Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)

[Veleor]

My offers

1. Spoiler button.

Add a [spoiler] button so users can hide long texts areas with it, as like on this forum: https://www.rtsoft.com/forums/showthread.php?23873-Click-to-show-spoiler-HOW-!

2. Alert message before posting.

Considering how many accounts were banned because of copy and pasting, it may be worth to add warning in the field of sending message.
_

3. Pin this topic and theymos title guide in Meta.

[1714024465]

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[coinlocket$]

Since trust is mostly for trading, what about to add a "new and separate trust system for abusers"?

I've reported around 200+ abusers but only a few of them are tagged, many DT doesn't want/doesn't have time to tag them.

List of Abusers waiting red tag.

I can report even 200 more accounts but no one is tagging them. 

[LoyceV]

Now that we have a 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members, I suggest to extend this to anyone who wants to post on the Altcoin board. My original post including Veleor's suggestion to post it here:

I'd say require at least 1 Merit to post in the altcoin section.

You can add this offer to the special list that it is not lost here.
Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)

The main idea isn't to stop real users, and I do realize they'll be "collateral damage", but this may be the only way to stop paid bumping bots. Copper Members shouldn't be restricted either. This will give the spammers something to lose. Currently, a spammer can create 6000 accounts in a day, which is enough to bump many threads for a very long time (and earn a lot of money from it).
Just 1 Merit (or 0.00208333BTC for Copper Membership) per account can still be abused, but not at this magnitude.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Now that we have a 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members, I suggest to extend this to anyone who wants to post on the Altcoin board. My original post including Veleor's suggestion to post it here:

I'd say require at least 1 Merit to post in the altcoin section.

You can add this offer to the special list that it is not lost here.
Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)

The main idea isn't to stop real users, and I do realize they'll be "collateral damage", but this may be the only way to stop paid bumping bots. Copper Members shouldn't be restricted either. This will give the spammers something to lose. Currently, a spammer can create 6000 accounts in a day, which is enough to bump many threads for a very long time (and earn a lot of money from it).
Just 1 Merit (or 0.00208333BTC for Copper Membership) per account can still be abused, but not at this magnitude.

The Altcoin board should be nuked, it’s an about cess pool full of shitty posters & bounty hunters aka shit posters.
It literally hurts my eyes just reading the rubbish in there.

[LoyceV]

The Altcoin board should be nuked, it’s an about cess pool full of shitty posters & bounty hunters aka shit posters.
It literally hurts my eyes just reading the rubbish in there.

Drastic measures
I still have some hope the board can be saved, but that requires maybe 99% or more of the posts to disappear. If 1 Merit isn't enough to accomplish that, I wouldn't mind seeing it raised further.
Make people earn the right to post about altcoins on Bitcointalk.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

The Altcoin board should be nuked, it’s an about cess pool full of shitty posters & bounty hunters aka shit posters.
It literally hurts my eyes just reading the rubbish in there.

Drastic measures
I still have some hope the board can be saved, but that requires maybe 99% or more of the posts to disappear.

Maybe a bit over the top by me there
It’s just so frustrating reading all the crap on there. It’s spilled over into Bitcoin Discussion now too which saddens me.

[LoyceV]

It’s spilled over into Bitcoin Discussion now too which saddens me.

Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist. Politics & Society is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to Flying Hellfish).

[krishnapramod]

It’s spilled over into Bitcoin Discussion now too which saddens me.

Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist. Politics & Society is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to Flying Hellfish).

Now Bitcoin discussion is far better than what it used to be a couple of months ago. Spam threads are quickly getting locked, duplicates reported. Although copy-pasters are getting banned, altcoin discussion board is still worse with duplicate threads and spam mega threads not getting locked. Maybe if a good number of reporters actively reporting on altcoin discussion board (not bounties and announcements), half the spam would be gone, making it better for discussions.

[TheBeardedBaby]

~

Now Bitcoin discussion is far better than what it used to be a couple of months ago. Spam threads are quickly getting locked, duplicates reported. Although copy-pasters are getting banned, altcoin discussion board is still worse with duplicate threads and spam mega threads not getting locked. Maybe if a good number of reporters actively reporting on altcoin discussion board (not bounties and announcements), half the spam would be gone, making it better for discussions.

It's not so quick process, keep in mind that before the changes / like the announcement for the reporter badges,the new mods like Welsh and Flying Hellfish, the more detailed reports stats and some other recent changes / people were not so familiar with reporting and only a few were doing it /I was one of them/. Now more are interested in doing it in a hope to get a badge one day, which is good. Imagine when the badges are actually implemented, there will be more and more people reporting and they gonna focus on different sections of  the forum. We are going the right way so it will come the time to the Altcoin section too, just wait.

[hilariousetc]

2. Alert message before posting.

Considering how many accounts were banned because of copy and pasting, it may be worth to add warning in the field of sending message..

I think this is a good idea and I've suggested something similar before, but with warnings for people not to post threads in the wrong subs. For instance a warning like Posts about the discussion of Bitcoin's value do not belong here but in Speculation in Bitcoin Discussion, and in Press: This board is for news about Bitcoin only - Do not post alt coin articles in here etc. Would help cut down on a lot of needless time wasted from staff having to move threads that shouldn't be posted there in the first place.

Now that we have a 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members, I suggest to extend this to anyone who wants to post on the Altcoin board. My original post including Veleor's suggestion to post it here:

I'd say require at least 1 Merit to post in the altcoin section.

You can add this offer to the special list that it is not lost here.
Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)

The main idea isn't to stop real users, and I do realize they'll be "collateral damage", but this may be the only way to stop paid bumping bots. Copper Members shouldn't be restricted either. This will give the spammers something to lose. Currently, a spammer can create 6000 accounts in a day, which is enough to bump many threads for a very long time (and earn a lot of money from it).
Just 1 Merit (or 0.00208333BTC for Copper Membership) per account can still be abused, but not at this magnitude.

I really don't think this is something theymos would go for as he doesn't want to limit people's ability to post here which this does. All it would do is put off genuine users whilst the people who came here to abuse the forum would just grin and bear it.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist. Politics & Society is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to Flying Hellfish).

I completely agree on your point regarding Bitcoin Discussion. This is bitcointalk, first and foremost a forum about bitcoin. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main board people are interested in. It's the first board most people will visit when they discover the forum, and it gives off a terrible first impression. As it stands, many senior members won't even venture in to it because of all the spam. The sub needs a dedicated mod that can clean up the spam and monitor any thread that reaches 5+ pages, as 99% of them are spam mega-threads which OP has long deserted.

I worry about the unintended consequences of the 1 merit limit for posting in Altcoin boards, however. Yes, many of them are bump bots, but there are a non-insignificant number of spammers just trying to rank up. Ban them from Altcoins and they will spill over to other boards - Bitcoin Discussion being the most likely.

[TheBeardedBaby]

As I stated earlier I don't see the need at the moment.
The ranking up process is locked by the new rules. The total shitposters cannot rank up to Jr. the ones that are more advances will probably reach up to member but not more.

Those shitposters that got the merit airdropped are now being filtered, I see so many ban appeals every day, so after some time the forum will be cleaned from most of the spammers. This process will continue and more and more of those who post nonsense will be filtered naturally.
I think theymos did enough changes /restrictions/ which will have more impact in a bit longer run.

[RivAngE]

What I see as the 2 main sources of problems are,
(1) The thread bumpers which seem to be paid people with multiple accounts or even organised groups of many people, not bots. The way those bumpers post in forums and answer to each other seems very relative and on-topic with every thread so they can't be bots, but I have my reasons to believe they're not normal users either (I mean... what normal person would visit 10 different altcoin ANN threads and praise every one of these projects as being the best!)
(2) Just visit the "Patrol" page and see the last posts, I'm sure 80% of the posts are social media links to fake accounts which post "advertisements" for a bounty camaign.


The problem n.2 isn't a big issue as long as the forum's database can withstand it! The spam is only going on inside bounty threads anyway.

However for countering the problem n.1 we need something more drastic. I'm sure there are IP-check filters in place already but that's obviously not enough.
Since the people doing the spam cannot be caught, we need to eliminate the motivation; that means punishing those who buy the services of spammers to bump their threads. But if we start punishing threads for having spammers, then each project team can send spammers to the competition's threads and then report the competition's thread for buying spam services.

TL;DR
To be honest I started writing this post about 30 minutes ago, thinking that I had an idea but then when I'd write my idea I'd see holes in it and then deleted it! That's why I haven't managed to actually come up with a suggestion this time but only the forum issues I can recognise. Maybe I should haven't bother to post this buy someone might actually come up with an idea while reading it!

Also, I used to think all this spam is coming from newbies who don't know how the forums work, which is why I had suggested the following filtering method, if you want to read it I'm linking it bellow, I still believe it's a good idea but not enough to counter a high percentage of the problem.

...

[hilariousetc]

Resurrecting Bitcoin Discussion would (in my opinion) be much more important than trying to rescue the altcoin board. But it's not infested by bump bots like the altcoin board, and that's why I made the 1 Merit suggestion there.
I think Bitcoin Discussion needs a moderator with iron fist. Politics & Society is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion (thanks to Flying Hellfish).

I completely agree on your point regarding Bitcoin Discussion. This is bitcointalk, first and foremost a forum about bitcoin. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main board people are interested in. It's the first board most people will visit when they discover the forum, and it gives off a terrible first impression. As it stands, many senior members won't even venture in to it because of all the spam. The sub needs a dedicated mod that can clean up the spam and monitor any thread that reaches 5+ pages, as 99% of them are spam mega-threads which OP has long deserted.

I worry about the unintended consequences of the 1 merit limit for posting in Altcoin boards, however. Yes, many of them are bump bots, but there are a non-insignificant number of spammers just trying to rank up. Ban them from Altcoins and they will spill over to other boards - Bitcoin Discussion being the most likely.

As I said above, requiring merit to post in the regular boards almost certainly won't happen as theymos is against those sorts of restrictions. It seemed like even requiring one merit for a signature was pushing the limits of what he's willing to do. With that being said, I wouldn't be against additional new boards that can only be posted in once you have a certain amount of merit so that should at least up the quality of discussion allowed in those boards and I have already suggested that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4854646.msg43759760#msg43759760

Bitcoin Discussion definitely needs some dedicated mods and I'm not sure why this hasn't happened yet.

As I stated earlier I don't see the need at the moment.
The ranking up process is locked by the new rules. The total shitposters cannot rank up to Jr. the ones that are more advances will probably reach up to member but not more.

It's not that difficult for shitposters to get a single merit to become Junior. They might not get it legitimately but I'm seeing a lot of shitposting juniors with one suspicious merit floating around. They can also just purchase the Copper Membership for $15-$20 or whatever it is. I still think we should remove Junior's signatures and require ten merit before you can get one. This makes it ten times harder or costlier for them to abuse.

[Direwolve735]

As I stated earlier I don't see the need at the moment.
The ranking up process is locked by the new rules. The total shitposters cannot rank up to Jr. the ones that are more advances will probably reach up to member but not more.

Those shitposters that got the merit airdropped are now being filtered, I see so many ban appeals every day, so after some time the forum will be cleaned from most of the spammers. This process will continue and more and more of those who post nonsense will be filtered naturally.
I think theymos did enough changes /restrictions/ which will have more impact in a bit longer run.

I think that improvements on the bitcointalk and cleaning it from spammers is possible only when new changes are implemented regularly. Yes, at the moment, theymos has introduced new rules, which already brought the solution to the problem closer, but this isn`t enough. The effect of innovation doesn`t grow exponentially; on the contrary, over time, more and more participants will find ways to break the rules and circumvent the restrictions.

We can`t stand still and be content with existing progress. Otherwise we won`t achieve the desired, but also lose what we already have. Therefore, I believe that after some time it`s necessary to analyze the result of previous innovations, draw conclusions and introduce new regulations in order to continue the forum improvement.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Therefore, I believe that after some time it`s necessary to analyze the result of previous innovations, draw conclusions and introduce new regulations in order to continue the forum improvement.

LoyceV is already doing that here:

• In the first week after the announcement, 286408 posts were made (-19.05%).
• In the second week after the announcement, 280503 posts were made (-20.72%).
• In the third week after the announcement, 259694 posts were made (-26.60%).
• In the fourth week after the announcement, 263685 posts were made (-25.47%).
• In the fifth week after the announcement, 240339 posts were made (-32.07%).

Given that the "1 merit for signature" rule has consistently reduced the number of posts by 20-30%, we can confidently draw the conclusion that it is reducing spam. Since we know that it is working, it seems silly not to take it further and raise the threshold to 10 merits, at least as a trial, and monitor to see if this reduces spam further. It almost certainly would, as it removes the "lucky" 1 merit receivers, makes it 10 times costlier to buy, and makes it 10 times harder for one account to level up all their alts.

[Direwolve735]

Given that the "1 merit for signature" rule has consistently reduced the number of posts by 20-30%, we can confidently draw the conclusion that it is reducing spam.

These data demonstrate that the number of posts has decreased. Yes, we can conclude that quantitatively there`s less spam (although there`s no direct correlation between the decrease in the number of posts and spam, since it`s possible that participants generally began to write less, not less spam). But these indicators don`t say anything about the quality of written posts. Even if the number of shitposts has become less, this doesn`t mean that they have become of higher quality. Therefore, we can`t talk about solving the problem so far. In my opinion, the spam issue should be solved in two directions: it`s necessary to reduce the number of shitposts, but at the same time improve the quality of comments. And for this, an incentive is needed (in our case, the required number of merit to increase the rank). And it seems to me that 1 merit for motivation is extremely insufficient.

[TheBeardedBaby]

Given that the "1 merit for signature" rule has consistently reduced the number of posts by 20-30%, we can confidently draw the conclusion that it is reducing spam.

These data demonstrate that the number of posts has decreased. Yes, we can conclude that quantitatively there`s less spam (although there`s no direct correlation between the decrease in the number of posts and spam, since it`s possible that participants generally began to write less, not less spam). But these indicators don`t say anything about the quality of written posts. Even if the number of shitposts has become less, this doesn`t mean that they have become of higher quality. Therefore, we can`t talk about solving the problem so far. In my opinion, the spam issue should be solved in two directions: it`s necessary to reduce the number of shitposts, but at the same time improve the quality of comments. And for this, an incentive is needed (in our case, the required number of merit to increase the rank). And it seems to me that 1 merit for motivation is extremely insufficient.

It's really simple, those who earned money in sig. campaigns with 0 effort /newbies and Jr.members/ can no longer do it and big part of them gave up.
Those who really push to do it, now pay either for merit or for Copper Membership.

It's not that difficult for shitposters to get a single merit to become Junior. They might not get it legitimately but I'm seeing a lot of shitposting juniors with one suspicious merit floating around. They can also just purchase the Copper Membership for $15-$20 or whatever it is. I still think we should remove Junior's signatures and require ten merit before you can get one. This makes it ten times harder or costlier for them to abuse.

Yeah, I agree but the number of those shitposters is not so big anymore as it was before. I can find in Bitcoin Discussions more legit threads that those spam-mega-threads, the Off-topic is not so popular anymore as it used to be before. Now if you refresh it every 15 seconds there are no new posts as there were before.

[Thekool1s]

As I said above, requiring merit to post in the regular boards almost certainly won't happen as theymos is against those sorts of restrictions.

@DdmrDdmr suggested somewhere to introduce a Merit-based sorting for new threads. I don't remember what thread it was but I think that will be a good alternative. The sorting should be based on how many merited users responded to a thread.

Also, Loyce's Comment comes to my mind on Spam Filter v1's thread. Something Like a "Reading" Mode should be introduced, Once in the reading mode, all the posts made by users who haven't received any merit will not be shown. I mean it's not required. The Bitcoin discussion board is much more readable these days can't say the same about Altcoin boards tho. The topics are usually crap or don't belong in the bitcoin discussion board. I think adding a moderator or 2 should help the cause.

[hilariousetc]

It's not that difficult for shitposters to get a single merit to become Junior. They might not get it legitimately but I'm seeing a lot of shitposting juniors with one suspicious merit floating around. They can also just purchase the Copper Membership for $15-$20 or whatever it is. I still think we should remove Junior's signatures and require ten merit before you can get one. This makes it ten times harder or costlier for them to abuse.

Yeah, I agree but the number of those shitposters is not so big anymore as it was before. I can find in Bitcoin Discussions more legit threads that those spam-mega-threads, the Off-topic is not so popular anymore as it used to be before. Now if you refresh it every 15 seconds there are no new posts as there were before.

I don't know about that. Spam megathreads are still rife and are pretty much the only threads in Bitcoin Discussion, or at least they drown out all the others because they're so easy to post rubbish in continually. Go in them and you'll still see higher-ranked members who were air-dropped the merit churning out their dross post after post thread after thread. It's mind numbing reading it. That won't change until we either remove air-dropped merit (which probably won't happen) or campaigns are punished who continue to pay for people to make the drivel in the first place.

As I said above, requiring merit to post in the regular boards almost certainly won't happen as theymos is against those sorts of restrictions.

@DdmrDdmr suggested somewhere to introduce a Merit-based sorting for new threads. I don't remember what thread it was but I think that will be a good alternative. The sorting should be based on how many merited users responded to a thread.

I think that would be an interesting thing to have as an option to view. It would certainly sort the wheat from the chaff/crap threads  and spam threads would be pushed to the bottom.