Boards that don't contribute to activity

[gregyoung14]

Why prohibit giveaways?

No-one's prohibiting anything.
Theymos seems to be thinking about improving the integrity of the ranking system. People will still be able to post whatever crap they like (mods allowing), it just won't feed the spam/sig cycle if it doesn't increase their activity and account value.
There is no downside.

Yep. I think this will benefit most of us. This just proves that theymos is a really hands-on guy..

[hilariousetc]

Bump.

I'm thinking of making Games & Rounds not count toward posts or activity. What other boards would be good candidates for this? Maybe Off-topic, though some decent discussions occur there, so I'm not sure about that.

Games and Rounds needs to go. There are people farming hundreds of accounts in there with many likely using bots. I've even seen hacked accounts reactivate after years of inactivity just to copy and paste someone else's giveaway address or username from an earlier post years ago.

Off topic should also be considered. It's the go-to board for illiterate newbies who know nothing about bitcoin but have heard you can earn here and shitposting account farmers to spam their way through the ranks. An even better solution though would be to remove signatures from ranks somehow and it'll solve the issue we have with people trying to spam their way to x rank or farm dozens of accounts for free.

[hilariousetc]

Bump. The new Bounties section should also be included with this. It's an entire sub forum consisting of posts like this one after the other:

Joined airdrop.. All the best..

Joined Airdrop & thank you for opportunity

Signed up, thanks for that.

Joined airdrop and best of luck

Just look at siemonangle0007 posts as well. His entire history is almost exclusively saying variants of 'joined the airdrop'. Pointless. Account farmers and sig spammers will love this board.

[xandry]

Bump. The new Bounties section should also be included with this.

Fully agree. Nobody are not even required to write such posts.

[hilariousetc]

Yeah, I think most of them are probably just doing it to quickly farm their accounts. I bet half of them probably don't even actually sign up to the bounty. Used to see a similar thing with people saying variants of "I PMd you" when in fact they never even sent a PM and were just trying to boost their post count (telling someone they've PMd them in itself is utterly redundant).

[LoyceV]

Games and Rounds needs to go. There are people farming hundreds of accounts in there with many likely using bots.

But... I like Games and Rounds! In my Newbie-times, when Bitcoin was worth a lot less, it was a great source of Bitcoins. Nowadays I barely use it though.
I've managed several campaigns for Rollin in Games and Rounds for more than a year, and given away thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins. After half a year, I switched to self-moderated threads only, with much stricter rules. I've seen alt-accounts post 8 different posts in an hour, cheating and spamming.
After I made a self-moderated thread, it was very easy to spot anybody who didn't read the strict rules. I have hundreds of accounts blacklisted, and after their posts got deleted they quickly gave up on my thread.

Instead of closing Games and Rounds, maybe threads could be self-moderated by default. That also requires an active OP.
On top of that, there should be a requirement to have a game element that earns Bitcoins on Bitcointalk, not just link to an external streaming site.

Also, abandoned threads like this one should be closed:

Can't believe this thread is still alive... should be closed by moderators.

Off topic should also be considered. It's the go-to board for illiterate newbies who know nothing about bitcoin but have heard you can earn here and shitposting account farmers to spam their way through the ranks.

While making suggestions to improve the forum: how about a limit on the number of threads anyone can create? I found a shitposter yesterday who opened 6 new threads that day, he just dumps a random question and creates the next one! Very easy to post 30 "ontopic" posts on a day, and a total waste of time to read. I wouldn't want to block any Newbie from opening a thread, but I doubt any serious poster needs more than 1 per day. Maybe make it 2 for Legendary.

An even better solution though would be to remove signatures from ranks somehow and it'll solve the issue we have with people trying to spam their way to x rank or farm dozens of accounts for free.

I assume the growing signature space with growing ranks was meant to be a perk for active users, and to stop Newbies from having big signatures.

Just look at siemonangle0007 posts as well. His entire history is almost exclusively saying variants of 'joined the airdrop'. Pointless. Account farmers and sig spammers will love this board.

Why don't you ban him?

[Mr. Big]

Disabling post count on games and rounds and off topic is a big help to me when patrolling. I don't have to refresh every 15 minutes to see atleast 100 posts. What more if it includes ANN threads and bounties.

I think newbies should not be allowed to post in ANN threads or bounties, that would prevent abuse.

[Lutpin]

Off topic should also be considered. It's the go-to board for illiterate newbies who know nothing about bitcoin but have heard you can earn here and shitposting account farmers to spam their way through the ranks.

Something similar happens in Politics and Society.
I don't see how discussing about scientific proof whether a god exists or not should give you activity on a bitcoin forum.

Instead of closing Games and Rounds, maybe threads could be self-moderated by default. That also requires an active OP.

It's not about closing the section, but about removing its contribution towards activity. People could still host and claim giveaways there.

On top of that, there should be a requirement to have a game element that earns Bitcoins on Bitcointalk, not just link to an external streaming site.

We've discussed that in another thread

[erikalui]

Instead of ignoring posts in some boards, how about ignoring posts containing few characters/words? People will post thanks, hello, and so on which shouldn't contribute to their activity which these posts are still counted as they are made in relevant sections. It's better to ignore them if possible.

[sinner]

why not we just report accounts and ban those obviously posting just to gain potential activity? that could be more effective in the long run

Perhaps accounts that have been ignored a high number of times should be reviewed by mods and banned if the mods are confident that the account in question is merely trying to increase activity?  Maybe display the number of times accounts have been ignored (display ignore count)?

Problem is any method to combat this problem can be gamed, and maybe the market will work itself out.  This is happening to some extent: most decent airdrops are sharedrops, and the good sig campaigns (DeepOnion) reject a lot of people.

[hilariousetc]

Games and Rounds needs to go. There are people farming hundreds of accounts in there with many likely using bots.

But... I like Games and Rounds! In my Newbie-times, when Bitcoin was worth a lot less, it was a great source of Bitcoins. Nowadays I barely use it though.

I'm talking about it needs to go from post count. The entire board is a spam fest. There's no good reason why it should contribute to post count. The Alt coin bounty board needs to go the same way as well. People are massively abusing it to farm accounts. Entire threads of just 'watching', 'interesting', 'waiting for airdrop', 'joined airdrop' 'received airdrop' type posts etc.  

Off topic should also be considered. It's the go-to board for illiterate newbies who know nothing about bitcoin but have heard you can earn here and shitposting account farmers to spam their way through the ranks.

Something similar happens in Politics and Society.
I don't see how discussing about scientific proof whether a god exists or not should give you activity on a bitcoin forum.

The sad thing is people used to actually have decent discussions in there. Now it's just been taken over by shitposters because most people who sign up here have little to no knowledge or interest in bitcoin so struggle to talk about it, but they can talk crap about subjects in there all day hence why they just create utter crap threads. Economics is going the same way now as well.  

Instead of closing Games and Rounds, maybe threads could be self-moderated by default. That also requires an active OP.

Ha, nobody is going to waste time doing that. They don't even look after their signature campaigns so they're not going to care about policing their own thread. I wouldn't be against making alt coin devs responsible for moderating their own threads though and if it becomes full of posts that break the rules then their threads should be trashcanned and accounts banned. Spam from crapcoins takes up the vast majority of moderation time and effort and this isn't something staff should be doing for free.

why not we just report accounts and ban those obviously posting just to gain potential activity? that could be more effective in the long run

Perhaps accounts that have been ignored a high number of times should be reviewed by mods and banned if the mods are confident that the account in question is merely trying to increase activity?  Maybe display the number of times accounts have been ignored (display ignore count)?

The ignore button used to glow different colours with the amount of people who were ignoring that user but it was removed.