There was a quote I saw somewhere that would be perfect for this - something about turning into something you don't want to be. I'll try find it later.

The forum was never and the admins will never allow it to be a platform just to host bounties on - we have too many users fighting to eliminate spam and I've seen a lot of bounties now utilizing google forms, and not forcing users to spam their weekly reports.

This is quite similar to an event that happened to Twitch which is one of my favorite sites and is a streaming platform for gamers. In 2016-2017, there was an invasion of cam-girls that where introduced on the platform and infested it, turning it from a site where gamers could go watch other users play and making it chaturbate.Then the eventually added a new TOS that killed those streamers.

 The forum is currently in this state, and being infested by bounty hunters and spammer bots and other shady stuff. There are a small bunch of managers trying to combat this spam but it's not shifting. Therefore theymos added merit which has made ranking up for spammers a lot harder and relatively the same difficulty for good posters that in the lower ranks. Slowly we'll see the merit shift over to good posters and a lot of spammers staying at a junior member rank.

~Zapo

I'll bite. Email coming soon.

The forum is not a place in which you should expect to be making income[1]. Making income of this forum is a privilege and not a right, users like you who have not received a single merit since the implementation of the merit system should not blame the system - blame yourself.

It is not the community's fault that you have not received any merit in order to rank up to member so you can add links to your signature and up your bounty rewards with the links you can now add into your signature. Merit was introduced as a way to combat spam and from judging your posts[2] and comparing it to the amount of merit you've earned. Seems like it's worked.

[1] Although I will applaud the legitimate users who've created a part-time/full-time job as a manager. You've done a great job and provided us users with a chance to earn a couple extra bucks a week.

[2] All your last 5-6 pages of posts are just twitter reports for bounties. Do you seriously expect users to merit you for submitting your bounty work? Some people are just privileged.

~Zapo

I see. I've never heard of that bug until now, thanks for informing.

No, I sent the user 1 merit and then accidentally refreshed my page and it sent 1 more merit. I did not click on the merit button more than once.

Thanks for the links.

~Zapo

Nice initiative oapieNL! I'd merit you if I had the Smerit.

I'd personally not trust any google extensions, with the exception of LastPass Password Manager[1]. The google chrome store is very different to what some people may compare it to, which are the app and google play stores. It is much easier to get an app listed on the web store and a lot of users are making fake trading bots, some fake steam helpers. [2] The only trading bot I'd trust would be Gunbot.

Nice catch.

As npredtorch said, probably removed. Google is usually fast with this and I've seen shady/scam apps removed from the google play store in a matter of hours.

[1] Great app, recommended. Personally, use the premium version.
[2] These are extensions that instead of helping you check items and trade easier, they'll hack your account and either trade your items away or spam your friends profile with malware.

~Zapo

So I recently merited this post . With 1 merit (or so I thought )

Since I was on mobile for that time, and chrome has a feature where if you pull down on the screen while on a webpage, the webpage will refresh. When I accidentally did this, my page refreshed and the poster received 2 merits, not 1.

Is there a possible fix for this? Is it a forum wide problem or just my phone?

~Zapo

G2A, Kinguin and other major reseller are absolute trash and they are allowing users to scam while taking a fee themselves.

In 2017, a lot of YouTubers and previous partners from G2A left G2A due to this...

This is better to explain with an example, so here we go.

Jimmy has just bought 100 stolen credit cards with 20,000 USD each in them for 20,000. But the problem is, the money inside the credit cards are "dirty" which means if he just transferred it into his bank account, he would be easily be caught. So Jimmy does this: Currently, there is a sale for an indie game "The crypto game". Its price is 50 dollars for a copy, and Jimmy then buys 4000 of these copies with this stolen credit cards. He then goes on a key seller site, G2A or the smaller site, kinguin and then sells it for a steal! Just 20 dollars a copy. G2A facilities of all this and they don't care what is being done on their platform. The most they do is banning the account and taking whatever remaining money is left in the account. Then eventually when the people with the stolen credit cards finally see their money gone, they put in a request and eventually get refunded. The indie devs are then forced to give back a lot of profits and are hit with a couple dollars chargeback fee, so they don't just lose a bunch of sales, they also lose money.

Due to G2A's carelessness and obliviousness, they are allowing these thieves to abuse their platform and they are also taking a cut of their dark money [1] and laundering the dirty money for the criminals.

Also, you might say "Just deactivate the stolen keys", but for small devs or companies they don't have the resources and there would be too much public outcry.[2]

[1] G2A charges a fee with G2A shield which is buyer protection (similar to ebay's protection) but they charge a fee for it, or they won't replace a broken key.

[2] This happened when EA killed a couple thousand keys of Battlefront 2 that were purchased by illegal credit cards and faced a fuck-ton of rage.

You can buy keys with BTC and then sell them to refill your wallet or find a seller via the forums.

Sorry for the mini rant.  

~Zapo

Take a look here -  ANN [Pre-Sale]Digitize:A Native Token Digitizing Loose Change for Cryptocurrency

If you take a look after the 2-3 page, the ICO bumping isn't that obvious as the other one's but it's mostly low-level accounts (a lot of newbies with 2-3 posts) posting a useless comment.

Maybe nuke all of the new accounts? I'd say its one guy making accounts every day and posting a comment on the ann.

~Zapo

Shifty Name : ✓
Broken English: ✓
Fake screenshots: ✓
No knowledge of hacking: ✓

Move along people, another salty gambler who's lost his weekly paycheck and is now salty.

FortuneJack does have some withdrawal issues, but they all get eventually solved and that's only when users win a substantial amount of money, so it is far for them to do KYC and checks in case the gambler is a cheater. Usually never happens 99% of the time and users get their money within the hour.

You can even use the typical argument of "FortuneJack Shills" because your argument is so stupid and the "shills" are making sense, especially Hhampuz.

~Zapo

Forum already seems slow to me when loading images, don't think loading a shit ton of data with 0.01 merits is a good idea for the forum.

Love the suggestions though, fun to ponder.

~Zapo

300% ROI is all that is needed.

No sane person would triple one's money and take some small profits. I'm surprised they haven't ran yet, with all the fud that's being spread about them. Maybe they enjoy the publicity.

I also don't think they've raised as much as they have said they are, and they have a lot of shills on their Telegram chat. They'll probably run in 1-3 months.

~Zapo

I think this goes against the terms and service of any website that'll need ID verification. Hell, this might even been illegal.

I don't understand why you can't verify your account yourself, unless you are going to do something scammy and then run, then the person who submitted the ID would be tracked down, while you run with your money.

This seems extremely shady and I would not recommend users selling their IDs for a mere 15 bucks.

~Zapo