Cleaning up the house in Bitcoin/ Altcoin/ Gambling Discussion boards

[Mitchell]

Do you mean when there are spam waves with same post contents, you will add those contents into your bot, to find spam posts automatically, and do spam reports?

Almost, it finds the posts and removes them. It removed over 500 of those quoted posts.

[hd49728]

By now, there are changes on bumping in some boards, and soon if the spamming issues in Bitcoin discussion, altcoin discussion, gambling discussion boards don't change, I believe theymos will soon apply bump score in those ones.
Bumping changes on some boards

There's long been a problem of spammy bumping being used to keep topics near the top, but lately it's become unbearable. Therefore, on these boards, bumping has changed:
 - Service Announcements
 - Announcements (Altcoins)
 - Tokens (Altcoins)
 - Bounties (Altcoins)

Therefore, I think that it is time for spammers to seriously think of their posting styles because if they don't change, the admin will move further and they will be destroyed. If someone looks around nowadays, you will see that there are some campaigns started to reject posts made in altcoin announcements. It is a very good signal that more ones will apply the same rules.

Posts in Games & Rounds, Investor-based Games, Off-topic, Lending, Auctions, Serious Discussion, Micro Earnings, Politics & Society, Archival, Announcements (Altcoins), Bounties (Altcoins), Scam Accusations, Signature Campaigns threads, or Spam Mega Threads will not count.

[hd49728]

We have been coming closer to the 10th anniversary of the forum (10th anniversary art contest), and now it is very good time to contribute keeping it as clean and informative as possible. From your decent posts, you can make your very minor contributions to help the forum, simply from your time, efforts and your dedication to help.

[skarais]

The 3 boards that you mention in the OP are targeted by spammers to publish posts. I am sure of that. Are there any efforts to reduce the number of spam posts there? I am sure there is a way and one of them is to report posts that are useless and of low quality for removal by moderator.

There are dozens of up to hundreds of "possible" users who are willing to report these submissions to the moderator for removal. But the best efforts for all those who realize that not participating in increasing the number of spam posts there. In my opinion, if a spammer is a disease then negative trust is the cure until they are fully aware and recovering from the disease. I have seen DT members send negative trust to spammers on my local board, but what about spammers on other boards especially the 3 boards that you mentioned on the OP ?

[TheBeardedBaby]

Isn't it a bit better now at least in the Bitcoin section? Last few weeks I reported a few threads that were actually made for discussing altcoins.
On the other hand there are still topics created by fresh accounts that hare even shorter that one liners with boring (already discussed 1000 times) subjects. You can't stop this.

I don't visit the Altcoin section, except when there is a shitpost in patrol which have to be reported.

[o_e_l_e_o]

In my opinion, if a spammer is a disease then negative trust is the cure until they are fully aware and recovering from the disease. I have seen DT members send negative trust to spammers on my local board, but what about spammers on other boards especially the 3 boards that you mentioned on the OP ?

Disagree. The trust system shouldn't be used to tag spammers. Spamming is against the rules, and these users should have their posts deleted or accounts banned. Being a spammer doesn't inherently make one untrustworthy. Negative trust also doesn't matter to the majority of spammers. Most bounty campaigns which pay them in their worthless tokens don't care about negative trust. What does matter is having their posts deleted because then they don't get paid for them. I would encourage everyone who frequents these boards to report spam posts rather than just skipping over them.

[skarais]

Isn't it a bit better now at least in the Bitcoin section?

Agree, when everyone cares about the activities of spammers on various boards in the forum, the forum will look healthier. But I think if we have to talk about it continuously without action, the results will not change at all.

Disagree. The trust system shouldn't be used to tag spammers.

I understand what you mean, but when I am active as a bounty hunter, not many managers will accept participants with negative trust and that is what I think. Negative trust with the tag "spammer and will change to neutral if proven to change" I think will help the forum to reduce the number of spam posts on various boards.

Spamming is against the rules, and these users should have their posts deleted or accounts banned. Being a spammer doesn't inherently make one untrustworthy.

The negative tag with the comment "spammer and will return to neutral if the user is proven to change" I think does not automatically make that user untrustworthy. This tag is only to make them deterrent so they want to change their bad habits into members of a good community.

I would encourage everyone who frequents these boards to report spam posts rather than just skipping over them.

This is a good solution and must be done by everyone, and so far the action must continue to be socialized to all forum members who want to contribute. Keeping forums clean from spam posts is an obligation of all forum members, ignoring them will not help the forum because they will continue to post and post endlessly without our knowledge. Banned is the last solution for spammers who dont want to change and I will support this forum and the good of all members.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Spamming is against the rules, and these users should have their posts deleted or accounts banned. Being a spammer doesn't inherently make one untrustworthy.

The negative tag with the comment "spammer and will return to neutral if the user is proven to change" I think does not automatically make that user untrustworthy. This tag is only to make them deterrent so they want to change their bad habits into members of a good community.

I disagree on this here too. If a person is a spammer, and since spamming will normally lead to low content value, and therefore be against the rules, then he should be reported and let the mods evaluate and deal with him accordingly.

Tagging should be essentially commerce related, and we cannot turn it into a sort of self-made pseudo-mod-like feature to tag/pardon for spam, each with his own personal criteria.

Even Neutral for this or anything like it are not my piece of cake:

<…>Trust scores and in many cases are misused. Being their conceptual nature that of rating commercial TXs that derive Trust upon the person dealt with, there are a tremendous amount of cases where the trust is built either a bunch of very small commercial valued TXs, or things which are unrelated. Look at my profile for example: All my positive Trust scores are not really commerce relates, and are therefore conceptually wrong (*), although I’m trustworthy as hell IRL.

(*) They should probably be neutral, although I personally do not like the use of neutral for something that, again, is not commerce related. Using a feature for commerce related stuff on positive/negative values, but conceptually allowing for other con commercial neutral rating call for confusion, and it would be better to have a system to rate Trust  for commerce and "Trust" (or whatever we want to call it) for anything else, as two different entities.

   

[o_e_l_e_o]

But I think if we have to talk about it continuously without action, the results will not change at all.

The action required is for more users to start regularly reporting spam posts rather than just ignoring them. I don't browse the altcoin boards, but I know there are plenty of non spamming and intelligent users who regularly read and post in Bitcoin Discussion. If every one of these users reported only a couple of posts each day, and we had the mod power to quickly handle these reports, the board would rapidly improve.

I do think we should be more liberal in handing out escalating bans for repeat spammers, though. I get so tired of reporting the same users for spamming day in and day out.

Negative trust with the tag "spammer and will change to neutral if proven to change" I think will help the forum to reduce the number of spam posts on various boards.

Maybe it would, but on the flip side I still see plenty of users with historical red trust for spamming continuing to spam. Regardless of the answer, I don't think it is an appropriate use of red trust, since being a spammer doesn't have any inherent link to your trustworthiness in a trade or the likelihood of you trying to scam. You are free to leave red trust to spammers if you want, but you are unlikely to convince many DT users to do so. I also think temporary bans would do more to push users to change their behavior, and this is the route we should be advocating for rather than leaving red trust.

[skarais]

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Yes and in the end we here have different perceptions and I am very sure that the aim is the same for the best and useful forums and users.
You both are wise parents with broad thinking so I who are still growing up have to learn a lot from you. The point is I will not ask all DT members to mark this spammer, I am just thinking of how to reduce the number of spam posts on various boards in addition to reporting on moderators and temporary bans.
While I only think that reporting spam posts every time we find it is a mandatory action and dont ignoring it so that the moderator can consider the appropriate punishment given to them.

[tranthidung]

While I only think that reporting spam posts every time we find it is a mandatory action and dont ignoring it so that the moderator can consider the appropriate punishment given to them.

Freedom is the basic of the forum. There is nothing mandatory required for all. Even rules, we only have unofficial ones.

Regarding to what you all discussed about the negative feedback on spammers (or neutral), let's see theymos' opinion on this.

In particular, in my view:
 - Giving negative trust for being an annoying poster is inappropriate, since this has nothing to do with their trustworthiness. If they're disrupting discussion or never adding anything, then that's something for moderators to deal with, and you should report their posts and/or complain in Meta about it.

As far as I know of, @The Pharmacist and @actmyname are the two (at least ?) who pioneered to leave negative feedbacks on spammers because of massively terrible spam endemic on the forum circa late of 2017 and early of 2018. I don't know where they began to report and tag spammers but I read their replies in some threads about their works back in that period.

They claimed that they stopped leaving negative trusts and reports (reduce in intensity) after the merit system was kicked-off.