Well, my shift of reporting starts soon, and I've just taken a quick look, and have already found several threads with the same bullshit as always. I think a general observation I've made is that threads which have "free" or "airdrop" in the title generate a lot more of these sort of replies.

Update: 7 of 7 threads I'm now actively reporting in have had at least 5 shitposts.

I missed predicting any results today due to having some internet problems at home. Fortunately, I predicted the correct score for Senegal, and hopefully that's at least saved me a little bit.

Senegal are currently my underdogs of the tournament as they have some real players in the team.

If this forum ever does turn into Facebook/Reddit, then likes/upvotes should without a doubt not contribute towards ranking up. Personally, I can see the appeal of the like system, but honestly I don't think it's needed.

These questions are specifically for the Beginners, and help section. If they are "elementary" questions then that's where they belong. So something like "what is mining" gets asked semi frequently, and would belong in Beginners, and help.

Theoretically you could report thousands of these posts a day if you had enough time, and willpower. It's already started to effect my browsing of the forum, and a few others things I would like to be doing, but it just needs to be done. I'm hoping that the community can pull together, and start reporting more collectively.
 
I don't know how many times I've reported pages worth of posts, and then within an hour they've already added another 5 pages of spam onto the thread. I constantly ask myself the question whether I'm helping the moderators or if I'm just annoying them with the reports.

If you mean making it public how much sMerit a user has then I would have to disagree with you on that. There's two main reasons why I would be against this. Firstly, anyone who has sMerit which hasn't been sent yet would likely be targeted by merit hunters, and be sent messages begging them for merit. Just as we see certain users sending messages to merit sources begging for merit.

Secondly, in would add unwarranted pressure on those that haven't found any posts to merit yet. I would rather someone take their time in merited quality posts instead of meriting any post that they come across. This is one of the reasons why I'm against decaying merit also. It just isn't needed, and users shouldn't be forced into meriting if they don't want too.

There's already a message stating that hoarding sMerit has no real benefit, and I think that should be enough.

Were you offering an incentive for users to post there? For example, offering them bonus stakes if they posted in the thread. That's generally the reason why announcement topics get removed completely. It doesn't matter if you ask them to only post quality responses either.

It wouldn't matter if 1000 users reported the thread if it wasn't breaking one of the rules. There's almost certainly an answer for it being deleted multiple times.

To be fair your merit received is a little inflated due to Searings merit on your post review thread so it would be a little unrealistic to expect 0.5-1 merit everyday. However, your post quality is damn decent, and I'm not disputing that you don't deserve more merit than you've rgot so far. New merit sources are the answer, but I feel the roadblock we are hitting is that potential good merit sources aren't gaining enough sMerit in order to demonstrate that they would be a good merit source. I do understand that theymos asked for applicants to list 10 posts, however that's not really a enough if you haven't merited a few other posts yourself.

Also, just because someone doesn't earn sMerit themselves doesn't mean they aren't going to be a good source. You could be really good at spotting others good post quality, but maybe they don't tend to post much themselves, and thus don't demonstrate their ability to pick out good posts.

Several sections are being neglected, but it's only natural that the main Bitcoin section is going to get the most exposure. Places like Bitcoin Discussion are going to be lost within the spam, and places like Mining only appeal to a certain few. However, having said that we should make it a priority for finding merit sources that are actively reading these sections, and can maybe demostrate that by including 5 posts per section in their application instead of 10 general posts. The altcoin section does have some decent content, but I can't really blame those who don't want to wade through the shit that's there.

It seems from the opinions within this thread, and others that I've observed merit distribution isn't exclusively the problem. There's certain sections which are overrun by the spammers which would likely be because of the moderation team is currently covering several sections of the forum, and as a result are spread thin. If the community as a whole started to report a little more then maybe we could reclaim Bitcoin Discussion, and other sections as well has having a few dedicated mods here, and there. Economics section doesn't seem to get that much merit apart from the Wall observer thread which I've seen some wasted merits on just memes, and pictures of unrelated stuff to the thread.

I think this is just because of the amount of spam that's in other sections. Plus, people seem to like giving out merit based on people who find scammers, abusers, and those who break rules. I can't say I'm against that, but a lot of users that post high quality content unrelated to these things are missing out. Especially when concerning users breaking the rules. They could just be reported. We've seen several members opening up topics reporting like 1-5 users, and they receive merit for it. I think this has subsided now due to the amount of people who started doing this.

I'm not entirely against this, but I do feel that moderation is separate to merit. At least currently due to the limited amount of sMerit which is available right now.

Yeah, but that was only natural as people didn't truly see the value of merits in the beginning. Plus, it was likely abused by a few individuals.

When you get home make sure to check if you've publicly sent an address, and sign a message with it following the instructions here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497545.0

Even though the password, and email has changed recently that's not enough evidence to support the claim. By following the above the admins can check everything, and verify it.

That's why I was careful on how I worded that. I believe that it prevents some bots, but obviously doesn't completely stop them.

If you don't log out often then you wouldn't. Plus, Captchas on Tor Browser can be a real pain for what ever reason. It only takes requesting a new tor circuit for the site, but that can take a few tries occasionally.

Yeah, but try, and disable captchas, and see how far up shit street we would be then. At least with the Captchas it requires time, and effort to do it. Maybe they have a way of paying for people to do the work for them like the old text captchas had, but it still requires an investment, and at least stops certain people from exploiting the forum.

Every post would be annoying for people on Tor connections think. But, adding the text captchas could be a good idea, and would at least require an investment from the people bumping. I know full well how bad the altcoin section is, and how over run it's getting, and often find myself spending way too much time trying to fight it. No doubt I'll continue doing so though

I'm not sure why you've put quotation marks around security feature, because that's exactly what it is. It prevents bots from registering, or logging in automatically, and spamming up the joint. Of course this only really prevents them.

Unfortunately, the way the forum is in its current state if we were to remove this security feature then we would have much more problems than we have with it now.

Sometimes compromises have to be made, and I would rather have to fill in a captcha than have to report more spam than there already is.

Maybe flagging posts to merit sources so they can merit it, especially since you might not have the merit yourself. However, there shouldn't be any reward for doing this. What this could possibly do though is highlight those that report good posts to merit sources as a potential merit source themselves. Might make it a little easier for theymos to determine good users for the job.

At the moment merit sources are picked based on their ability to reward merits. The problem with this is that a lot of users don't earn enough merit themselves to highlight this. You don't necessarily have to be a good poster yourself to determine what is a good post. You could apply for merit source anyway, and just show your ability with 10 posts quoted, but this likely isn't enough. There's definition a flaw in the merit selection process due to this fact, and is likely the reason why we haven't gotten that many more.

Gleb hasn't been proven to be lying, and hasn't proven to be protecting the buyer. It's all assumptions that are based off the evidence that we have. Plus, the only evidence we have it the personal message, and the password changes. There's also some 'evidence' that his posting habits changed, however that's purely subjective.

Depth 2 members or anyone for that matter isn't going to send a negative over to suchmoon just because he now has control of the account. He doesn't really even own it as they have said Gleb can have it back any time he wants. They are holding it so that the account isn't transferred to someone who would abuse the account.

Looks to me that suchmoon helped Bruno out. He's likely going through some hard times which resulted in this whole thing, and suchmoon showed empathy towards this, and wanted to make sure that the account didn't go into to someone else hands that would abuse it. He's also stated that he's not going to be using the account publicly so if it ever does make a post again then we can start having a discussion on why that's happened.

Admins can, however moderators can't. I'm not sure what forum you were moderator on, but it just seems an unnecessary privacy concern to allow all moderators to see IP addresses. If an IP address has to be taken in to account for any reason at all on a user then the moderators can just leave it for an admin to act upon it.

People make mistakes it's within our nature. Far too many people around here are to quick to judge, and react by tagging them. I respect Jet Cash for actually looking at the user account, and determining that it might not be worth ruining his reputation over.

Even high ranked members can make mistakes, and not be aware. If he doesn't learn from his mistakes then he'll likely be found out eventually, and can then be tagged. But, a one off in this scenario isn't that bad in my opinion.

Informing them via personal message that asking for merit is frowned upon would be the better option.

Maybe, Gleb thought he wouldn't be able to pay the loan. In this is right to assume at least he wasn't willing to borrow the money that he knew several members would be queuing up to give him, and then default on it.

At the end of the day we are talking about something which is highly subjective, and applying any kind of moderation to highly subjective issues never really works. If you don't think gambling is moral then don't visit that section. If you find the advertisements annoying then that's a personal issue. 

I'm not even a merit source, and have had people ask me to send them merits. I also think that merit applications should be done via personal messages rather than publicly. However, I think theymos specifically stated to post a thread within Meta to apply.

Strangely enough I've had 2 people in the last week message  me thanking me for sending merits. I had no idea people were this polite on this forum

Not completely. I would argue that ICOs contribute the most to spam, and that's not because of the bounties that they offer, but any investment opportunity get's a lot of hype because people are hoping that it will be the next Bitcoin where they can be early adopters, and earn a little bit of money.


Signature campaign mangers need to be looking at their participates, and only accepting those that are already making that amount of posts. It only makes sense to employ someone who is already making quality posts, and to the amount specified. Yet, they don't because they are lazy, and only care about their payment at the end of the day.

Replying in one of those threads isn't that bad, and I'm sure a lot more veteran members have fallen into the trap too. As long as it's a unique reply, and is adding something new to the thread then I don't see the problem with it. I can understand why signature campaigns rule them out, and rightly so in my opinion. But, that shouldn't stop you from replying to them if you would like to point something out to someone for an example.


Although, it's probably true that more reputable, and helpful members get genuine clicks or exposure than just the average Joe. I don't think they get more exposure than the users which are posting hundreds of posts per day. At the end of the day depending on what is being advertised people will click because the advert has got their attention, and not the individuals post.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in the problem we have today in were low quality members are hired because they bring the best bang for buck. Even if it's detrimental to the forum.

It could work. Although, a lot of people would likely argue that this isn't a guarentted payment, and therefore no one would go for it. However, let's be frank here they would as it's money at the end of the day. 1 Merit isn't going to be hard to earn every week, and I much prefer a system in which there's a on going requirement as opposed to the current system which is implemented that you need x amount over the initial ranks starting merit because all this system proves is that you've made good quality posts in the past, however you may not continue that once you've been hired on a signature campaign. Thus, an on going merit requirement is likely better.


This just isn't going to work. The merit requirement would have to be in conjunction with the existing requirements of post count. There just has to be a certain number of posts made to be beneficial to the advertisers. 1 post unfortunately isn't going to get enough exposure, and wouldn't be worth while to them.

I like the idea of an ongoing merit requirement just because it actually requires you to make good posts. I don't think 1 merit is high enough of a threshold to prove effective though.


The multi account rule is more than likely about morals rather than anything else. Enrolling alt accounts when it's specifically not allowed is just greedy. Signature campaigns can pay well, and I would imagine that there's several users exploiting this with multiple accounts. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain few signature/bounty managers are aware of it.


I think if theymos were to implement a feature where you could filter all replies on a thread by merit, and perhaps only show those that had been merited this might work. But, unfortunately more does mean more money. It's the way our brains work we are pattern recognizing machines, and if we continually see an advert then we will likely either be intrigued by it, remember it when your looking for that specific service or automatically ignore it.

Also, people still read the forum, and every reply in each thread.

The fact is that Bitcoin is actually worth something, but a lot of the ICO payments are made in stakes which the majority of the time result in you being paid pennies.

No this can be the correct section. The OP is looking to discuss the matter, and isn't looking for an input of staff members, but a discussion from the community. It can be in Serious Discussion.

I don't think so. A post doesn't have to be useful in order to receive merit. It doesn't even have to be that impressive either. Maybe I have lower standards than some of the merit sources, and yourself. But, any post which took time, effort, and was thought out is good enough for me to send it merit. It doesn't even have to be 100% right as long as it's on the right tracks. Even if someone is asking a question if it sparks off a thoughtful discussion then I might even send merit to them for that.

I'm not doing too well at the moment, but I haven't managed to do any of the bonus questions due to not being around to do it. Let's hope that my predictions get a tad better...