happened really already. The chance of any worthwhile discussion going on is little to none these days. It's just Junior Members churning out barely decipherable one liners then moving onto the next thread. They're not here to discuss, just to post a sentence or two to get paid. I didn't get a response back. If what he said was true then it would happen at all ranks begging for merit to move up which barely ever happens. Besides, I would rather deal with minimal amount of begging and merit abuse than not do anything about the thousands of bots and spammers that are getting paid to post nonsense or copy and paste which isn't magically going to sort itself out so we need to do something and making sure these bots and spammers can't get paid for shitposting and copy and pasting as Juniors is a big step in the right direction IMO. |
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I can't work that First77 guy out. I've already warned him about all the threads he keeps posting in the wrong sections, and he doesn't seem to be interested in bitcoin and even keeps creating crap threads in the wrong section usually seemingly trying to slag bitcoin off and promote gold investment instead. Think he's likely just trying to get hits to his website and YouTube videos in his signature more than anything.
Let me put your mind at ease - don't try and work him out. Look at her ramblings on her website http://dangerousmother.com/ and you will understand why you cannot work her out.  Lol. I think his posts here are essentially just indirect ref spam. He's trying to get hits to both his youtube channel for the youtube view money and also he has ref links on that website trying to get people to invest in what looks like some sort of ponzi scam gold site. He actually messaged me this morning asking why two of his threads were "incorrectly" moved to speculation today (they were in the right forum but actually went in the trash). Also lol: Many people will say that my website has 1995 design. 'dangerousmother.com' with 1995 design is internet's heritage.. 450 million websites on the internet went for modern designs and forgot internet's heritage. |
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I started noticing a few of these accounts popping up in the same threads and posting back to back or very close to each other. Their naming patterns and them all being registered days apart are already a big enough giveaway but then their posting habits by sticking to the same threads and the way they type are even more so. First confronted him about it below which he denied even being aware of most of them *cough* bullshit *cough*: There's one thing I don't see anybody talking about here. I don't think it's very practical to ban selling accounts. How could you practically apply a ban like that? I mean, you can see if the quality of posts completely changes at one point of time and the person starts spamming. If they already have the status they want, they may not really post very much at all any more. I think it's also a good point, that if it would be banned, it could drive prices up more, like illegal drugs. You have to keep in mind, the original account owners put in a lot of work and effort to get their rank up. If they decide they want to move on in their life, maybe their efforts should be worth something. Then if the new account owner does stupid things, they'll just lose their whole investment. They'll get what they deserve.
Well you, an account farmer, would say this. How many accounts are you farming? How many of your accounts have you had banned now? Which ones of these are yours that I've noticed posting in the exact same threads as you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2247852 Zayn_Nazy June 30, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280178 Willie_Linder July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2279012 katherin_panini July 13, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271482 Michael_Cox July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280138 James_Cline July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2272791 Sherwood_Archer July 11, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271537 Aidan_Davis July 10, 2018Besides, you stop it the same way we don't allow users to sell weapons or post ref links here. If they list an account for sale it gets removed or they get banned. As ThePharmacist said, it's not rocket science. I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I only recognize seeing a couple of these accounts on the forum. The a few days later I found some more: Don't suppose you know who these accounts belong to either? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271547 Luis_Gray July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2274820 randall_boss July 12, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2273291 Merritt_Baldric July 11, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2274323 Jared_Burns July 12, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2277232 Charles_Summers July 12, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280233 Kimberley_Isham July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271603 Isaac_Ramirez July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271544 Brian_Wood July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271623 Owen_Smith July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2274435b Stuart_Shook July 12, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2273233 Dawson_V July 11, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2274369 Nathan_Weymouth July 12, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271455 Luke_Turner July 10, 2018 And I've just spotted even more today: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280150 Douglas_Rhoades July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2272848 Dixon_WestSeven July 11, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2271514 Evan_Smith July 10, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280502 Separate_Bass July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2280165 Chris_Costales July 14, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2277130 Joseph_Williams July 12, 2018 There may be some false positives in there but as you can see they all use names with an underscore in between them. The thing is; he's isn't really a shitposter. One of the things that makes them stand out and links them together is he almost always just writes the same similarly structured one paragraph. He isn't really talking much about bitcoin and tends to stay in the same sort of politics and economics threads, but there is a lot of these sorts of accounts and there will be many more to find if you check more of the threads they've posted in. If we had access to the memberlist these would be very easy to find. With that being said, this farming could go much deeper. Jared_Burns is also banned (probably for copy and pasting). These two threads below he created are copy and pastes and if that account does indeed belong to the rest then it's ban evasion. I doubt this is his first rodeo with account farming either and these farmers tend to learn to adapt and evade detection after they get caught: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4873408.0https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4789142.msg43217945#msg43217945If you look in them you will see more evidence of farming with users who also use 'real' names but formatted in two different ways: No spaces: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2290691 LeadHenry July 18, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2290757 GraceEmily July 18, 2018 Spaces: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2243002 Sydney Chapman June 28, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2243135 James Fleming June 28, 2018 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2289120 Mary Birkin July 17, 2018, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2245205 Miguel Fulton June 29, 2018, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2245306 Eden Thompson June 29, 2018 Maybe he's creating the threads for his alts to post in and shitposters to shit in or maybe other farmers are just taking advantage of that. Either way I think it's worth keeping an eye on and to see if they start abusing bounties or whatever. |
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Sent multiple signed messages to both theymos and Cyrus
Theymos clearly states for you to send ONE message. If you've spammed him more than once, he may simply ignore you... :/ He says send one to cyrus. If not after two weeks then PM theymos, but this is outdated and irrelevant info. Neither are seemingly responding or restoring accounts and they don't seem to have been for quite some time. Some people have been waiting nearly a year to get their accounts back and without even getting a response at all. Until theymos either automates the process or grants someone access to aid in their recovery then they're likely just not going to happen right now regardless of how many messages you may or may not send them. |
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Well that's what I thought but it doesn't seem to be the case. I just voted with the following account which is a Newbie: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1424594 hilarious* Edit: Oh. Think I figured it out. I whitelisted the account before. That must have wiped the restriction. Allowing Juniors to vote on the poll is still going to be useless though since it directly involves them. Someone with an army of indefinite Junior Members could sway the results and I don't want it to look like the community thinks it's a bad idea (though maybe theymos could use the abuse votes as honey-trap for Junior farmers  ). |
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Didn't theymos a while back make it so that Juniors (or up to some other low-level member) couldn't vote on polls due to obvious abuse? Or was that just for a poll he personally created about a particular issue? (might have been on a trust/merit system change). I just used my hilarious* account to test (which is a Newbie) to vote on one of my own polls and it allowed me to do so. I want to create a poll for something else but if Newbies and Juniors can vote on it then it will defeat the entire process.
As I have suggested in the past, allowing more poll/self-mod options to disallow certain ranks from voting or posting would be helpful.
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I don't see those options here in Italy, my only options is 2.29 EUR for 1 month of premium look and feel of the website without add ons. I want to really buy the privacy package and for 3 Pounds it is not a problem for me or anyone else.
Care to share a link ?
It's probably just shown to those who actually create a league there.
I'll try and figure out how to pay the 3 pounds a bit later and set up the CL league as soon as this week's EPL is over. Just need to not be lazy.
I'll try email them about it but I don't get why you care so much about this. Especially to the point that you're willing to sacrifice your own privacy and hand over your personal information and debit card to them. Nobody can see your scores until they're unable to change theirs. The only way this could be abused is if there was some collusion between a couple of users where one puts their scores in and shows the results to others. If people are so concerned about that (which probably won't happen anyway) then either put some fake scores in at first or none at all and just make sure to put your correct ones in before kick off. |
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Got two correct scores today. Would have had three had it not been for the late goal from Arsenal. I was going to ask if Sojourner was purposely making shit picks as some sort of self-sabotage, but he actually was the only one to get the City score correct today haha. For those that were complaining about the 'privacy' issues, superbru does have a paid option to remove the feature to be able to see users picks for only £3:  But they don't seem to offer any other payment option other than debit cards:  And there's no where to put the name in so I'm assuming it uses the one you signed up with and since mine is Mr Hilarious Andco that's probably out of the question. It's a non-issue to me though because you can only see others results once you've locked yours in. For those that are worried about any possible shenanigans or collusion you should probably just put them in at the last minute. If somebody wants to create a pool for the Champions league and pay for the premium feature I have no issue in that. |
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Alright, makes sense then. I was checking the campaigns lately and noticed only campaigns open to Members and above, hope we could restrict campaigns to Members or at least Jr with 4 or 5 merits, just this would make a massive difference. I don't understand campaigns managers either, as a restriction would still bring a lot of applicants anyway, and everyone would be satisfied.
Most bitcoin-paying campaigns are limited to higher ranks, but ICO campaigns don't care and will accept almost anyone and often any Juniors that will sign up. The more users the better for them. Moire spam = more adverts of their ICO. In fact, they seem to thrive on exploiting lower ranks because they're often the only users they can get and the only campaigns those users can get on are ICO ones. Because of the limited payment this just leads them to create dozens of Juniors to maximise profits. The more accounts you have the more spam you make and the worse quality your posts become. This is why in my opinion it is essential to implement a merit requirement for Juniors. Without one ICOs will continue to pay farmers, bots and spammers to post whatever drivel they can be bothered to make. This really needs to change. |
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I received a PM today with a typical excuse: Hello sir, I'm representing my friends to appeal about our accounts that you give negative trust due to this post. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4650049.0I wish to inform you that those accounts not belong to a single person, we are making a community to perform bounty campaign. Does working on bounty campaign with our own individual account against the rules? About the those wallet that are connected to each other, we used it to safe the fee of transaction.Some of our team today (the other member are working at home, at the moment): here is our website : http://kidoelkempoel.com/index.htmlPlease kindly reconsider, and please remove the negative trust on our account. Thank you. I hear the explanation of what I bolded above a lot. Transaction fees are pretty damn low, so there's really no reason why funds should be pooled--and given that blockchain transactions are the only good way to prove accounts are connected, people shouldn't be doing this. I'm hardly swayed by this picture, either. It shows a bunch of shitposters sitting around a shitposting table in a shitposting farm. They deserve negative trust just for that. Give me a fucking break. Guaranteed the women here don't care about bitcoin in the least. They got recruited to spam like suicide bombers get recruited by ISIS. Jesus Christ. I've been saying it's not going to be long before the only people posting here are shitposting families and their half a dozen alt accounts, but I can't believe that they actually took a picture of their operation. I never thought I'd see this. I think you're wrong about their excuses though. What I think likely actually happens in the vast majority of cases is that there will be one 'ring-leader,' 'boss' or family member etc that is the main person behind recruiting people to the group. He will tell his friends, family, co-workers, schoolmates that they can earn good money just by posting on a forum. These newbies obviously don't know how to work a bitcoin wallet nor care to learn so the ringleader of the spammer group will be in charge of all the wallets for the accounts. He obviously then has a lot of different addresses with money in so he will send them all to one address and then to the exchange or something like that. He will take his cut minus fees then pay them in their local cash. The sad thing is that picture will likely just be a small operation here. I'm sure there are farms or sweatshops with double/treble the amount in that picture. I don't think it's crazy to imagine that there will be entire offices set up like this in the near future if they haven't already. I mean, one guy even claimed that his entire office's accounts were banned (though that was like just a one man job and the bullshit excuse he came out with). As long as you can continue to get paid here for doing nothing but churning out a sentence or two then this is only going to get worse. Shit can't continue. |
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Looks like the very truth, the sad thing is many of them don't even know they'll never rank up because of the merit systems. If they knew they would stop posting I guess, or at least a fair amount of them.
You don't even need to rank up either as you can get paid as a Junior which requires no merit just 30 activity which a bot or spammer can achieve in under a month with any sort of spam. This is leading people to farm multiple accounts each and in some cases they're in the hundreds. The longer we allow this to happen the worse it becomes and people are even botting campaigns now with their legions of Junior accounts. Campaigns don't care because it's still advertisement for them. Doesn't matter if you ban half of their accounts because they have the rest still collecting payment. Juniors should have their signatures removed or at the very least they should need to gain at least one merit to become one. That would help tremendously. Crap campaigns who continue to pay spammers also need to face repercussions. |
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Still I think that the fastest way to decrease the spam is to enable merit reqirements for Jr.Members and disable signatures for those Jr. who has no merit.
You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them. |
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The forum has become unfit for purpose a long time ago and it is now just a place for people to churn out their generic one/two liners for payment. People aren't interested in reading others comments or having a discussion. They just squeeze out a post as fast as they can then move on because time is money and it doesn't matter whether you spend one minute on a post or thirty minutes, but obviously time is money so the quicker the better. Those signature guidelines unfortunately aren't being enforced either and there's nothing anyone can do about it until theymos makes changes to what is and isn't acceptable here and that needs to start with punishing signature campaigns as they're the ones that are causing the mess in the first place. As long as campaigns keep paying people for making poor quality posts then it is only going to get worse very fast because more and more people sign up here just to earn by spamming and they do so in their droves and often with dozens of accounts.
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