[Request] 1 Merit to become junior member and access to bounties sub

[Piggy]

What is needed to partecipate in bounties, is the signature space, so no sig. space no spam( in principle).
Maybe could be put in place some system that activate the signature space when you reach a certain amount of merit or you have fulfilled some other requirement.
At the moment it could happen that user A farm 10 account to Jr. Member to join a signature campaign with all of them, with all the spam/posts required to be in it.

[hilariousetc]

My request is to force newbies to obtain at least 1 Merit point to become junior member + you must be junior member or more to post in the bounties sub.

Not agree with 1 merit , many corrupted member's here 1 merit can be buy. So requirement of 1 merit will be merit abuse & opportunity for corrupted members for earning.

This isn't an excuse not to do anything. Going by this logic we should get rid of merit, activity and ranks because anyone can buy or farm an account. Even requiring one merit would help a lot. Good luck trying to get one merit on your dozens to hundreds of alt accounts you're farming to copy and paste on ICO campaigns. It puts a huge spanner in the works of abusers whilst not being that restrictive to everybody else and if you can't get one merit then you don't deserve to be a Junior Member or earn from signatures here.

What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion? Also, people should not be required to post in order to get paid; that's already against the rules.
An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
 - "I want to discuss things"
     = Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
 - "I want to make money"
     = Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
     = You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc.

How about just enforcing bounty managers to do their goddamn job. They literally just sit around doing nothing and get paid for that. Damn those lucky bastards. Isn't that something everybody wants? Everything is handled by bots,the post counting and calculation of stakes and all that stuff.

This is just logical and needs to happen. Staff shouldn't have to be the defacto bounty managers for everybody who doesn't do their job. If a campaign is paying hundreds of bots and spammers then they should be the one to receive the ban as they're the direct cause of this.

What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion? Also, people should not be required to post in order to get paid; that's already against the rules.

An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
 - "I want to discuss things"
     = Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
 - "I want to make money"
     = Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
     = You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc. (Quizzes are pointless to stop dedicated spammers, since an answer key will quickly be compiled, but it may help in cases where clueless people are ending up here.)

I like this idea, it's nice and easy.

Just cut the forum (virtually) in two:
1) Bitcoin and Altcoin discussion (serious) (gaining activity and merit) and
2) ANN on Off-topic (no additional activity and no merit)

Make the users choose where they want to start to post. A user can only post in only one part, but can change this setting in every 30 days (or 60 days even better). (It's useless for bots and account farmers, they won't wait, they will register accounts for both sections).

So if newbies want, they can participate in any bounty and after if they have read a lot here and are interested in Bitcoin and serious things too, they can change their mind (and their settings too), but I'm afraid classic bounty hunters won't change at all...

This would cause that the serious section won't be spammed with bounty posts/signatures. I don't know if this would be OK for the companies running the bounties for their ICOs, because they will lose the serious part of the forum, their marketing won't reach the serious members of the crypto world (if they care about it at all, maybe they just need to present at the ICO rating websites that they have an active ANN thread in BTT and they have enough posts there daily...)

The serious section would still have the classic signature campaigns with reliable campaign managers, who will take care about the quality.

It won't matter if there's still no merit requirement to become Junior. All they have to do is wait 2 weeks or so and make 30 spam posts then they're one and can spam away everywhere else and get paid for it by ICO campaigns. People will also just start registering via spreadsheets so they don't actually have to post in the Bounty board whilst still abusing everywhere else.

personally I believe that the bounty sub should be a reward and not a right. Members should be able to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge or commitment to be let into that area, and I think that 1 merit isn't enough - 10 or 20 should be the bar IMO..

I'd prefer them being locked into the Bounty board. At least the disease is quarantined to that section then. It's when these bounty hunters join a sig campaign and start crapping all over the forum that is causing the most damage.

[r_f_n]

What is needed to partecipate in bounties, is the signature space, so no sig. space no spam( in principle). ~snip~

Yeah, I have a same opinion with you.

So based on this I would like to suggest:

• I don't' think 1 Merit is not enough, at least 5 merits to become jr. member, and 20 to become member

• To make bounty board not accessible before reach jr. member rank would be a good idea!

• Force out the bounty managers to update the rules: no sig. campaign for jr. members + reject the application from member rank or above, who didn't receive at least 1 merit in last 30 days from moderators (local or global) or merit source, when applying for sig. campaign. In this way, I think the account farming will be worthless.

[athanz88]

What is needed to partecipate in bounties, is the signature space, so no sig. space no spam( in principle). ~snip~

Yeah, I have a same opinion with you.

So based on this I would like to suggest:

• I don't' think 1 Merit is not enough, at least 5 merits to become jr. member, and 20 to become member

• To make bounty board not accessible before reach jr. member rank would be a good idea!

• Force out the bounty managers to update the rules: no sig. campaign for jr. members + reject the application from member rank or above, who didn't receive at least 1 merit in last 30 days from moderators (local or global) or merit source, when applying for sig. campaign. In this way, I think the account farming will be worthless.

While the suggestions are good, i must highlight the suggestion number 3. As i say, the suggestion is good but i think it will encourage more merit farming and abusing, no? Even the manager of the campaign can give the participants a merit if it means that the manager will run his/her job successfully without a quality control. What must be added to your suggestion is the managers need to make sure they are not hiring a spammer, but the works take a lot of time and not many managers want to do that and some doesnt even care because they think spamming/bad advertising is still an advertizing, it spreads.

[r_f_n]

While the suggestions are good, i must highlight the suggestion number 3. As i say, the suggestion is good but i think it will encourage more merit farming and abusing, no? Even the manager of the campaign can give the participants a merit if it means that the manager will run his/her job successfully without a quality control. What must be added to your suggestion is the managers need to make sure they are not hiring a spammer, but the works take a lot of time and not many managers want to do that and some doesnt even care because they think spamming/bad advertising is still an advertizing, it spreads.

Yeah, you're right. Therefore what I said before was 'forcing' them to do this, such as locking their thread if they did not apply the rules to the campaign, or even get them banned. I don't know whether this can be effective because as far as I know, there are any campaigns that are currently active and managed by managers who have red trust, but its still running!

[athanz88]

snip

Yeah, you're right. Therefore what I said before was 'forcing' them to do this, such as locking their thread if they did not apply the rules to the campaign, or even get them banned. I don't know whether this can be effective because as far as I know, there are any campaigns that are currently active and managed by managers who have red trust, but its still running!

Well, the original function of a forum, including this one, is for people to gather and talk about particular things they have interest on and i guess even the founder of this forum itself did not expect for this forum to be able to provide the members the ability to make money from a scheme like bounty and signature. Now when its growing fast and making the forum have more spammer, it is hard already to control the situation. Forcing things to be happen maybe a good solution but i am afraid it will cost something to the forum itself.

Like hillariousetc said, 1 merit to be junior member solution would help a lot, and i believe this would help a lot too because it is a great idea, although i think it needs to be higher to be junior member. But any of this great idea would be good if it can be applied sooner, as I think this is the suitable solution for now, and it goes well with merit purposes itself.

[mazdafunsun]

While the suggestions are good, i must highlight the suggestion number 3. As i say, the suggestion is good but i think it will encourage more merit farming and abusing, no? Even the manager of the campaign can give the participants a merit if it means that the manager will run his/her job successfully without a quality control. What must be added to your suggestion is the managers need to make sure they are not hiring a spammer, but the works take a lot of time and not many managers want to do that and some doesnt even care because they think spamming/bad advertising is still an advertizing, it spreads.

It requires tremendous work from mods to force bounty manager to do or not to do something .
Also i dont think that scenario of bounty manager giving out merit to spammers is realistic, they dont want to get their reputation demaged.

I think that the solution would be to disable Jr. Member signature for everyone who has less than 1 merit, it would help tremendously.
And no, i dont think that merit abusers would easily bypass this rule because almost all of free merit was spent in the first months after merit system was introduced.

[withlove99]

What is needed to partecipate in bounties, is the signature space, so no sig. space no spam( in principle).
Maybe could be put in place some system that activate the signature space when you reach a certain amount of merit or you have fulfilled some other requirement.
At the moment it could happen that user A farm 10 account to Jr. Member to join a signature campaign with all of them, with all the spam/posts required to be in it.

As I know in the past, rank of member are based on the person's activity on Bitcointalk, merit system start from January . I see the problem you mention a little unfair for newbie. when not easy to get merit.

[hilariousetc]

While the suggestions are good, i must highlight the suggestion number 3. As i say, the suggestion is good but i think it will encourage more merit farming and abusing, no? Even the manager of the campaign can give the participants a merit if it means that the manager will run his/her job successfully without a quality control. What must be added to your suggestion is the managers need to make sure they are not hiring a spammer, but the works take a lot of time and not many managers want to do that and some doesnt even care because they think spamming/bad advertising is still an advertizing, it spreads.

It requires tremendous work from mods to force bounty manager to do or not to do something .
Also i dont think that scenario of bounty manager giving out merit to spammers is realistic, they dont want to get their reputation demaged.

It's not as much work as running around after them trying to clean up the spammers and bots they are paying to crap all over the forum. The problem needs to be tackled at the source. If you're paying kids to graffiti on walls all over a city then it's pointless just wasting time and energy running around on wild goose chases arresting the kids day after day as it will solve nothing. There are always hundreds of kids you can keep paying and they are willing to do your dirty work. Spend time catching the bad guys behind it all in the first place. Punishing them wouldn't be that difficult either. If they come here and do nothing about spam and pay bots to copy and paste then their threads are trashed, accounts banned and signatures blacklisted. If they can no longer advertise here then they're screwed. Once they start to realise that doing nothing is unacceptable the culture around here will change very fast and campaigns will do what they're supposed to.

I think that the solution would be to disable Jr. Member signature for everyone who has less than 1 merit, it would help tremendously.
And no, i dont think that merit abusers would easily bypass this rule because almost all of free merit was spent in the first months after merit system was introduced.

This is a given. I hope theymos elaborates on why he put it in the No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified camp. It's a quick and simple fix for numerous things.

[athanz88]

snip

It requires tremendous work from mods to force bounty manager to do or not to do something .
Also i dont think that scenario of bounty manager giving out merit to spammers is realistic, they dont want to get their reputation demaged.

It's not as much work as running around after them trying to clean up the spammers and bots they are paying to crap all over the forum. The problem needs to be tackled at the source. If you're paying kids to graffiti on walls all over a city then it's pointless just wasting time and energy running around on wild goose chases arresting the kids day after day as it will solve nothing. There are always hundreds of kids you can keep paying and they are willing to do your dirty work. Spend time catching the bad guys behind it all in the first place. Punishing them wouldn't be that difficult either. If they come here and do nothing about spam and pay bots to copy and paste then their threads are trashed, accounts banned and signatures blacklisted. If they can no longer advertise here then they're screwed. Once they start to realise that doing nothing is unacceptable the culture around here will change very fast and campaigns will do what they're supposed to.

@mazdafunsun
I think the same way like hilariousetc. Sources of the problem need to be controlled, and bad managers are one of them in my opinion. It does not need a lot of work and i guess that is the job risks of the managers, they must spend their time to check the posts of their participants, and maybe reporting the posts if they find the quality is too low. If the managers only grading work from post count which stated in profile page, then i can be a manager too, heck even a primary school kid can do this job too.

Making rules or standard to be a managers can be applied if there is an authority who manages the managers. Making a list like SMAS or DarkList is a great thing to do too which can help to control the problem from managers side.

[escalante28]

You are pushing them to cheat if you do that. We as a jr. member are having hard time how we are going to level up our reputations here through merit system. If that rule you want will be implemented, I won't wonder if most of the members here will cheat through buying merits, high rank will abuse too by selling too expensive merits.
Sometimes being so strict and dominant is not good. Instead of that why don't you advocate them how to write a new topic that can makes other give them a merit. I believe there is also a moderator for spamming so my opinion is when caught by spamming ban them permanently so others won't follow them.

[athanz88]

You are pushing them to cheat if you do that. We as a jr. member are having hard time how we are going to level up our reputations here through merit system. If that rule you want will be implemented, I won't wonder if most of the members here will cheat through buying merits, high rank will abuse too by selling too expensive merits.
Sometimes being so strict and dominant is not good. Instead of that why don't you advocate them how to write a new topic that can makes other give them a merit. I believe there is also a moderator for spamming so my opinion is when caught by spamming ban them permanently so others won't follow them.

Well, right now they are cheating too, like, using bot in a campaign or using multiple accounts on a campaign or bounty, so i believe there will be less cheating like i have mentioned if they can not go to junior member easily. Merit selling? how do you know that? And you are accusing high ranked member far selling merit? I guess if you can say that then you have enough evidence so please make a thread and report about that. I would like to see the thread and will support you if you have the evidence.

Advocate them? You think how much thread and posts already made for the purpose of teaching people to get merit? Even a member here make a thread to guide people to use a good english, and some of them even made a contest/challenge that can increase the knowledge of members here and the reward for the challenge is merits.

There is a moderator for spamming, but have you ever done some report? Try to report some spam first and then you will know that the spam is way bigger than the human can even handle, that is why we need to change it from the system.

[jerick6]

If this thing could lessen the spammer why not?  As a newbie,  I understand what your point is and I knew also that their so many people against with it even it is for the enhancement of our community.

1 merit is not that bad, if you can then we can do it also right?   

[hilariousetc]

You are pushing them to cheat if you do that. We as a jr. member are having hard time how we are going to level up our reputations here through merit system. If that rule you want will be implemented, I won't wonder if most of the members here will cheat through buying merits, high rank will abuse too by selling too expensive merits.

We are not 'pushing' anyone to do anything. Besides, if this is the case then why would you not do this anyway to buy your way through Member-Hero ranks or just even buy an account? There isn't any logic to what you're saying and you're completely biased in that you're worried this is going to push your further behind in trying to reach a decent rank to earn more. I don't even care if these idiots did try buy merit whether successfully or not. That is still a huge hoop to jump through and it requires time, initiative and money. They're not going to be able to afford to buy x amount of merit for their 3/6/12/200/2000 alt accounts anyway and that's why there needs to be a merit requirement to become a Junior because anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts here for free. It doesn't matter if they never make it past Junior either because when you've got dozens or hundreds or even thousands of accounts copy and pasting other's responses and getting paid for it by ICOs as a Junior you don't need a higher rank and it's big business for doing nothing. Pure passive income that destroys the forum in the process. This needs to change and removing signatures or requiring merit is one of the only ways we'll stop this abuse.

Besides, you already got three merit so why are you complaining? Is it that maybe you're going to struggle to get the same on all your other accounts? Did you buy the merit or did you earn it legitimately? Either your argument/logic is wrong or you did actually just buy it and that's what you're annoyed about. You would already be a Junior under this proposal so I don't understand why you're against it unless there's something else going on here. Unsurprising you've received two merit from one user and sent him one back. I'm sure that's a simple merit trade.

Sometimes being so strict and dominant is not good.

How is requiring at least one merit strict? This forum is such a shitshow because it's so lax in policing users or enforcing rules. It's the opposite of strict. Users and even campaign managers can largely do whatever they want here and as such you get users farming their accounts in their hundreds just by writing a generic crap sentence that nobody cares to read and ICOs who will happily pay them for it.

Instead of that why don't you advocate them how to write a new topic that can makes other give them a merit. 

How do you do that exactly? We're not here to teach children what to do and most won't be able to do it to a competent level anyway. Most people who come here these days are silly, naive kids who can't speak much English and don't know anything about bitcoin and have only come here to earn. This would be like trying to teach physics in Mandarin to English teenagers who couldn't care less about physics or Mandarin. No chance.

I believe there is also a moderator for spamming so my opinion is when caught by spamming ban them permanently so others won't follow them.

Oh great, let the moderators handle everything. Signature spam isn't the job of the staff here, but users do get banned, but tell me what is the point in banning one or a dozen alt accounts when the very same user has hundreds of even thousands more in their stockpile that they carry on doing the same with that we don't know about? It's utterly pointless and you need to tackle the issue at the source. It's the campaign managers job to police campaigns and they aren't doing their job at all and so they need to be forced to do it and one of those ways is to force them not to be able to accept Junior Members. How do we do that? Remove Juniors signatures or at the very least require a merit to become one. If you can't get a merit whether you earn it or buy it then you shouldn't be able to earn on that account. This is a very simple solution to a complex problem.

[hotforblockchain]

i like the option of signature but the spam in alt-coin and other sections is just so overwhelming so I do like this idea of 1 merit before having the option to use signature
At the start i just could not understand why there is many shitposts, then i learned about bounties.

[mazdafunsun]

It's not as much work as running around after them trying to clean up the spammers and bots they are paying to crap all over the forum. The problem needs to be tackled at the source. If you're paying kids to graffiti on walls all over a city then it's pointless just wasting time and energy running around on wild goose chases arresting the kids day after day as it will solve nothing. There are always hundreds of kids you can keep paying and they are willing to do your dirty work. Spend time catching the bad guys behind it all in the first place. Punishing them wouldn't be that difficult either. If they come here and do nothing about spam and pay bots to copy and paste then their threads are trashed, accounts banned and signatures blacklisted. If they can no longer advertise here then they're screwed. Once they start to realise that doing nothing is unacceptable the culture around here will change very fast and campaigns will do what they're supposed to.

@mazdafunsun
I think the same way like hilariousetc. Sources of the problem need to be controlled, and bad managers are one of them in my opinion. It does not need a lot of work and i guess that is the job risks of the managers, they must spend their time to check the posts of their participants, and maybe reporting the posts if they find the quality is too low. If the managers only grading work from post count which stated in profile page, then i can be a manager too, heck even a primary school kid can do this job too.

Making rules or standard to be a managers can be applied if there is an authority who manages the managers. Making a list like SMAS or DarkList is a great thing to do too which can help to control the problem from managers side.

ok, you do make a solid point that chasing bad posts is much more work than working with managers.
But what about the bounty platforms which are running signature campaigns outside bitcointalk?

Still I think that the fastest way to decrease the spam is to enable merit reqirements for Jr.Members and disable signatures for those Jr. who has no merit.

[hilariousetc]

Still I think that the fastest way to decrease the spam is to enable merit reqirements for Jr.Members and disable signatures for those Jr. who has no merit.

You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them.  

[athanz88]

snip

You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them.  

Same feeling here. After looking a post from Theymos on how do he thinks about the suggestion, i am making a confused face. Why does he put 1 merit requirement in the label "Ok and might needed some fix/changes" and then disappear again. We cant win this war because we are just people facing the bots and other people, plus the number of people who care about this spam matters is minority in the forum.

hillariousetc, do you have any guess of the reason why Theymos said that to the suggestion ?

[hilariousetc]

snip

You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them.  

Same feeling here. After looking a post from Theymos on how do he thinks about the suggestion, i am making a confused face. Why does he put 1 merit requirement in the label "Ok and might needed some fix/changes" and then disappear again. We cant win this war because we are just people facing the bots and other people, plus the number of people who care about this spam matters is minority in the forum.

hillariousetc, do you have any guess of the reason why Theymos said that to the suggestion ?

No idea. Theymos didn't respond when I asked him both publicly and privately. All we can do is hope that he explains his reasoning at some point. My best guess is he doesn't think it will help much or is too restrictive or something, but I would disagree on all fronts. Hopefully he just thinks it needs some tweaking to be effective. Cyrus said this about the matter though:

Requiring Merit to get to Jr. Member isn't probably the best approach: begging and the sense of need of increase in community oversight over Merit abuse are two things that come to mind.

Which my response to that was:

I would disagree. If this was the case we would see such with Juniors begging for ten merit to become Members which doesn't happen often. People who do beg for merit though are handled like any other beggar and their threads are trashed and they often get negative feedback from the community. The longer we do nothing the worse things get. It's not going to be long before the only people who are posting here are bounty hunters, sig spammers, copy and pasters and bots, if that hasn't happened really already. The chance of any worthwhile discussion going on is little to none these days. It's just Junior Members churning out barely decipherable one liners then moving onto the next thread. They're not here to discuss, just to post a sentence or two to get paid.

I didn't get a response back. If what he said was true then it would happen at all ranks begging for merit to move up which barely ever happens. Besides, I would rather deal with minimal amount of begging and merit abuse than not do anything about the thousands of bots and spammers that are getting paid to post nonsense or copy and paste which isn't magically going to sort itself out so we need to do something and making sure these bots and spammers can't get paid for shitposting and copy and pasting as Juniors is a big step in the right direction IMO.

[Crypto Girl]

I don't have anything to add in the suggestions above, consequently all are reasonable to not be implemented. I know Theymos has been reviewing this so let give him more time to this.

Yeah, you're right. Therefore what I said before was 'forcing' them to do this, such as locking their thread if they did not apply the rules to the campaign, or even get them banned. I don't know whether this can be effective because as far as I know, there are any campaigns that are currently active and managed by managers who have red trust, but its still running!

Of course, these red tag managers doesn't bother if their participants are spamming or not, as long as they earning from running a bounty then it will be all fine. Is there anything we can expect from these managers? Obviously, nothing.


Undeniably, spam posts are beyond our control and if these things will implemented we can see this forum in its fresh and informative look.