How to avoid this kind of posts/threads ?

[bL4nkcode]

It seems that day by day there are so many threads made by Brandnew accounts in bitcointalk discussion or even on several boards with this kind of posts.
 





Almost every 1 hour I can see 3-6 or even more posts like this.

I keep reporting that kind of posts whenever I saw that in any boards especially in bitcoin discussion and it takes longer before being deleted which is not as usual.

What if all Brandnew/Newbie accounts cannot make a new thread or they can't make a new thread if they have below 20 activity or so(as long the account is a newbie).
 
Is it possible that staffs/mods can change this function of this forum so they can't make new threads which are commonly spam posts or maybe theymos itself will do.

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[shorena]

We had a newbie jail once (could only post in a certain section), which is somewhat similar and it caused more issues than it solved. Id guess what you notice is that Lauda is no longer staff and there is/are no replacement(s) yet.

[hilariousandco]

I made a suggestion a while back that all newbies are essentially shadowbanned until their first post on the forum is checked by a moderator and they're whitelisted. This would stop those sorts of bots almost 100% as they would be nuked and nobody has to see their crap in the first place. Many of those serial digital goods scammers/ ban evaders also wouldn't get through, though the smarter ones could easily bypass it once they realised what was going on.

We had a newbie jail once (could only post in a certain section), which is somewhat similar and it caused more issues than it solved. Id guess what you notice is that Lauda is no longer staff and there is/are no replacement(s) yet.

Lauda being gone shouldn't make much of a difference with these newbie bot accounts. Most mods are also patrollers who can nuke them and we have many patrollers from the same European time zone. Half of the time when I click on the report to ban them someone else has already beaten me to it by a millisecond. However, even when Lauda was staff there often seemed to be a backlog of reports at about 5-7am-ish (gmt) as I often notice when I get up early so maybe we could do with a patroller active in that time zone. Those bots in the op were active between 5-8am and I slept in today (which is rare  ).

[Sundark]

Threads like these while being rather annoying are not a great problem. They are usually deleted almost instantaneously and no one pays attention to them.
I would rather not limit newbies ability to create a thread just because there are some abusive idiots out there.
But that shadowban hilariousandco mentioned seems like a good option to prevent this problem. I would like that feature to be implemented, if that is not a big problem.

[Dav7]

I think this forum only needs more staff to handle this situations more quickly

[Joel_Jantsen]

I think this forum only needs more staff to handle this situations more quickly

I doubt that.A bot could do a much better job at nuking the obvious spam bots.If I'm not wrong,Mitchell already has one.
On the user side : One can easily write a bot to iterate over different sections and report the obvious spams to moderators.

[LoyceV]

I keep reporting that kind of posts whenever I saw that in any boards especially in bitcoin discussion

It's good for my "reported accuracy"

What if all Brandnew/Newbie accounts cannot make a new thread or they can't make a new thread if they have below 20 activity or so(as long the account is a newbie).

Then they'd just spam existing threads, which makes them harder to spot.
 

I made a suggestion a while back that all newbies are essentially shadowbanned until their first post on the forum is checked by a moderator and they're whitelisted.

I've seen several forums using this system. Any idea why it isn't implemented?

though the smarter ones could easily bypass it

That is indeed easy: post something semi-decent, be accepted, start the spam. Or even edit the first post to make it spam.

[hilariousandco]

I made a suggestion a while back that all newbies are essentially shadowbanned until their first post on the forum is checked by a moderator and they're whitelisted.

I've seen several forums using this system. Any idea why it isn't implemented?

Yeah, I've seen it before and think it would be worth trialing or coding into the new forum at least. If this board doesn't use it then others who use the software can. I think theymos said it would be too difficult to code (but maybe he meant on this board and a couple of other mods didn't seem to like the extra workload it may cause (though I don't think it would cause much more and is a small price to pay to stop these spam bots almost 100%)).

[botany]

I made a suggestion a while back that all newbies are essentially shadowbanned until their first post on the forum is checked by a moderator and they're whitelisted.

I've seen several forums using this system. Any idea why it isn't implemented?

Yeah, I've seen it before and think it would be worth trialing or coding into the new forum at least. If this board doesn't use it then others who use the software can. I think theymos said it would be too difficult to code (but maybe he meant on this board and a couple of other mods didn't seem to like the extra workload it may cause (though I don't think it would cause much more and is a small price to pay to stop these spam bots almost 100%)).

You have 10-12,000 new users on an average registering every month. That means you will have to whitelist on an average 400 new users every day. How does that compare to the volume of reported posts?

If real people don't get whitelisted quickly, they could lose interest....

[hilariousandco]

It won't be anywhere near 400 a day. Doubt it would even be 100. Most of the accounts that register here will be bots which we have to nuke any way and assuming they even manage to make their first post (many don't). Many other users who sign up won't make a post either or just lurk. I expect whitelisting accounts will take roughly the same amount of time as it takes for reports on spam bots to get handled so not very long. New users who sign up will have to wait six minutes before they can post any way but remember they will be shadowbanned so they probably wouldn't notice in the first place. It would be interesting if theymos could provide us with the number of users who sign up per day who make at least one post because that's the accurate figure.

[minifrij]

I can't understand why it is still possible to post a thread with a URL as the title. While it wouldn't stop all bots, it would certainly prevent these from spamming so much.

[SaltySpitoon]

They are annoying, but I haven't ever seen them last very long. About half of the time, when I go to nuke the account, someone has already beaten me to it in the time it takes to click on the thread, verify that its a spam post from a new account, and then hit the nuke button through their profile. There is a bot that handles nuking new spammers, it just doesn't catch all of them.

I am highly against returning newbie jail, as someone who sat through it and someone who handled whitelisting new users when it existed. When I signed up for Bitcointalk originally, I abandoned my account and just used a friend's account for 6-8 months because I dubbed it more hassle than it was worth. On top of that, there was the issue of getting newbies to post productively in the newbie section because either A) They came here with a question in mind or B) Its hard to post something constructive within the confines of a "Introduce yourself!" thread which made up the majority of the posts there.

It really sucks when you have just heard about Bitcoin and are excited, and you either have a ton of getting started, or "HELP! MY MONEY IS LOST!" questions, but you can't really get an appropriate answer because your post is buried inside of the newbie section. That said, that doesn't mean theres not an acceptable middle ground somewhere.

[botany]

It won't be anywhere near 400 a day. Doubt it would even be 100. Most of the accounts that register here will be bots which we have to nuke any way and assuming they even manage to make their first post (many don't). Many other users who sign up won't make a post either or just lurk. I expect whitelisting accounts will take roughly the same amount of time as it takes for reports on spam bots to get handled so not very long. New users who sign up will have to wait six minutes before they can post any way but remember they will be shadowbanned so they probably wouldn't notice in the first place. It would be interesting if theymos could provide us with the number of users who sign up per day who make at least one post because that's the accurate figure.

There are ~9600 brand new accounts which were registered in January 2017.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sa=search;search=brand%20new;fields=group;start=675570
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sa=search;search=brand%20new;fields=group;start=685174

This would include nuked accounts.
So out of 13,354 accounts which have been registered in Jan 2017, 3700 accounts (or 120 accounts a day) have at least 1 post. This is the number of accounts which would have to be whitelisted. I think it makes sense just to nuke the spam bots.

[shorena]

-snip-
Lauda being gone shouldn't make much of a difference with these newbie bot accounts.

Hmm, I see.

-snip-
even when Lauda was staff there often seemed to be a backlog of reports at about 5-7am-ish (gmt) as I often notice when I get up early so maybe we could do with a patroller active in that time zone. Those bots in the op were active between 5-8am and I slept in today (which is rare  ).

Yeah, I tend to see them more often when I get up early as well. I doubt its a common time for people to be active though.

I like the white listing/shadow ban idea as long as they are handled quickly enough.