How about we trial a sub board of bitcoin discussion where posts in there don't count towards activity or post count and signatures aren't displayed at all?
Removing certain sections from contributing to activity/post counts has been discussed in the past, but never was integrated.
Was there a reason this discussion vanished/idea was dropped?
It's been brought up multiple times and I bump the suggestion every so often in the staff board. Theymos even created a thread about what boards to discount a year or two ago in Meta but no further action was taken. Boards like Games and Rounds and Bounties/Tokens need to be removed from counting towards posts/activity because posts in there contribute absolutely nothing and they're being massively abused by farmers farming accounts and shitposters trying to rank up. I've even seen people use bots in Games and Rounds to copy someone else's posts from earlier in the thread so they obviously don't even care about claiming the bounty but they care about easily getting that precious activity and post count by doing nothing.
Big part of the new users are not following/ reading the rules. But there are also not so well organized rules and it's not easy to find them. Newbies keep asking the same questions over and over again. Maybe this is the way to improve other members Activity points.
Yes, this is something I've been thinking about also. I was going to propose that all new users are forced to read the rules upon sign-up and everyone else are mass PMed about the rules or we create a handful of 'golden rules' that must be obeyed or permabans are issued on sight (no ref links, do not copy and paste content, do not ask about activity etc). There will be no excuses theat "I didn't know it was against the rules to copy and paste or post ref links" etc. Translations of the Golden Rules will also be included.
Why there is no 2FA on the login? If you have sms authentication and long process for changing your initially registered mobile number it will be difficult for people to register 100 account and reduce the account selling.
There will be several two factor options on the new forum so I get why he hasn't bothered coding them for this one, but if the new forum is still 1+ years away I think it would be worthwhile implementing asap. Requiring email verification would be another step in limiting or slowing down account farming as it's just another hoop to jump through.
I have mostly ruled out:
- Banning account sales.
Aside from the possible account sales moving to external sites or platforms, is there any other reason behind ruling this out?
I don't think we should continue with the logic of 'people will sell them elsewhere so we might as well just allow them'. People will continue to sell child porn and malware elsewhere but we don't and shouldn't allow them to be sold here using the same logic. Disallowing account sales is easily enforceable and I think this is something the majority of people would support other than those financially benefiting from their sale.
The main issue is the account sales in the first place, it would be best to allow a single account for each person only (I know it will be hard with the use of similar VPN's and etc... but there are other forums that actually identify each users regardless of them using similar VPN's and etc...). Not sure how hard that is to get implemented, but I think it will be worth the hassle.
This is something I've also been thinking about. Maybe we should only allow one account to be created per IP. Too many people are abusing the 'you can have as many accounts as you want' rule to literally farm dozens-hundreds of accounts. There's only so many proxies in the world and the most popular ones would soon get used up. We could maybe include as one of the perks in the donator ranks to 'whitelist' your IP so you can create an additional account or multiple ones. We're also getting hit by hundreds of bot accounts mass spam PMing people and offering bumping services to bot peoples threads disguised as fake questions and interest in their ICO etc. If there's only one account per IP this would seriously limit this sort of shady business as I suspect they're using only a few IPs or proxies.
How about we trial a sub board of bitcoin discussion where posts in there don't count towards activity or post count and signatures aren't displayed at all?
I think this is much needed in Off-topic and Politics & Society sections (not just trial, implement it right away on those sections).
Off topic, yeah, as it's just abused by farmers en masse but I fear these shitposters would just move elsewhere like they have into Politics and Economics/Speculation. Politics can have some decent discussions in there but throwing some extra man power at that board by giving it a couple of dedicated mods would help clean up the mess. I'm going to put a sticky in Politics soon warning that users will be banned if they continue to treat it like Off Topic v2.0 with unsubstantial threads because some of the topics created in there are ludicrous (
do you prefer beaches or mountains,
do you love your parents etc. It's just kids who have absolutely no knowledge about bitcoin or probably anything else for that matter just trying to earn money and/or rank up their accounts).
I don't think prizes are a good thing. It would just create bad feeling if one didn't win one.
I think payment from sig campaigns is probably a sufficient enough reward, but maybe some prizes for the best posters or contributors could be a good thing. Maybe a select group of trusted users or staff that could vote for the best posters deserving of rewards or maybe only rewards are given to users who don't even have a signature but post worthwhile contributions anyway (people like DannyHamilton etc (who I'm surprised is even still here to be honest)).
Blocking signatures completely would be a bad thing in my opinion. I use my sig for various minor things, such as selling bitcoin domain names. This is the only option in this forum if one wants to offer Bitcoin domain names.
I don't think this is something you have to worry about as theymos has said this is something he's unlikely to do multiple times now including this thread. I agree that it would be a shame to lose them completely but I also think signature campaigns cannot continue on as they are as the only people who are going to be posting are third world shitposters abusing lazy campaigns and this has pretty much happened already as more and more shitposters sign up daily and good/great contributors are leaving on a weekly basis.
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures.
Removing signatures all together would be the best, but atleast with this one we would have a few safe places without all the spam.
Demanding a certan rank to post would only lead to more account sales no matter how it is done.Not if the only way to get a signature is to buy it from the forum. This would kill account sales 99%.
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
I am a little more hesitant to support something like this. While many people use signatures to earn income from advertisements, some people also use signatures to make political statements, support certain causes, etc., and I don't think it would be a good idea to prevent that in certain threads.
They could still do that. Just not in the spam free board. If they don't want their political statements to be 'silenced' then they can choose just to not post in that board.
what other ideas do people have?
When an outsized percentage of users participating in a signature campaign are banned for post quality related reasons, the company behind the campaign should get called out by the forum. This is somewhat similar to what caused the PrimeDice signature campaign to close down, except that long standing users within the community were calling out the harm that the PD signature campaign was causing to the forum. This would give incentives to those ultimately behind signature campaigns to weed out low quality advertisers, as if they don't they will be known as someone contributing to the spam problem.
I've suggested that if a campaign has x amount of users banned in a month that their signatures are removed/blacklisted and/or their threads trashed and accounts banned. It really shouldn't be acceptable for people to come here and do absolutely nothing other than pay people to make spam in the hundreds. If we let people get away with this then why would they ever change their habits when they get a shitload of advertising for free which damages the forum quality in the process? If ICO campaigns quickly have their accounts banned and threads trashed they'll soon get the message that they need to get on top of the spam if they want the privilege of advertising here for free.
I do like the idea of a paid membership (copper) to allow users to "skip" the process of accumulating activity points to achieve a certain ranking status. If someone buys a copper membership, at the very least, it shows they have a genuine interest in participating in conversations.
I don't see any issue in at least offering these ranks alongside being able to rank up naturally. If I was a new user to this forum I would gladly donate $100 or more to get a Full Member or Hero rank-sized signature and I'm sure hundreds will too (the money would be made back within a week or two anyhow). It will put a stop to people just lazily spamming over 6 months just to hit Full Member rank or whatever or even just buying an account which many people still do so it benefits the forum in multiple ways.
Charge every body $0.5 per post if wearing a signature, when they see they can't earn anything from posting for campaigns with low payments, they wouldn't join them, and campaigns would have to raise their payments, when they pay more money, they would expect higher quality posters.
If people keep on participating regardless of paying $0.5 per post, you'd at least have some money to pay for more staff and moderators.
Take 5% of the funds raised in every ICO, make these beggars pay tax instead of offering a paid membership rank.
Making people pay the forum per post isn't a good idea and would be too messy to even implement not to mention most people just wouldn't bother with it. It would be better and easier just to police low paying or badly run signature campaigns instead, and/or make people pay for their signature so they at least have to financially invest in something here.
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
The no signatures part I don't really like as that doesn't seem fair to advertisers. They, in theory, pay for quality posts in serious discussions that are far more likely to be read.
It's not fair to everyone else who has to put up with the spam from badly run campaigns and the staff who are left to de facto run them and clean up their mess for free. The point here is that these campaigns then wouldn't pay for posts in those boards with no signature.
I have mostly ruled out:
- Banning account sales.
Would you be able to explain why it is exactly you are against this? This policy alone encourages hackers, scammers and farming. I imagine a lot of accounts have been compromised for the sole purpose to sell on. Banning this, at least would make it more difficult and less popular. Yeah you would still have them selling on external sites but, it may reduce the amount of accounts being compromised/sold.
Yeah, there's a massive black market that we've created by linking signature size to account level and hence why there is such a market for hacked accounts. I'm not really sure why theymos is so dead set against this. Accounts would become next to worthless if signatures are removed from them and the only way to get one is to donate so next to nobody will be selling them either on this site or any others. 99% of their value is in their signature sizes and if we take that away then they become next to worthless and instead of money going to shitty account farmers and scummy account hackers that money then goes to the forum instead. Win win.
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
This has been discussed multiple times and the majority of users actually support this idea. Even if this isn't the answer to spam in other sections, this should be introduced anyway. Sections which don't count activity, posts and doesn't show a persons trust. So that users can at least have a genuine discussion without having to filter the spam out.
It doesn't stop the issue of spam on the rest of the forum (but that can be tackled by giving more powers to other mods and getting tough on crap campaigns and spammers), but at least it provides a safe heaven for those that are only interested in quality discussion and not just financially motivated by pay to post campaigns. I and I'm sure many others would still gladly contribute to discussions in there even though I know I wouldn't be paid for them and it would really show just what sort of poster you are if you never even bothered making posts in there at all.
