Seems like the normal shit that happens mostly in spam megathreads. Every single Junior account owner, involved in a bounty, finds it to be an opportunity for them to increase their posts for the week when they see a thread like that. That mostly happens in Bitcoin Discussion, Economics and Altcoin Discussion boards, though other boards are hit by this wave too but not this much.


Before, when an account only needed activity points to rank up, people used to create many accounts in order to farm then to a higher rank and then sell them all to earn Bitcoins, but now when they need Merit to rank up, they simply create multiple accounts and join bounty campaigns with all of them to scrap tokens.

Turns out, he has actually scrapped that table from:

• [LOG] The ranked up members - Congratulations!

Here is the original:


He scrapped the table, removed satoshi but forgot to re-arrange the numbers.  

Edit: Does OP deserve a report for plagiarism? 

Looking at the past experiences of mine, one thing comes to my mind that every newbie should know and should avoid doing:

Never get into trading, if you don't really know what you are doing. Most of the times, people think that it is very easy - you go in with some money and come out with profits once the market goes up. No! It is not that easy as it seems. The people that are earning profits out of trading everyday, every week or every month are the ones who understand the market very well. Just having an initial investment and a little bit of knowledge of how trading works isn't enough to turn your $100 into $1000, unless you are extremely lucky, but not everyone is so lucky. So, if you don't want to lose your money, then just don't do it until you learn the way of doing it. Greed is usually what compels us to do things that we are not supposed to do, gambling and trading are two appropriate examples of that, though quite different in nature because gambling is based solely on luck, while trading requires knowledge and experience along with some luck, but the cost can be the same for both of them if we think we can pull it off because we have greed in our mind, we are doing a mistake.

So true!
I actually opened that link to see if there is actually something in it. So stupid!  


Doesn't a thread get hidden if you ignore the person who has started it? If not, that is how it should be. If you ignore the user that has started a topic, the entire topic should be hidden for you because you don't want to see that guy and his posts anymore. It would make no sense if the thread still shows up even if you have the creator on ignore. Let me know if someone have tried this. I didn't, yet.

I like your ideas, by the way.


A ban might not be appropriate, but closing the signature space for a week or two for a lot of your posts getting deleted in a short period of time sounds like a good idea to me. People should keep reporting, and the mods should keep deleting and the automation will keep closing the signature spaces thus reducing the bounty spammers. But again, I don't get tired saying this: We need more mods!


It has already been thought over, and not implemented because such a thing can be used negatively by the spammers as well. Now you can't only let genuine users use this feature. So, what if a spammer teams up with some other spammers and plans to get me banned for a week, because I have done something that harmed him, by charging one of my posts? How would you counter such problems?


No board is better, when counted for spam, but Bitcoin Discussion is one of the most important boards (or used to be) of the forum, and that is the reason why we are discussing that. Otherwise, pick up any board and you will find hundreds or such spamming routines going on every day in each one of them.


A deleted post is a deleted post, no matter if it has been deleted by a mod or the user himself. So the merits associated to that post would get removed if the post is removed, meaning no one can delete the posts only to hide the abuse if the merits would also vanish along with the post. It would make no sense to merit your alt and delete the post if the merits are being removed too with that. But I think this has already been discussed before, and wasn't approved, either by the community or by theymos, I don't really remember that.

Though I have reported him yesterday for plagiarizing, but I'm still not sure if he is banned or not yet. There should actually be something to show if a person is banned or not if you open their profile. theymos should definitely implement this thing.


He got that Merit in this post:



which I have archived here, yesterday (before he could delete all of them), as a proof for plagiarism. Though he had deleted all his posts, but the Merit he received would remain as one will still have the Merits given to him even if the post/thread he got them from gets deleted.

Would be very much useful if we could get notified by PM including a link to the post where we were mentioned/quoted, without having to open another thread to see the notifications.
Isn't it possible to use a higher ranked account and ask a mod to whitelist it so that it doesn't need to wait to send PMs? Mods can do that, don't they?

Not a good idea. It would take forever for that to get implemented considering no one would agree for it.

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A little tip for you: Putting a P.S at the end of every post doesn't really make it constructive. People only do that when it is needed, but your post history tells that you have made that to be your signature note. Concentrate on the quality of what you write, without adding anything extra to make it look better. And, you are clearly here for bounty hunting, which I could see in your post history, so maybe you should avoid trying to be concerned about the forum.


When fire would no longer be hot, and ice would burn you if you touch it.
They don't even respect the place that fills their pockets. They eat and shit in the same plate, kind of.


I'm regularly visiting the board only to see if there is something that I can read, and all I get is disappointment. I think yesterday, I saw a thread started by JC, discussing about the effects of different things on the price of Bitcoin in coming time, and I really enjoyed reading some of the posts in that thread, although I couldn't post anything there for not being so knowledgeable about some of the terms used in there. But what I saw that could have been better was that there were spammers involved in that discussion, and I just thought that maybe if the thread was self-moderated, we would not have to see those replies.


I never said that every newbie is a spammer, although I say this every time that the amount of spam we see comes mostly from lower ranked accounts, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any constructive or good posters in those ranks, but it is very rare to find them now a days.

Donate 50 Bitcoins or so if you want to have the freedom to do it yourself every time, or request theymos to do it free for you. I'm not sure if he does it for everyone or just for the ones who are trusted in the forum.

And, you could find the answer to this by simply searching about it in either the forum search section or in Google. Try doing that in future to avoid creating repetitive threads.

Misuse of resources is what some humans do which they shouldn't. Now, just because it is not prohibited to have multiple accounts, it doesn't mean a person should start farming them for negative purposes and have a gigantic list of usernames and passwords saved in a text file on their computers or noted down on papers and kept in a safe like money. There are no official rules against having multiple accounts because people might as well need one more account for, as you said, another reason for which they cannot use their existing account for some reason. In such cases, you should create another account, but that is not what people do - and that is the reason why having multiple accounts is discouraged, though allowed.

He is so stupid that he copied the article completely and didn't even remove the lines that are for the readers on the website, examples:

---

1. Another article suggestion for readers of that article, in the post:



Original:

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2. The text behind the image^[1], in the post:



Original:

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3. The tagline of the image, in the post:



Original:

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It's not like he wouldn't get caught if he had removed all these, but still, you need a brain even for plagiarizing.

I have reported him to moderator, in case you didn't.

Archived the thread for future reference: http://archive.fo/jhvyd

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^[1] A property of HTML, called "title" is used to give a title to an image used in a HTML page, which is printed if you copy and paste the image from that page to somewhere else. Try selecting the image in this article, and paste it in Notepad. The text you will see there will be: Kim Kardashian Receives Her First Bitcoin.

No, the problem is in the starting of those discussions, or in the titles of them. Just read all the titles in that snap and you can have an idea that almost all of them, except for one or two, are useless discussions, no matter how many or less replies they have got until now. Those threads with less replies but with useless titles or starting posts are going to reach the same position very soon.


I think they do, but spammers beat them by 10-100. They delete 10 posts, and meanwhile, there are literally 100 or more replies posted. They would absolutely get helpless in such situations. We need more mods for every section that is extremely congested, like Bitcoin Discussion or Altcoin Discussion and some more.


It's not true that no one cares about all this, nor the fact that everyone is accustomed to this is right. It burns us like hell to see all this happening, but all we can do is to suggest things to prevent this from happening, and that is what we do. It is the decision of theymos (he's the Administrator, if you don't know) to implement something, and no one can really force him to do that unless he thinks/decides that something is right to be done.


Although it has become a custom to have multiple accounts to earn money now a days, but having more than one account is not actually a bad thing at the first place, as long as they are not being used negatively. I would not blame someone to be bad only for having two accounts unless I find them using any one of them in something that is bad for the forum.

I didn't mean anything like that by asking that question. I just thought that maybe he has mistakenly exchanged the pictures of both projects since he is managing both of them.


Received my payment. Thanks Zapo.


Isn't it the quality that actually matters? I mean, Chipmixer is the top running signature campaign in the forum right now, and that is not only because of their high payments, but they are also known for the quality their participants generate every week. It should not be a problem if a participant does not reach the maximum post threshold, as long as their post quality is good enough, and I really don't rush towards reaching my post threshold, but I just try to only post when I know there is something constructive I can write.
I'm not saying that I'm offended by this, but I would be more happy if I'm judged by the quality of my posts, but not by the quantity of them, unless I don't reach the minimum required or make very much less. 28/30 aren't really that far, IMO.
I'm sorry if it sounds rude. That's not what I intend to do here.

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It seems that he had received 50 Merits a day after the implementation of the Merit System, from trollercoaster for this post that got deleted later on. Maybe a mod or an admin can check what the post was.

Some read the title, and some only read the last few replies of that thread and starting posting according to them, without even reading the OP.
A spammer is just like a child who only does what others are doing, with no further thinking of whether it is right or wrong, or whether it should be done or not.


It has. "Bitcoin Discussion" is not the only board that is flooded with spam every day, but it is one of the main boards of the forum and that is what takes my heart. Otherwise, there is more than enough spam in every single section of the forum that needs not be there.


They require a place to spill their shit, and they don't really find it here in Meta and that's the actual reason why we don't see a lot of spammers in our threads in this board. If someone starts a useless thread here, it gets reported if it does not belong here, but in Bitcoin Discussion section a spammer starts a topic which actually is a discussion but isn't constructive or is repeated several times already, so it would remain there and becomes the place for other spammers to fulfill their needs.


That's insane!
I wonder what would be the results of the same analysis in Altcoin Discussion board knowing it is the most crowded board by replies/posts right now.

Faucets are not gonna earn you anything unless you manage to get some 20k or more referrals somehow. For every claim of your referrals, you get 50% of the amount or 100% in some cases, which may bring you a few dollars every week but that would still not be worth the time you will need to spend on accumulating the referrals.
Since I have been a user of faucets once, I would definitely not recommend using them for a long time. You may use them only to have a little experience while you are learning about Bitcoin or something, but never keep in your mind that you will earn money through faucets. The ones who earn money by faucets are their owners who earn them by the advertisements they put up on their sites.

"403 Forbidden"

That's what it says when I open it.
Does that mean this?

I must have missed your thread. That initiative is exactly what I suggested here as well. I, too, believe that we can still recover some boards if all of us start taking part in them and don't just sit and watch. I agree with everyone saying that the spammers are too many in quantity and they won't let us succeed in this, but that should not be a reason for us to not do anything for it. You can't win a fight if you don't even fight, no matter how hard it is.


I believe a member, who comes here not for spamming and knows what constructiveness is, can easily earn 10 Merits and then become able to wear signatures and not suffer at all. There aren't really a lot of them to be honest, maybe 5% out of 100%, and we should not leave the remaining 95% untouched only because it might affect the 5% a little. That would be unfair to the community itself.
Removing signatures for lower ranks would only reduce spam, but theymos already said that he wouldn't do it.

Is the team for both BQT and IOU projects the same? Because the pics you have posted are the one's from the team of BQT as it seems.

Though its a shame, but the amount of spam generated on the forum comes mostly from our ranks (Newbie, Jr. member, Member). Hence, I cannot suggest disabling signatures for any higher rank but nor I would lay my weapon down if someone tries to attack me only because I belong to a cast that is nasty as shit.


I too have said the same things in past, but just a bit differently. I said, that campaigns should be forced to either accept users above Jr. member rank, or only select the users that are at least mildly constructive. A campaign, if found accepting users that are extreme shitposters, should be punished by either locking down their thread or something like that.


I agree that no board is less in terms of spam posts these days, but "Bitcoin Discussion" is the only board that comes to your mind when you hear the term "Bitcointalk", and it deserves to be clean, and if it cannot be cleaned, it should at least have some quality topics, in self-moderated mode where constructive posters can come and have a good discussion for the day.


How is this similar to the spam? 
Its not the same topic that is repeated, like how spammers do. Every person, who condemns the act of spamming tries to bring up something that needs to be done to tackle it, and as long as the spammers exist, these anti-spam posts would keep coming.


I don't think it is useless as long as the creator of that topic takes this responsibility to keep the thread clean from spam and spammers, and that is what I want to see. Besides, I think every single person, who comes to the forum everyday with positive energy to have some good discussions and read some good posts would surely open up a thread in that section if the creator of that thread is someone who is known in the forum to be among the good ones here.

That's exactly what happens there. A day before, I visited that board and posted on a topic that was almost newly started and didn't have a lot of replies, and I thought it kind of deserves to post something on it and I did it, but what I found today is that topic has grown to 5 to 6 pages already, in a single day, and all you can find there are useless replies from extremely useless spammers. Now, who would open every single page of such a thread to see if there is a post worth reading?


That's what I suggested. Self-moderated threads can have a very big effect on the quality of that board. People starting useful discussions making the threads self-moderated to clean the incoming spam can give us some hope.


I don't completely agree with that since I'm a Member, and I believe I deserve to wear a signature because I have earned my position. I was a Newbie when Merit system was introduced, and I reached this rank because, I think, I have been contributing something to every discussion that I have been a part of. Removing signatures for Jr. members can do the work because they cannot reach Member rank without earning Merits, and if someone can manage to earn at least 10 Merits, I believe they deserve to have the right to wear a signature.

The quality is dropped because we have stopped trying to get our hands in there anymore. Starting useful and constructive discussions in moderated mode can still show up some quality discussions in that board but only if we try.
And, of course, not every single person, wearing a paid signature, is a spammer. I'm wearing one too, and I can totally speak out about me not being a spammer.


Appreciate that! We need more people doing the same, and along with reporting, you should also think of initiating some discussions that can catch attention of some of the good posters and hopefully we will see some quality in that board again, soon. Just make the threads moderated to not let spammers get in.