If we're going to have a newbie jail with merit I believe it would be better to have a limit based on 'receive merit by x people' instead of just 'receive x merit'.

Yes, exactly!
Yes, there could be exceptions for certain boards.

Anyone here with more technical knowledge and insight that could be able to speculate as to whether those spamming efforts might be automated?
My feeling is that it might be a possibility. It seems to me like threads will shoot back up at the top as soon as they leave the front page and it feels like this is done in automation.

I know that there are limitation in place already like a time limit. But the time limit can't exactly help in posting not being automated... Currently those accounts are being created and start posting faster than the mods can purge them. When spam responses to each spam-promoted thread are shy of 500 per day it would be hard for a handful of humans to keep deleting accounts and moreover pointless if the spammers can utilize newly created accounts.

My suggestions for the simpler solutions I can come up with:
1. Remove pumping powers from new accounts.
2. Implement reCaptcha for each post to new accounts posting in frequently spammed sub-forums.

#1 Would no longer allow spammers to use new accounts for their effors. Anyone would be able to post anything but it wouldn't have any value in 'bumping'
#2 Would make it harder to automate posting. I can't be sure if anyone has managed to automate posting on bitcointalk but it would be a countermeasure for reassurance.

God dammit, the example thread I had provided in the OP (now trashed) has been re-posted and is again being spammed. Those spammers are persistent. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4468662.0

Look at this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438289.3780

Filled with 'joined' posts by new accounts. Those posts make no sense and aren't serving as proof for any part of the campaign, they're clrearly using them as a distraction to keep bumping the thread. 190+ pages of spam in 5 days...

Edit: Another bounty that seems to be doing the same
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4418531.2480

Edit2:
Announcement thread that appears to be utilizing spam bumping

Lots of one liners from new accounts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3213051.2360

I hope Theymos has seen the idea about removing 'bump powers' of low ranking members. I think it's a good solution that should be given some consideration.

It appears as though certain people have figured out how to game the system in bitcointalk. Low activity accounts are utilized to keep bumping threads with no limits and thus keeping many topics at the top with fake activity.

I had once observed that were being used to bump a thread promoting a phishing website were old account that had potentially been hacked. Here's that thread in question archived. As you can see, many of those accounts were created in 2015/2016 and have now been banned.

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But this is also going on with newly created accounts. There are countless examples, sadly. I don't have examples to document every single one but for the purposes of this thread I'll be looking into one.
【ANN】  ETHEREUM VERGE 【ICO】【PRE-SALE】

Of notice:
Topic created by a new account.
Posted on June 11th
Already has around 50 pages of responses

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Now let's see how the accounts responding to this thread look like. I will only be looking at 5 of them:

Name:    billybigblocks
Posts:    8
Activity:   8
Merit:   0
Position:    Newbie
Date Registered:    14-03-2018, 10:13:15

Name:    Lifehackersumit
Posts:    7
Activity:   7
Merit:   0
Position:    Newbie
Date Registered:    13-04-2018, 11:56:17

Name:    Estelle002
Posts:    3
Activity:   3
Merit:   0
Position:    Newbie
Date Registered:    03-05-2018, 08:49:10

Name:    CuongNguyen181196
Posts:    2
Activity:   2
Merit:   0
Position:    Newbie
Date Registered:    29-05-2018, 07:53:14

Name:    Noumanfiaz
Posts:    14
Activity:   14
Merit:   0
Position:    Newbie
Date Registered:    31-01-2018, 22:04:44

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If you look into the profiles of those accounts, you'll see that almost all of their responses are incoherent, short oneliners that would fit in the context of almost any thread. Here's just one example. It appears as though many of those accounts were created specifically for the purpose of spam-bumpint to promote threads.

The example account I provided above has already responded to 3 threads with nonsensical messages, all of them under the token section. Links to those responses in the threads:


Links to the other two threads:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3595870.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4418531.0

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This was as far as my documentation on the mater goes. Below you'll find my opinion on must be done.

I believe that this is a serious issue and that measures should be put in place to counter and discourage spam
Some thoughts on what could be done:

1. We start reporting threads to mods (Short term solution)
More recently I've started looking for spammy threads to report them. If more people would do this mods would be able to notice such cases more easily, delete the threads and purge the spammy accounts. But mods are already overwhelmed and removal isn't instant. This really doesn't solve the problem.

2. Limiting new accounts
Back in the day, bitcointalk was enforcing a newbie jail. New accounts would have to reach a post threshold to be able to post outside of it. This was until 2013 I think, but after the explosion of crypto's popularity it became increasingly hard to moderate such section and it was ultimately disabled.

But now with the explosion of ICOs, there is a lot of demand to project onto bitcointalk. The forum's inability to handle spam has results to many new projects utilizing blackhat solutions for promotion on bitcointalk, as it is one of the biggest hubs for cryptocurrency related discussion. An easy solution I could imagine would be to disable bumping from accounts below the Jr. Member rank. They would be able to respond but it wouldn't shoot the thread to the top. This way providing a powerful counter-incentive on creating new accounts to spam-bump. It would also limit the pool of accounts mods would have to get around banning.

3. Expanding on and improving Theymos' 'points of evil' system
I don't know how theymos would be able to achieve this, but potentially he could lend a hand with some hours and the experience of the epochtalk team?

On another note, I don't think that outright deleting threads is a good response to spam-bumps. This leaves open the possibility of competitors purposefully targeting a thread with spam to take it down. Moreover, legitimate responses to the thread also are deducted from the post count of those that made them, which is unfair towards quality forum members.

I wonder if the notion of AI was the same 10 years ago or more. For example, would a chatbot be considered AI in the 1970's? These days around it would be mocked as an 'IF' statement.

When 'Neural Networks' weren't invented yet, what was considered AI? I don't remember the term being used as much as it has been lately, maybe it's because the press perceives recent developments with related technologies a breakthrough though. I wonder to what extent such notion would be true.

Coinbase recently acquired Paradex. Paradex was planning to build an exchange for achieving, in their own words: "Exchange ERC20 tokens using your own wallet". Now that Coinbase bought it, they ceased public opperations but likely Coinbase will be utilizing some of their tech in the near future, either in the background or not. Who knows.

I think that large stakeholders would be better off getting an OTC deal with an exchange so they can get FIAT for their coin. Why would anyone trust OP?

Metahash bounty will be paying in ETH, check it out.

There's no such thing as a no brainer investment. Especially by a newbie posting such content for the first time in his account. This is clearly an ad. 

If there's not much capital bounty campaigns are a perfectly viable option to invest your time in. Many projects have a good potential and really end up paying well for the participants. The thing is that actually picking up good projects might be a little hard.

I like where this is going.

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Announcement Thread

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This is something the staff of the forum would have to take very seriously.

It's grossly abused and it doesn't even make sense for a bounty manager to have in thread verifications. They just make his work harder. Threads should be for discussion...

Most bounty campaign managers these days use this to bump their thread with mane using automated responses even. I am speaking from experience.

Really though, people shouldn't be paying all that much attention to market capitalizations of cryptocurrencies. The liquidity isn't that great outside of the top 10 or perhaps even top 5 currencies and among those there even are exceptions. Further, the volatility is just too big for the market cap to be a reliable metric.

There's an army of shills with a vested interest in Verge. Could be alts of the developers, bag holders or even 'traders' that bought at the top. No wonder people are defending Verge when it's in the interest to let off their bags to others.

The bottom line is that anyone who tried to sideline from the facts proving that Verge is an utter disaster of a project is trying to mislead people. It should be spelled out loud and clear that

VERGE is a scam! It should be dumped by everyone as it truly holds no value or integrity in its technology. The development team has managed to pump it's price and sell the "news" for it several times but this time they're trully caught on their fraud. Any coin that's susceptible to 51% attacks or even hacks such as verge was isn't worth much.

This is most likely the equivalent of a clickfarm doing bounties. Don't get me wrong here, but it's part of the reason that decentralized checking for bounties is lacking at. There's no way to detect abuse when it's coming from the same user or group when there's no centralized platform bounty hunters have to go through.

What figures? It seems rather that it's dying. Maduro doesn't speak about it anymore, the ICO keeps being a failre and Venezuala is still in deep crisis.

Latest news: India Refuses Oil Trade with Venezuela Using 'Petro' Cryptocurrency