Some of these suggestions are similar to what the newbie jail was. Instead, of restrictions on where they can post you are limiting how many times they can post. This harms the legitimate users, and 1 post per day is incredibly low. Also, requiring a certain character count is just pointless. Some replies just require a few words. In fact, I honestly think the character requirement for signature campaigns isn't needed. A constructive post can be said, and done within a couple of words, and not necessarily 100 characters. It just invites unnecessary padding of a post.

Yeah, it should be their responsibility, and they should already have some pretty strict guidelines for the best possible users joining. However, this isn't the case because there's no actual downside of them enrolling anyone, and everyone. The person who is hiring them is happy because they are getting crazy amount of traffic because their website is being spammed across the forums, and the campaign manager is happy because they are getting paid for minimal work.

There either needs to be punishments handed out to the campaign managers as well as the the members participating in the campaign or implementation of restrictions. I'm actually more inclined to try out punishing campaign managers, and see if the quality improves.

Is banning signature campaigns not a sort of restriction in itself, though? This should be the last resort. Fundamentally, it isn't a problem that users can earn from posting. There is a problem in how this is affecting the forum, and how its currently being handled.

In terms of users hunting for merit. The prospect to earn is still there, but it's just behind a rank restriction.  The users that are looking to earn through bounties, but aren't the required rank will definitely increase their posting habits in order to earn merit. As evidenced the last few months the users that are hunting for merit usually don't post high quality content.  

Paying for signatures is a little different. I wouldn't agree that the merit system could be removed if signatures would be put behind a paywall either. I think the merit system is a pretty good system, regardless if there's other limitations on signatures or not. Its not perfect by all means. However, those that haven't earned any merit since the introduction of the system are fairly easy to spot. I've also supported hilariousandco's suggestion of a pay for signature type system in the past. I think it would be mostly beneficial. Of course, the price of this would need to be carefully considered. Too low, and users won't care about spamming, and getting banned, because they'll likely earn their investment back before they get caught, and they'll just reinvest on another account. Too high, and your just pricing out legitimate users out of the usage of a signature. Several users like to link to their personal projects within their signature, and other interesting projects by others. We shouldn't be removing the ability of users to do this.  I'm not 100% for the idea of a paid signature, and don't see it as the best solution, but more of a compromise due to something needed done about the issues.

I'm quite passionate about the forum as you might of gathered, and I'm only nitpicking so that we can actually come up with a solution rather than proposing some, and not really going into depth about them, and then this type of thread resurfaces again in a few weeks, and we circle around the issue again.


I know that there's several people who are spending their time reporting in that section. You only have to take a look at the modlog to see that there are hundreds of posts every day getting removed.

I've recently considered making a Discord/Telegram account just so I can join their groups, and see if they are offering an incentive to post on their threads, because it seems to be the trend right now. Investigating the thread whether they are offering an incentive to post is time consuming enough, let alone if they aren't, and you have to report each post individually.

Yeah, mprep is the only moderator assigned, and he's a Global moderator too. But, it definitely spills over to other moderators from time to time. I received a personal message from cyrus about a specific report so I know that he deals with reports from time to time.


Getting the bounty managers to enforce this would be difficult. Especially, because the list is subjective. I think it's a good movement personally, but it is subjective. Unless, theymos is willing to specify certain guidelines for campaign managers to follow, and actually enforce it we won't be able to get them to follow certain things that would make the campaign less spammy, because they simply don't care.


I agree. I don't like restrictions either as it normally impacts on the legitimate users more than the malicious users.


Right, even if we did try, and limit it. Several users use public wifi, and VPNs. Especially, in countries which the government isn't so friendly to Bitcoin. It would be incredibly difficult to find alternate accounts without them exposing themselves or by taking an in depth inestigations per account. Most of which would have to be done by an admin, and considering both theymos' words, and the account recovery issue right now I don't think they'll have the time too.

There's several pieces of software out there which hundreds of new VPNs are coming online, and being used. They could just use them. There would be no way to regulate this AFAIK. The users registering multiple accounts aren't likely using the most common VPNs because these have likely already accumulated too much evil points to make it feasible.

Considering the accounts linked to that user the account was likely created to abuse bounty threads. However, as they were caught they likely just made a script to auto post, and send members personal messages.

That wouldn't need a code as the account is already established, and isn't doing anything more than me or you posting here. Now, if you were referring to the website that they linked, and the claim they run multiple accounts are once, then I would wager that it's a malicious site trying to gather users personal data.

Right, so you are referring to campaign managers not accepting multi accounts? Well, most of the Bitcointalk ones do, and I think some bounties specify that its against the rules to have more than one account enrolled owned by the same user. But, it's hard to enforce, and prove. I would wager there are several accounts that are owned by the same person in the same campaign, even the Bitcoin ones. In fact this has been proven to be right in the past.

Implementing restrictions on certain ranks not having signatures would tackle this issue, though. Simply restricting multiple accounts either through campaign managers or through the forum rules isn't going to be effective even if we throw out the perfectly legitimate reasons to have an alternate account. It's simply to hard to prove. At the moment the people with hundreds of accounts probably only use a VPN, and likely don't try, and hide their information all that well. But, if we were to impose hard limits they would soon find a way around it by using VPNs/Tor, and different addresses for their multiple accounts. They might even go so in depth that they look at timing analysis or changing the national spellings of certain words between their accounts.

Could be an interesting solution to the issue. Although, this is something that would have to be adopted by bounty managers, and most of them don't actually care about the spam issue. All they care about is their advertisement, and hype around their project.

Theymos could potentially come out with a set of guidelines which bounty managers have to follow otherwise their thread will be removed. This could be an approach which would avoid too many official restrictions, but would deal with some of the issues. Whether, the forum has enough users reporting, and the manpower to enforce this though is another thing.

Limiting multi accounts is impossible. It's too easy to use a public open VPN, and open an account up. Yeah, the IP will eventually get banned but, they'll then just move onto another clean VPN. They'll then post under Tor Browser, and without some very in depth research it would be difficult to prove who's an alt of who.

Plus, alt accounts have their uses. I personally have an alt account that I access when using insecure connections. Same as Loyce above, and theymos also does the same.

Requirements are generally higher because, they are run by users that actually care about the forum. Instead, of some random user that is in it for the money, and doesn't care for it at all. Plus, a lot of the bounties in the Altcoin section run campaigns with new accounts.

Hey, does anyone want to make a "We need you" image for reporting on Bitcointalk? I think that could be pretty damn cool, although I'm not very well versed in editing images.

I was going to change the Uncle Sam image to the logo of the Bitcointalk logo, but don't think it would look right. Have I ever mentioned that we need a mascot for the forum? Kind of like how Uncle Sam represents the American government.

It's a mixture of the two. There are some ICOs/alts that use bumping services which use bumping bots. Another, exploit is by offering an incentive to post on their thread, and then finally it's just users that are trying to earn money, and post something good about the project in order to gain some favour or something.

Yeah, but this is where we could go for softer restrictions, and try to make up for it via actively reporting. Judging by how long it takes for a report to be handled the moderators aren't completely swamped by reports. If we could increase the amount of users reporting then it could make a difference. It would be nice to have statistics to offer insight into this, and whether or not reporting is actually doing something. I'll continue to report regardless, but it does feel like a losing battle most of the time.

Something needs to be done about the issues regarding bounties, and the Altcoin section in general. Although, I'm not sure what the best solution is, and none of the effective ways are without restrictions. But, something does needs to happen.

These are just some of the solutions which have been brought up:

- Additional moderators
Taking into consideration of theymos' post he doesn't really know that many users that he would consider appropriate for the job, and trustworthy. Even, if he had a few in mind I don't that this would be that effective considering the amount of spam over there, and how many bounties there are.

- Prevent certain ranks bumping the topic
This could be a option to remove the bumping bots, and bumping services issues that we are currently having. Most of the bumping is done by Newbies, and Jr members. There's a few that have higher ranked accounts, but it would be severely limited if we did impose bumping restrictions on certain ranks. This could maybe be limited to certain sections, and wouldn't be site wide.

- Disable signatures
Whether this is for everyone, behind a paywall or certain members aren't allowed to wear one. This wouldn't get rid of merit beggars, and would actually make it worse. I'm not sure if this is the right approach, and whether it would solve anything. At the end of the day you'll still have people attempting to get merit, and spamming in order to do that. Putting it behind a paywall could work. But, if bounties are promising high returns then they'll likely be willing to invest in a one time fee for a signature.

There's several other ideas, but those are the ones that I can remember right now. All of them involve putting restrictions somewhere, and I'm normally against imposing restrictions until the very last resort. However, I don't believe there's any other option. Things need to start happening, because I'm personally sick of the spam now, and I'm sure the majority of the forum is. Another extreme measure which was suggested was to remove the altcoin/bounty section altogether. but I'm personally not a fan of that approach.

I think I've probably been pissing off mprep with sending reports their way, and any other moderator that has to deal with them. The reports normally get dealt within a few hours so I'm not sure if they are understaffed or whether there just needs to be more users reporting. But, what I do know is that it's currently not working.

You might want to include a starting price, bidding increments, and a end date at the very least. Also, where are you located. You are also going to need to get a escrow involved that can oversee this, and be available to maybe confirm the details about the car.

I thought I remember Primedice being alright, and ran well. That was a bloody long time ago though, and can't really recall who was hired. I don't think I remember Secondstrade at all. I guess recently we've had better run campaigns, because of the issues that are now widespread. At least a few years ago the spam problem wasn't as apparent.

I'm not sure this has ever been the case. There's a few campaign mangers that enforce their own rules, but I doubt the people behind hiring them actually care, and it's the campaign managers that are insisting on specific rules. It definitely didn't do more harm than good. It would be nice if that was the case, but that's not really how advertising works. 

Red tags do nothing to those that spam, and isn't what the trust system was intended to do. Although, even if you did tag them they don't care about the reputation of the account, and only care about bumping the thread.

Yeah, this isn't something that is exclusive to new accounts. It's been happening a while with higher ranked accounts too. I've personally seen several full members, and reported them in the past.

I don't think I'll include those threads as I would like to focus more on reporting, and how it should be done rather than including resources to report in. A lot of these threads in Meta could just be reported instead of posting on the topic. I understand in particularly complex reports, but other than that the report field is good enough.

I might include them in the post below the original post, but I'll decide on that later.

theymos likely has some decent contacts outside of the forum which would be willing to contribute, and write some of the content. Some well respected ones at that. Not all of them are here on the forum anymore unfortunately. I'm not sure what you mean by contest, however its likely not the best option. What would be better is if anyone has an interest in writing some of the content or contributing other ways such as proof reading they could contact theymos privately, and he could then approach these users if he deems them capable. If we introduce a contest where people can vote etc then I fear the it would just turn into a popularity contest, and not who is the best option. In fact, theymos could probably draw up some questions or ask the applicant to demonstrate how they would explain certain aspects. By this he should be able to gauge the technical ability, and knowledge of the user. Maybe, he could pass the responsibility of this onto some of the mods that are knowledgeable in the specific subject. For example,  achow for subjects relating to Bitcoin.
 

I don't think implementing another restriction via requiring users to take a course in order to rank up is the best idea. The merit system is already in place for doing just that. Courses should be optional, and have no bearing on rank. Instead, you get a cool badge to display that you've successfully completed a course!

However, having said that there's been talks about requiring a user to complete a mini quiz to complete registration. I guess that might be able to tie into this idea, possibility.

Right, I think I get what your trying to say now. You mean a sort of filter that only displays merited posts per thread? I think that's been suggested, and theymos also hinted of the possibility of adding this in the future. I would welcome it. I'm not sure if I would personally use it, but I can see the appeal. 

Generally, spam is spam,  and should be reported. Obviously, I don't know what you are refering to specifically, but if they are spamming to promote their service or what ever then yeah, it's not allowed. An example, would be the ICOs that use spam bots or spam with alt accounts.

I like the ambition that you are showing at the very least. I don't see this being implemented any time soon unless, there's an open source software already out there that is suitable then this is likely going to need a bit of investment, and time to not only make the content, but the software also. Besides that I'll encourage any type of content creation which will help better others peoples judgment/knowledge on Bitcoin, and this forum.

Consider drawing up a wire frame, and presenting it here. Possibility, we could then have a little more insight, and add to it. Fundamentally, the idea is a good one. Also, how are you going to deal with course details/answers being leaked? I'm assuming that these would have to be changed frequently to avoid this issue.

I'm guessing your going to be the one overseeing this? Haven't you got got enough on your plate already?

You've probably got the contacts, and the drive in order to get the most competent people. Even, if it's to initially write the content up, and then using a pull request system to keep things up to date. I don't think it will be a problem for you to contact some of the people who are specialists in the areas that you want. However, they might be able to provide the knowledge, but putting that into an itinerary, and course format might not be the strongest area. You'll likely need to draft in several people for one course where they all provide different inputs.

I think getting the foundations down is going to be the priority. I think you might agree that updating it should not be as difficult as the initial content in terms of updating the content itself. Finding the people capable, and willing to do this could be a little more difficult. However, I think we have more than enough able, and committed members to update topics on Bitcoin, and the forum.

Mods shouldn't have automatic editing privileges. Of course, if they have the skills, and knowledge then sure. Initially, I think selecting a few "experts" or those capable of creating the content would be the better choice. Then finding a few users who can transfer this into a course structure. Finally, allowing pull requests as mentioned by Github to allow for editing/correcting mistakes.  

A custom title should suffice. Something along the lines of "Content creator". I have no qualms of paying the writers either as this is a fairly ambitions project. However, I would be interested in how many people would voluntarily be willing to do this. Especially, considering the limited amount of people who are able to create worthy content, and discuss in depth, and at the same time convey the information clearly.

Especially, in terms of Bitcoin, and the technology behind it.

Why is this misleading? Cryptocurrency is what you make of it. Whether, you are investing in it for short term gain, and with the ultimate goal of withdrawing, and transferring that back into fiat or your goal is to use Bitcoin as a currency. They are both investments. Plus, investments don't mean a guaranteed profit so it doesn't mean that you would be rich already. I feel for the person that has to write up the investment course, though. Quite a tough subject to tackle that one.
You'll be surprised how many people will be willing to do it just to get a badge on their profile. That's enough of an incentive for them alone, and of course they pick up some knowledge on the way, and hopefully put that into practice. It's exactly why sticky threads aren't looked at or adhered by. They don't really offer any real incentive to those that read it other than gaining knowledge, and following etiquette. It doesn't mean that offering an incentive via badges would get them to intake the information they are going through, unless you have to demonstrate what you've learned in the course via a quiz or something along those lines.

Edx is something we should be looking to emulate. However, I quite like the idea of this Bitcoin forum being the forefather for information about Bitcoin, and therefore hosting it via this site would be the best option. I've used Edx, and in fact a few universities actually recommend it, however I don't think they have a platform that can hosted elsewhere, and tied into here on the forum.

This is kind of indirectly implemented already with the merit stats page. You can check the most merited users of all time, and recently. As well as a few other statistics related to merit.