In order for a thread to maintain a position on the first page of the altcoins/announcements subforum it needs a post every 10 minutes or less, something that seems unlikely for all but the most followed projects and/or ones undergoing some controversy. For a project too small to show up on CMC, however, the more likely explanation is the use of paid bumping. Previously I found plagiarism or duplicate posting (ie - when someone writes the exact same response in several thread) to be most common, but the last few days I have noticed a new technique which appears to be a fake conversation. That is to say, two or more people seem to be having a conversation because they are asking/answering a series of questions between them, but this conversation does not seem to be authentic as it is strictly about generalities and often times doesn't even make sense.

Unfortunately, this behavior (absent plagiarism or duplicate posting) does not seem to be excluded by the (un)official rules hence I thought I'd present my evidence here and get a discussion going on how to address this going forward. Below are a few threads whose conversations seem fake and the users who appear to be involved based on posting more than two generic questions or answers to the thread:


The first two examples - EvenCoin and SafeInsure - seem to be employing the same group of people: BTCFaucets, CoinNextE, amanai, bitokman, guarino, 12coins, SamuelN, peetah, Tiny_Prism, boomertoo, kk777, Klacik.

The 3rd example - ATLANTICO - is run a little differently as it is less of a conversation and more just random postings (mostly from people on the sig campaigns for GigTricks and EraSwap): Justenjoy1903, Anya Doreen, Maryqueen Finez, HappyCaptain, imopogicute, 25espia1994, larry1994, clarise123, pogicute1234, 123pogi123, jackielim

I have already reported some of the users above for plagiarism or duplicate posting (though the latter is less clearly an infraction*) but if they haven't plagiarized or posted the same post to multiple threads I'm not sure what to do. A few months ago a similar situation occurred with the RoomDao ANN - discussed here Bumping RoomDao ICO ANN - and that thread was nuked by mprep, but some people argued that bad actors or competitors could report threads for paid bumping to get them nuked for their own benefit. I dunno about that - "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" springs to mind.


EDIT - got clarification that duplicating one's own posts is treated the same as plagiarism by hilariousandco:

I don't know about perma ban, but temp ban should be for sure. Threads for these types of posts aren't really required. One or two reports should be enough(ask the mod to check post history and explain it clearly what the guy is doing in the report paragraph).

It's a permaban. This is no different than copying someone else's post and if you do this then you have absolutely no intention of contributing here and you're 100% only doing it to farm your account and/or bleed bounties whilst putting in no effort at all. It's scumbags like these that are destroying the forum. If they're too lazy to actually make posts then don't bother.

...please make sure their post history is not filled with 1-2 line replies in spam megathreads (or bounty reports, of course).

For example, Delphinus awarded crocus a merit point to get him out of newbie hell after reviewing his post history:

Here you go. I've gone through your post history. You're posts aren't perfect, but it's pretty clear you're a real account with a long post history of on-topic comments.
Definitely deserve to be a jr. member 

Wow I've got merit thanks sir for checking my post history, I will post more quality post to have a great and helpful community.

While crocus can string together words into an intelligible sentence or two, most, if not all, of his/her replies are merely rehashing what a thousand other people (or bots) have said on the hundreds of other pages in these spam megathreads.

See complete ANN thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5018388.0

Relevant excerpt from said ANN:

...
Our Hettarer,  first conceived in Japan, makes use of conductive paper that collects charged particles from electric currents occurring naturally from the air as well as the device. By simply sticking the HETTARER sticker on the back of your phone, it improves the overall battery performance by 20-40 per cent. HETTARER not only improves battery performance, it also lowers the high frequency of electric devices by 90%! So it will greatly increase Crypto-mining efficiency if it is sticked on Crypto-mining rigs!
...

I'm an EE - specializing in power conversion, no less - and this is flat out impossible/bogus/a scam.

A thread on my watchlist popped-up with a new post, but the post was from someone I had put on ignore, which I found a bit annoying. Nothing worth breaking out the pitchforks and Molotov cocktails, mind you, but it is illogical for someone you want to ignore to still be able to get your attention, albeit indirectly.

[increases your income exponentially]

...I thought I'd post about it here first, because I usually just report plagiarism and the more egregious spammers/shitposters and wanted to get the opinion of the more seasoned members here on whether this should be filed under: "distasteful, but tolerable" or "insta-ban"?

So the thread in question: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2460570.0

And a quote from the thread for those too lazy to click on it (like I normally am, hence my accommodation here):

...
Unlike of other lending programs you can lend not only USD, but EUR, BTC, ETH and LTC in Mercury Global lending platform. You will receive up to 1.15% daily return during every 300 days in each of these cryptocurrencies. Reinvestments increases your income exponentially. Compound calculator http://compoundaily.com. Lending of eCurrency (ECR) also will be soon.
...

So, basically promising an outrageous 300% return IF you keep your "investment" locked up for 300 days. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Yesterday I reported a post in the altcoins announcement subform for plagiarism because of a curious phrase that seemed familiar - "mining and swimming pool" - and a google site search did, indeed, turn up a whole bunch of posts that were identical... 110, to be exact. I explained in the comment to use google site search of the key phrase to find the other offenders and it looked like the post I reported was deleted (though today there are now 118 posts with that same phrase, so clearly that bot has not been deterred).

This morning I spotted another blatant bit of plagiarism in the same thread and when I went to report that post I saw my accuracy had declined from 95% to 92%!? So my accuracy went DOWN after reporting PLAGIARISM... WTF, mods? I gave you 110 identical posts for free and my thanks is a ding to my reporting accuracy? I would be much less upset if this was from reporting spam or shitposting, but plagiarism is a clear cut, unambiguous violation of the rules which is supposed to result in a permaban. Plagiarism also takes more work to hunt down and verify for those making the report, so it's even more demotivating when such a report is ignored, much less tossed out.

Frankly, with the amount of shitposting and plagiarism that persists despite 3+ months of the merit system the mods could use all the help they can get from those members who care enough to report posts in the first place. Don't demotivate us into giving up, as I have seen @Jet Cash lament most recently.

I can't find any description of how to do this on the hashrefinery website and there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support thread for this pool here. Is it the usual <BTC address>.<workername> or something else?

I have a lone GTX 1080 FE that I've been playing around with and I am having a really tough time zeroing in on optimization for Neoscrypt. I've found the best mining program for it so far - hsrminer, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2565979.0 - but tinkering with clock rate and memory and power limit (haven't yet resorted to voltage adjustments) isn't changing things much. Right now I am getting around 1200 kH/s (or is it 1.2 kH/s, as minethecoin insists?) with power limit at 85%, core clock at +150 (actual clock is bouncing around 1725 MHz) and mem clock at +300 (rock steady at 4811 MHz).

These are exactly the same settings I use for Equihash and my understanding is that Neoscrypt can be pushed quite a bit harder... am I far off base here or doing pretty good?

My current cable modem is a Motorola (now Arris) SB6121 and it had been working very well for 2 years, but so far this week it has locked up on me 3 times (and two of those times were about 1 hour after I went to sleep, of course) so it is clearly on its way out. I should note that I bought the SB6121 because my previous modem needed to be rebooted on a daily basis.

My ISP will supply a cable modem for "free"* but those modems are always 10+ years old and suck so I am buying a new one.

My top pick right now is an Arris SB6183, but I am definitely open to other suggestions. I may replace the router, too, as the once luxurious seeming 4 wired ethernet ports on it now feels a little cramped.


* - except they raised the price of internet service by $10/mo. when they bought out my old ISP, so not really free...

I'm having massive issues trying to access my web wallet, and the login for it is beyond stupid, anyway. You have to enter a username/password and pass the infernal (and totally useless, because hacked) reCaptcha just to then have to go through reCaptcha again to enter a 6 digit Google 2FA code. Why not ditch the reCaptcha which everyone hates and just use a password and 2FA?

Anyway, it seems the devs know there is some issue with accessing the web wallet and one is encouraged to send them an email about it. See the below reddit post for more details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BytecoinBCN/comments/7mldac/mobileweb_wallet_issue_let_us_know_if_you_have/

Is there an actual schematic for a PCI-e riser floating around somewhere? My Google-Fu is failing me at the moment... I am contemplating making my own (yes, I realize this is a dubious venture).

I am having no luck running GPU-Z on my Windows 10 (Home) machine. When I double click on it I see the blue swirly for about 1 second then nothing. Running the program compatibility troubleshooter suggests Win 7 mode, but that doesn't work either and when I tell it that it just says the program is incompatible, so sorry.

I haven't really found any other complaints about this so I'm guessing this is just a quirk of my setup, but damned if I know what. Anyone else having this problem (and even better - anyone else have a solution?  )

I just snagged one of these "on sale"* from Best Buy and popped it into my old desktop with Win 7 installed. Bone stock it was doing about 21.6 MH/s mining Ubiq (using ethminer 0.12.0) which seemed to be way, way less than what I've seen others report for various RX 570 cards.

Then I realized that Compute mode isn't available in Win 7 so I swapped it with the GTX 1050 Ti installed in my newer Win 10 desktop and put the GTX 1050 Ti in the Win 7 machine. After the laborious process of uninstalling and reinstalling the relevant drivers and such on each machine, I was once again getting 21.6 MH/s on the RX 570 before Compute mode was enabled; afterwards, my hashrate increased to 22 MH/s, so not exactly a thundering improvement. I then loaded up MSI Afterburner and increased the memory clock from 1750 to 1900 and that gets me to 23.2 MH/s, but at 375W total at the wall; cutting the power by 15% didn't affect the mining speed at all but dropped the draw to 345W or so (hmmm... just 8%...).

At any rate, I was thinking I'd be cruising at something like 28 MH/s with this card, and while 23 MH/s is a sight better than what the poor GTX 1050 Ti could do (13.4 MH/s), it's still somewhat disappointing. So what are other people getting with this card and what sort of O/C seems stable? Also, is there any advantage doing the BIOS mod now that the official AMD drivers have Compute mode?




* - I say "on sale" because while the "not on sale price" was $250US, MSRP is supposed to be under $200US...

I seem to be getting a lot of "Stratum_recv_line failed" errors and outright disconnects from the pool with both Vertminer and CCMiner-x64, and this is happening on several different pools. Since I am getting a slightly better hashrate with Vertminer I am using it for now, and the only command line switches I am using (besides the necessary ones to specify url:port and address) are "-D" for debug mode and "-r 3" to limit the number of retries in the event of failure.

I am trying to stick to Network 2 where possible since I am using my existing hardware to just try this mining stuff out and it isn't exactly ideal for the task (a GTX 1050 Ti) but at least when mining Ubiq for 1 week I received a little over 2.5 coins; at the rate things are going with VTC I can expect 1 coin in 2 weeks, maybe.