What are we going to do about the Shitposters?

[hilariousetc]

Start a Premium Membership system.

it may help to reduce the high number of spammings. because mostly people join here are alt of already members and account farmers and reason of joining the forum is to participate in bounties and signature campaigns.

so my suggestion is to start a premium membership level for the forum... Free members can not have Signature space, not have access to some important boards and some other features. to open signature space and other features. a user have to buy premium membership package..

This is exactly what I have been suggesting we do for quite some time and something I forgot to mention here. Signatures should be removed from ranks entierly and anybody who signs up to the forum only has a very minimal signature (something along the lines of a junior level one). To get a bigger signature along with colour you have to donate to the forum. Something like $50 will get you a Silver membership with a full member sized signature (and possibly avatar) and Gold member which gives you a Hero sized signature for $100 etc. There could even be a premium rank for $200-500 or so which gives you even more perks such as an image banner signature and the ability to change your name etc. This would essentially kill account farming 99% and put a stop to shitposters signing up with 50 accounts for each member of their family.

[jamalaezaz]

Start a Premium Membership system.

it may help to reduce the high number of spammings. because mostly people join here are alt of already members and account farmers and reason of joining the forum is to participate in bounties and signature campaigns.

so my suggestion is to start a premium membership level for the forum... Free members can not have Signature space, not have access to some important boards and some other features. to open signature space and other features. a user have to buy premium membership package..

This is exactly what I have been suggesting we do for quite some time and something I forgot to mention here. Signatures should be removed from ranks entierly and anybody who signs up to the forum only has a very minimal signature (something along the lines of a junior level one). To get a bigger signature along with colour you have to donate to the forum. Something like $50 will get you a Silver membership with a full member sized signature (and possibly avatar) and Gold member which gives you a Hero sized signature for $100 etc. There could even be a premium rank for $200-500 or so which gives you even more perks such as an image banner signature and the ability to change your name etc. This would essentially kill account farming 99% and put a stop to shitposters signing up with 50 accounts for each member of their family.

instead of one time donation it would be even better to limit the premium membership to a specific period. so you have to renew your premium membership again after a week, a month or a certain time..
coz 50, 100, 200 and 500$ is not a big amount. account farmers would easily cross this.

and limiting free users to some specific boards only is also helpful. like Help and Beginners, Meta and Off-topic. (maybe local boards) for  all other forum boards a user must have premium membership.

[hilariousetc]

No, I don't think some sort of annual membership fee is a good idea and doubt theymos would go for it. Yes, some people will happily pay the fee on a few accounts if they can afford it, but the point is it severely restricts the number of accounts people will make because nobody is going to pay $100 for each of their dozens to hundreds of accounts (and if they do then fair play and the forum benefits financially). At the moment anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and this is a huge problem especially when people try be sneaky and farm them with bots or just shitpost which is easy to do in certain sections.

[criptix]

No, I don't think some sort of annual membership fee is a good idea and doubt theymos would go for it. Yes, some people will happily pay the fee on a few accounts if they can afford it, but the point is it severely restricts the number of accounts people will make because nobody is going to pay $100 for each of their dozens to hundreds of accounts (and if they do then fair play and the forum benefits financially). At the moment anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and this is a huge problem especially when people try be sneaky and farm them with bots or just shitpost which is easy to do in certain sections.

250$ is probaly nearly a months salary for the most 3rd world people here.
Lets see how many 3rd people can keep on shitposting and pay 100$ per banned account.

Vod, I saw you tagged a user for shitposting, and I think that's a great idea for someone in DT to do.  I've said it in another thread that this will disqualify shitposters from a lot of campaigns, and mods are definitely not banning all of them.  That's understandable and I'm not blaming mods for anything.  There are so many new shitposters, it's unreal and there's no way staff would see them all, and there are almost too many to report.  So props to Vod.

Your post was the #32 reply to this thread and the #14 reply by a PAID sig. Ad. user what is that like almost 37% replies by a PAID user? I guess that shows where the problem lies.

What's your paid post count now?  

The campaign I'm in doesn't pay for posts in meta, you dumbass.  I've been concerned about this problem for quite a while.  I'm not part of the problem here--but my opinion is obviously quite biased.  I've reported a lot of posts, and I don't get paid for that.  Ignoramus.

You have reported 457 posts with 96% accuracy

And i stopped to report people beginning 2016 or so and started again two months ago since the shit show is hugely annoying by now

[hilariousetc]

No, I don't think some sort of annual membership fee is a good idea and doubt theymos would go for it. Yes, some people will happily pay the fee on a few accounts if they can afford it, but the point is it severely restricts the number of accounts people will make because nobody is going to pay $100 for each of their dozens to hundreds of accounts (and if they do then fair play and the forum benefits financially). At the moment anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and this is a huge problem especially when people try be sneaky and farm them with bots or just shitpost which is easy to do in certain sections.

250$ is probaly nearly a months salary for the most 3rd world people here.
Lets see how many 3rd people can keep on shitposting and pay 100$ per banned account.

Exactly and this is the sort of abuse it will prevent. They'll be able to scrape together a hundred dollars or so to invest in an account and if they want to invest their hard earned sig money into more with their monthly earnings then be my guest. I think people will take better care with their accounts once they treat it as an investment and make better posts from just the one or two as opposed to creating as many as you want for free currently to bleed lazy crapcoin campaigns dry.

[LoyceV]

As you can see, recently there's been more than 50 bans in succession.

I count more than a 1000 successive Autobans, and a total of 6156 on that page. I assume it's a bot banning them, but I'm curious to know how this works.

If they continue they'll get banned even if it takes a few reports.

Question for Mods: does Bitcointalk keep track of the number of deleted posts per user? Otherwise it will be impossible to remember who is a repeat offender.

I've reported a lot of posts, and I don't get paid for that.

Anybody who cares about the forum should do that. In the last week, I think I've reported more posts than I've made.

so my suggestion is to start a premium membership level for the forum... Free members can not have Signature space, not have access to some important boards and some other features. to open signature space and other features. a user have to buy premium membership package..

This is exactly what I have been suggesting we do for quite some time and something I forgot to mention here. Signatures should be removed from ranks entierly and anybody who signs up to the forum only has a very minimal signature (something along the lines of a junior level one). To get a bigger signature along with colour you have to donate to the forum. Something like $50 will get you a Silver membership with a full member sized signature (and possibly avatar) and Gold member which gives you a Hero sized signature for $100 etc. There could even be a premium rank for $200-500 or so which gives you even more perks such as an image banner signature and the ability to change your name etc. This would essentially kill account farming 99% and put a stop to shitposters signing up with 50 accounts for each member of their family.

instead of one time donation it would be even better to limit the premium membership to a specific period. so you have to renew your premium membership again after a week, a month or a certain time..
coz 50, 100, 200 and 500$ is not a big amount. account farmers would easily cross this.

I don't think that helps. Signature campaigns pay enough to not care about a membership fee, and after paying the fee they can continue to earn from spamming. It just lowers the expected profit from (say) $500 to (say) $450.

I expect hilariousetc's suggestion to decouple signatures from rank will still make accounts with more posts more valuable, as it gives signature impressions in much more old posts.

Lets see how many 3rd people can keep on shitposting and pay 100$ per banned account.

If they actually get banned, it will indeed be a great punishment. But it's also a slippery slope: it gives the forum a financial incentive to ban people.

I think people will take better care with their accounts once they treat it as an investment and make better posts from just the one or two as opposed to creating as many as you want for free currently to bleed lazy crapcoin campaigns dry.

Many are just too dumb (or uneducated) to know they make bad posts. They can't even read simple rules before posting in a thread.

[Welsh]

Question for Mods: does Bitcointalk keep track of the number of deleted posts per user? Otherwise it will be impossible to remember who is a repeat offender.

Even if they don't they only have to look at the post history of the account. Spammers would of made several of the type of posts that's been reported and they can make their decision based on that. Especially, over at the altcoin section, these "good luck" posts and misspelled replies like "good projet" are posted several times by the same user.

I count more than a 1000 successive Autobans, and a total of 6156 on that page. I assume it's a bot banning them, but I'm curious to know how this works.

Judging by Badbears response here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=985030.0
I don't think all of them are automatic bans.

[sapta]

250$ is probaly nearly a months salary for the most 3rd world people here.
Lets see how many 3rd people can keep on shitposting and pay 100$ per banned account.

Well I could even tell you right now on how many people from my country are willing to pay for a Copper Membership: 0. But somehow -maybe words got out about farmer who created so many accounts and shitposting without getting caught made a fortune from bounties etc- there was a guy that would buy some hero accounts just to do that and openly made a topic in my language like:

I'm going to invest my money on some hero accounts and try to make some money from bounties and signature, is it worth the BTC?

And then I remember sometimes ago Cyrus and I caught and banned a farmer with some established accounts (more than 15). What?!

Question for Mods: does Bitcointalk keep track of the number of deleted posts per user? Otherwise it will be impossible to remember who is a repeat offender.

Admin can see if an account has been banned before. Repeat offender would get longer ban or even a permanent one.

[jamalaezaz]

No, I don't think some sort of annual membership fee is a good idea and doubt theymos would go for it. Yes, some people will happily pay the fee on a few accounts if they can afford it, but the point is it severely restricts the number of accounts people will make because nobody is going to pay $100 for each of their dozens to hundreds of accounts (and if they do then fair play and the forum benefits financially). At the moment anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and this is a huge problem especially when people try be sneaky and farm them with bots or just shitpost which is easy to do in certain sections.

make sense.. but I've been managing Signatures and specially ICO bounties. I now very well how much a Full member and above rank account can generate with his signature from bounties.. I my self paid 0.5 to 1 BTC worth of altcoins per members (some month before) for their signatures.

[criptix]

No, I don't think some sort of annual membership fee is a good idea and doubt theymos would go for it. Yes, some people will happily pay the fee on a few accounts if they can afford it, but the point is it severely restricts the number of accounts people will make because nobody is going to pay $100 for each of their dozens to hundreds of accounts (and if they do then fair play and the forum benefits financially). At the moment anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and this is a huge problem especially when people try be sneaky and farm them with bots or just shitpost which is easy to do in certain sections.

make sense.. but I've been managing Signatures and specially ICO bounties. I now very well how much a Full member and above rank account can generate with his signature from bounties.. I my self paid 0.5 to 1 BTC worth of altcoins per members (some month before) for their signatures.

That is if they participated in the signature campaign over the whole duration.
If they get banned before they wont get money and lose i.e. 100$.
At the same time mods will have to enforce the rules more strictly and giving out bans faster to shitposters.

[coolcoinz]

That is if they participated in the signature campaign over the whole duration.
If they get banned before they wont get money and lose i.e. 100$.
At the same time mods will have to enforce the rules more strictly and giving out bans faster to shitposters.

Red trust works quite well. If all DT members started tagging spammers it would at least eliminate those annoying "know no english but still write" dudes. This combined with frequent updates of SMAS would greatly reduce the spam. What could be expected is some campaign management will start to see free money in this as there will be a lot of red/smas tagged posters around that would be willing to write for a fraction of the normal rate. They'd start employing them with minimum wage, like slaves. Also, some of those spammers that wouldn't be able to join a campaign with their tagged account would turn to account farming and selling. It's much easier to hide spam if you're not wearing a signature and writing in the less watched boards like off-topic.

[cellard]

It's a game theory problem: The moment you get rid of all that forum activity, which is ultimately legit, organic activity of real people, you are damaging your SEO. Google's algorithm doesn't care if 1000 indonesians are registering daily to get some peanuts on bounty campaigns, that activity is real activity and not flagged as bots, which helps ranking the site better, which helps ad revenue. I can't blame theymos on that. And realize the fact that internet traffic doesn't disappear, it finds new paths, and guess who would capitalize all that traffic into it's own forum: Exactly, Roger Ver. Do we want bitcoin dot com's forum to be the #1 ranked bitcoin forum?

Personally I just bookmark quality posters I like. If you like gmaxwell's contributions, bookmark him and follow his posts and ignore the bullshit. Of course this doesn't mean 3rd worlders spamming 100 times a day shouldn't be banned, but getting rid of all that traffic becomes a problem from a SEO perspective. You don't want to lower the demand of participation on your forum.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

It's a game theory problem: The moment you get rid of all that forum activity, which is ultimately legit, organic activity of real people, you are damaging your SEO. Google's algorithm doesn't care if 1000 indonesians are registering daily to get some peanuts on bounty campaigns, that activity is real activity and not flagged as bots, which helps ranking the site better, which helps ad revenue. I can't blame theymos on that. And realize the fact that internet traffic doesn't disappear, it finds new paths, and guess who would capitalize all that traffic into it's own forum: Exactly, Roger Ver. Do we want bitcoin dot com's forum to be the #1 ranked bitcoin forum?

Personally I just bookmark quality posters I like. If you like gmaxwell's contributions, bookmark him and follow his posts and ignore the bullshit. Of course this doesn't mean 3rd worlders spamming 100 times a day shouldn't be banned, but getting rid of all that traffic becomes a problem from a SEO perspective. You don't want to lower the demand of participation on your forum.

Yes, I agree with you, but as far as I’ve seen in similar posts on this section there are many more people who favor very hard and tough action, which would affect traffic. It all comes down to what theymos wants to do, though, and I hope he implements measures to reduce spam but not drastic ones that affect traffic. Also, because I think from my experience in other forums, that a forum is not a place only for “high quality posts”, as I’ve commented on other posts about this subject.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Another tough way of  doing it  : Instead of allowing signatures for only premium members,let it done by case by case basis.For instance,once a member signs up ,he can request for a signature approval once in 6 months.If he gets rejected,he basically cannot have another request for the next 6 months.If someone thinks they're good enough,they can ask for approval in a common signature board where mods/admins can grant the access.Involves too much manual work from time to time.

[eddie13]

I understand this problem is something to be upset about but a lot of the suggestions here are bigger government, authoritarian, and freedom limiting..
I just hate to see people always looking to big brother to solve their problems..

First off pretty much all of your suggestions will require more staff for you account vetting and buy in stuff.. That also puts a lot of power in that vetting persons hands. More centralized power is, well, not very concurrent with the ideals of Bitcoin..    
These suggestions are also freedom limiting in that none of this would give anyone any MORE freedom but rather take little pieces of it away in hopefully the right spots.. Their is nothing wrong with some limits on freedom when it comes to affecting other people around you, such as this situation, but in general increasing limits on freedom is not a good trend direction to be heading..
I know this is a company but what kind of examples do we want to set?    
                                  
And about this "company"..
Sure it is probably technically a company legaly or whatever but is this place run like a company or run like a community?
Do we have shareholders or an owner that really cares all that much about what it is ultimately worth? I don't think so..
I see said often, maybe even by theymos iirc, that bitcointalk doesn't really need donation money and fee money and all that sort, so they don't seem too money hungry to me..
About google SEO and ad money and stuff.. I don't see any ads around here do you? Where?
Theymos auctions off a little banner sometimes in this community and usually gets bought by someone in this community.. I doubt he much cares about the little coin it brings TBH..
Bitcointalk dsoesn't need more taxes, fees, value, adsense ranking, notta..
Bitcointalk comes from a "position of fuck you", doesn't need any more money.. They hodl..

Now I'm not criticizing anyone intentions here because this is a problem worth working on but many peoples initial reactions are to just ban this ban that make more laws hire more people, centralize more power, ugh.. You should understand.. What would you say if you heard stuff like that coming out of ted cruz or our new SCOTUS judge?
If you are truly a leftist and don't care about this freedom and liberty stuff then one.. What the heck are you in Bitcoin for? "Profits"? Two, well then, we disagree on things..


So, as I earlier suggested, this problem could be alleviated greatly in a way that centralize no more power, does not increase the size of the governorship, creates no more positions to waste resources through the friction of buerocracy, creates and needs no more taxes or fees, AND actually increases the freedom of the people!

Just create one more forum section, the "No Signature space", where signatures don't display (campaign managers can sort out the posts paid), and anyone and everyone that want to have a legit conversation free from the ravages of sig spam can simply use their freedom to post in this section if they do so desire..


Some things I don't like specifically about a few suggestions..
Now you want me to fork out like $100 in BTC to keep my account nice and have a signature? Really? I don't get paid for my signature, its there because I want to see them succeed.. I have tried the signature thing in the past and found that it wasn't for me.. I don't like to post according to someones rules.. I like to post whatever the heck I want, sometimes 1 liners, sometimes I like to blast out a page.. Don't care about any post quality calculation..
Also I don't like the deleating old threads ideas.. Shutting down ctive spam topics by all means hit em, but leave history stand imo..

Well, their's a morning rant for you guys.. I might be a bit out of place because I'm not as high and mighty as a lot of you so take it for what you will..

Edit: also, this way would also not "affect traffic" and seo etc whatever stuff if you care about those things..
BTW I think screw what anyone outside of bitcoin talk thinks, rnkings, seo, nonsense.. Remember that "position of FU"

[cellard]

Another tough way of  doing it  : Instead of allowing signatures for only premium members,let it done by case by case basis.For instance,once a member signs up ,he can request for a signature approval once in 6 months.If he gets rejected,he basically cannot have another request for the next 6 months.If someone thinks they're good enough,they can ask for approval in a common signature board where mods/admins can grant the access.Involves too much manual work from time to time.

This would end up on a ton of people, both posters and advertisers, moving into Roger Ver's bitcoin dot com forum, most likely. Not to mention it would require an insane amount of resources to monitor and judge everyone. You have to balance out what you are going to do, like I said before, you don't want to end up giving all that organic traffic (which is worth millions) to the enemy as a result.

Personally, I would bring back the noob jail, so newbies are forced to stay in the newbie section until at least 14 points of activity. If you are really new, then you first steps should be there as you learn (of course, there's the possibility that a cryptography expert didn't have an account here yet and would be stuck on there with the noobs, but I guess that's not usual). This would solve all the newly created accounts by broken english third worlders spamming nonsense. If you get rid of only that, the forum becomes way better. Then just keep banning the obvious low hanging fruit spammers manually as of now, and that's all. Don't go overkill with it, or you risk losing ranking points when people search for "Bitcoin forum" on the internet. It's the same as Roger wants to do with /r/btc, he wants it to show up above /r/bitcoin when people search "bitcoin reddit" on the Google.

[eddie13]

Another tough way of  doing it  : Instead of allowing signatures for only premium members,let it done by case by case basis.For instance,once a member signs up ,he can request for a signature approval once in 6 months.If he gets rejected,he basically cannot have another request for the next 6 months.If someone thinks they're good enough,they can ask for approval in a common signature board where mods/admins can grant the access.Involves too much manual work from time to time.

This would end up on a ton of people, both posters and advertisers, moving into Roger Ver's bitcoin dot com forum, most likely. Not to mention it would require an insane amount of resources to monitor and judge everyone. You have to balance out what you are going to do, like I said before, you don't want to end up giving all that organic traffic (which is worth millions) to the enemy as a result.

Personally, I would bring back the noob jail, so newbies are forced to stay in the newbie section until at least 14 points of activity. If you are really new, then you first steps should be there as you learn (of course, there's the possibility that a cryptography expert didn't have an account here yet and would be stuck on there with the noobs, but I guess that's not usual). This would solve all the newly created accounts by broken english third worlders spamming nonsense. If you get rid of only that, the forum becomes way better. Then just keep banning the obvious low hanging fruit spammers manually as of now, and that's all. Don't go overkill with it, or you risk losing ranking points when people search for "Bitcoin forum" on the internet. It's the same as Roger wants to do with /r/btc, he wants it to show up above /r/bitcoin when people search "bitcoin reddit" on the Google.

Right about the "insane amount of resources" part..

You are also right in a way about the ranking but just because of the current war with beecoin..

[pixie85]

Another tough way of  doing it  : Instead of allowing signatures for only premium members,let it done by case by case basis.For instance,once a member signs up ,he can request for a signature approval once in 6 months.If he gets rejected,he basically cannot have another request for the next 6 months.If someone thinks they're good enough,they can ask for approval in a common signature board where mods/admins can grant the access.Involves too much manual work from time to time.

Do you even realize how much work it would be? Every mod would open log in to see hundreds of requests every day and most of them would have to be denied. Denying would cause tears anger and hundreds of threads where people would sit and dwell upon the decisions, looking for conspiracy theories.
-He was allowed to post, he must be paying the mods! -I bet mods aren't allowing us to wear signatures because they're enrolling their alts!
Nobody would wait 6 months when leveling up a member takes less and it would make the accounts with privileges more valuable on the black market.

[digaran]

Charge any body wearing a signature at least $0.1 per post, I know that even if you do that, we beggars will shitpost no matter what, but if you are charging every body and if we post 10,000 times a day, you'll have $1000 to hire 4 new moderators. I'm begging you.

[otrkid70]

Are you people Blind?

(...)

Shut the fuck up already

Why so angry? Aren't you the guy who was writing sob stories about how you're going to die soon?

What the hell are you talking about???

You know what I'm talking about. Your cancer story. Have you already forgotten about that?

Vod, I saw you tagged a user for shitposting, and I think that's a great idea for someone in DT to do.  I've said it in another thread that this will disqualify shitposters from a lot of campaigns, and mods are definitely not banning all of them.  That's understandable and I'm not blaming mods for anything.  There are so many new shitposters, it's unreal and there's no way staff would see them all, and there are almost too many to report.  So props to Vod.

Your post was the #32 reply to this thread and the #14 reply by a PAID sig. Ad. user what is that like almost 37% replies by a PAID user? I guess that shows where the problem lies.

What's your paid post count now? 

Talking like a true anti- signature activist but you weren't like that in the old days. You have tried to rent out (or whore out like some people like to call it) your signature in the past, but now it's suddenly above your level.

As far as your first response....I won't even dignify that with  detailed response. I'll stay on topic.

As far as your second response here read part of my own Quote and don't put me in the same Category as you Pimping out your Sig space with Every post.

looking to sell my first 2 spots trying to keep away from the "Pay per post" these types of deals tend to make you a target with every post you make. I'm not a spammer and don't wan't to be labeled one.

You will always be a paid Spammer of the forum Which is the problem.