Campaign Managers and Bots. The main reason for the SPAM. Solutions?

[TheBeardedBaby]

Yet another thread on the problem, but here we have to find a solution without pushing theymos to come up with one.Another truth is that discussions help to solve problems,so the more discussions, the better.

Let me draw a line first > I want to focus here on the forum community /the active,human part of it/ as the instrument to deal with the problem, there are so many members wishing to help and volunteering already, I have enough proof that we have a great task force here ready to react /thanks to all the participants in the SpamBusters sharing from their own time to report/.

The main two sources of SPAM /in the English section at least/ as I see them are >

• Signature Bounties
• Ann-bumping-account-farming bots

The key to control the spam from the Bounties is to focus on the Managers. We have discuss this matter many times before, but let us find a solution here once for all.
What is missing? Clear rules for the bounty managers, clear punishments for those who do not follow the rules.
I'll post this great idea from hilariousetc. If we can develop it more it would be one possible way to control them.
As I said earlier I want to focus on ideas where theymos is not so much involved in the development and he can focus on other more importation things, but the working force will be the forum society.

I was thinking about the possibility of some sort of default trust team should be assembled to help police shit campaign managers seeing as theymos doesn't really want to do anything about them even though they're the ones responsible for 99% of the spam here. If a problem campaign is spotted then they should be given a warning that they need to do something about the spam. If any campaign has say five or ten users baring their signature that are either making very low quality posts or are banned for copy and pasting then they should get the warning and then negative feedback from everyone on the team until they clean their campaign up. Negative feedback works a lot of the time because they don't want their reputation tarnished when they're trying to make as much money as possible and if they ignore the warning first then feedback should be used as a last resort. Campaigns really shouldn't be allowed to come here and ruin the forum making it unreadable by paying unlimited users to make any old crap they can be bothered doing. When these campaigns accept Junior or even Newbies they are at worse overrun with copy and paste bots or at best one/two line spammers, but that doesn't matter to the campaign because as long as they're making the posts and are being paid in monopoly money they've created out of thin air it then their objective is still met. The longer we let people get away with doing a shoddy job without repercussions then it is only going to get worse.

The bots are the next big thing generating SPAM, and we, the SpamBusters were working mostly on the ANN threads, manually reviewing all the user activities. We had some success in locking some ANN threads and big part of the reported account were banned so I think we made a small impact, yet not enough.

Even more people will start reporting after the report badges come to life /which will be quite soon, probably in the next few years/ and then the mods work load will increase. However the bot activity will not be reduced enough as everything is automated there. So let's fight back, they can make bots to spam, we can make bots to check for plagiarism, text-spinners, one-word-shitposter. I'm sure we can do that, it's just to address to the right people.

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[AverageGlabella]

Theymos is already considering introducing punishments for campaign managers.

• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.

He does not seem to agree 100% with it and would like to make modifications to it. So we already know that theymos is ready and willing to introduce guidelines to the campaign managers. Its coming up with the guidelines and the consequences if they break rules. Also who is going to determine whether a campaign manager is doing their job? Staff? Wouldn't that mean staff members would have to take on the job of the campaign manager and check each individual participant and determine whether they are accepting anyone?

Or maybe if its obvious that a certain signature campaign is causing mass amounts of spam they can have strikes.

Offenses
1. Removal of topic
2. Removal of topic, ban of campaign manager and those who spam.
3. Permanent ban of campaign manager.

In addition to this we should probably put a rank limit on opening a topic in the bounty sub forum. I would go as far as only allowing full time members from creating topics there. But I guess that means the copper membership would be redundant and theymos would not want to put such a strict restriction. So what do we do? If we limit it to copper memberships at least they have to make an investment and will likely want to avoid getting banned. But campaign managers get paid good money and they dont mind paying what is peanuts in comparison to make themselves copper membership.

[cinchin1]

According to what he is presenting, the spammer appears because the bounty program and many people are creating accounts continuously, and I really think that creating multiple accounts is just the result of bounty when they require a lot of post in a week, and of course, if want to do that, many people have become spammers. Therefore, to limit the situation of spammers appear, we should ask the regulators should have the appropriate rules, there should not be too strict conditions

[Jet Cash]

This is a post that a newbie with a copper membership tried to make. He tried to use html for his post. I copied the html onto a blank page, and added it to my hosting. http://kat1.com/spampost.html
I'll leave the page up for a day or so, and then I will delete it.

You guys have to decide if posts like that should be part of a Bitcoin discussion forum.

I've backed away from the forum for a few days to allow things to get sorted out. The obvious quick solutions are

- Delete or move any underworld threads or posts on the beginners board.
- Up the rank requirement to post in serious discussion.
- Restrict new members' thread starting permissions.
- Use the serious discussion and Ivory Tower boards, and moderate the posts there.

[Helana]

- Delete or move any underworld threads or posts on the beginners board.
- Up the rank requirement to post in serious discussion.
- Restrict new members' thread starting permissions.
- Use the serious discussion and Ivory Tower boards, and moderate the posts there.

In addition, taking a look at previous discussions that we have had, I've come to the conclusion that one of the better solutions to the spammer's problem is to stop the counting activity in the problematic boards.
Nevertheless, and since the OP is talking about some kind of solution that doesn't involucrate Theymos doing any changes, probably the Ivory Tower being used to moderate's idea is for the best, for it will avoid more spammers joining the task.
Now, if a DT team is focused on reporting and red tagging bad bounty managers and spammers, probably it will bring some solutions, but temporary ones. I mean that everybody is entitled to make another account, or to buy one and to come back to spam again (we have seen that continuously, ban evasions are happening every single day).

Even though it is working somehow, because the deleted posts seem to be discouraging some spammers, it looks like an eternal task, never to be fulfilled, sadly. As well as the code is not being changed into more radical solutions, the volunteers work looks impossible to accomplish. It is just like trying to stop an ant plague with a finger when some insecticide is needed.

[hilariousetc]

The main two sources of SPAM /in the English section at least/ as I see them are >

• Signature Bounties
• Ann-bumping-account-farming bots

ANN bumping bots are the least of our worries right now as at least that's limited and quarantined to the alt coin section and in ICO crap threads which we don't even have to go in so I don't care that much about it (though I don't agree with it happening and have suggested a couple of things to try prevent it). However, sig campaign spam is something we can do something about now and is something we should have tackled a long time ago because just ignoring it has too much of a negative effect on the forum and makes it unfit for purpose. This board now is just somewhere for people to spam rubbish to earn and it never should have got to that place.

Theymos is already considering introducing punishments for campaign managers.

• Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.

Theymos probably considers a lot of stuff, but not much help if nothing ever gets implemented. When will sign campaigns guidelines start being enforced? 2020 when he's finished coding the forum? There's still going to be lots of extra things like this that are going to take even more time coding so will likely take even longer to happen, and in the meantime the forum becomes even more unusable and unfit for purpose.

Also who is going to determine whether a campaign manager is doing their job? Staff? Wouldn't that mean staff members would have to take on the job of the campaign manager and check each individual participant and determine whether they are accepting anyone?

There probably should be some dedicated sign campaign mods that are responsible for dealing with campaigns and their spam etc. ICOs should probably have to start contributing to the cost of the spam here as well and maybe that could be used to pay the sig spam mods. I've already suggested that ICOs have to pay some sort of fee to advertise here in the first place because they cause too much damage and get a tonne of free advertising in the process.

[Thekool1s]

There probably should be some dedicated sign campaign mods that are responsible for dealing with campaigns and their spam etc. ICOs should probably have to start contributing to the cost of the spam here as well and maybe that could be used to pay the sig spam mods.

Make another group like "SpamBusters". Assign participants to monitor different Signature/Bounty campaigns and let them review the post quality of users participating in those campaigns. If the member finds out that the manager paid for more than X 'shitposts', They can report their findings in that thread afterwards DT members can review the user's finding and mark those managers accordingly.

E,g If a manager paid for more than 20 Shitposts, Nuke the ICOs thread and mark the manager. There shouldn't be enough breathing room for the managers. 20 Shitposts are way too many IMO, This number can be worked out.

The Thread could as a test for the participants, The participant who reports in most managers could become a 'signature mod'. Would like to hear your opinion hilariousetc.

[hilariousetc]

There probably should be some dedicated sign campaign mods that are responsible for dealing with campaigns and their spam etc. ICOs should probably have to start contributing to the cost of the spam here as well and maybe that could be used to pay the sig spam mods.

Make another group like "SpamBusters". Assign participants to monitor different Signature/Bounty campaigns and let them review the post quality of users participating in those campaigns. If the member finds out that the manager paid for more than X 'shitposts', They can report their findings in that thread afterwards DT members can review the user's finding and mark those managers accordingly.

E,g If a manager paid for more than 20 Shitposts, Nuke the ICOs thread and mark the manager. There shouldn't be enough breathing room for the managers. 20 Shitposts are way too many IMO, This number can be worked out.

The Thread could as a test for the participants, The participant who reports in most managers could become a 'signature mod'. Would like to hear your opinion hilariousetc.

Doesn't matter what my opinion is, it's theymos you need to ask or persuade. If I was in charge of this then there'd probably be very little spam here coming from signatures. If it was up to me shit campaigns would be banished the moment it was clear they were doing nothing and lower-ranks wouldn't even be allowed to earn here via signatures at all unless they've received a decent amount of merit. If only quality posters got paid and everybody ran their campaigns like Darkstar then we wouldn't be having this issue in the first place. Until it becomes unacceptable to post crap and those that pay for it get punished then nothing will change here.

[coinlocket$]

Beware, the problem is not just related to the fact that people are shitposting for the signature.
In my opinion a bigger problem is due to the bounties farmers, those people who sometimes have or don't wear the signature and who use bots both for social media activities and for forum reporting activities, often people with 10- 20 accounts with junior rank that freely abuse the bounties by writing their reports (with the bot) and the managers do nothing to stop this or don't remove them from campaigns.
I repeat that, these accounts often do not have the signature and therefore look at the post history (without counting the first 30 messages needed to become junior) have a percentage equal to 100% of messages for the report of bounties.

[TheBeardedBaby]

Doesn't matter what my opinion is, it's theymos you need to ask or persuade. If I was in charge of this then there'd probably be very little spam here coming from signatures. If it was up to me shit campaigns would be banished the moment it was clear they were doing nothing and lower-ranks wouldn't even be allowed to earn here via signatures at all unless they've received a decent amount of merit. If only quality posters got paid and everybody ran their campaigns like Darkstar then we wouldn't be having this issue in the first place. Until it becomes unacceptable to post crap and those that pay for it get punished then nothing will change here.

I just addressed the problem as I see it.
I think we should find a solution which is convenient for both sides the admins and the users, and it doesn't require much of theymos's time to be wasted on this.
Seems like he is also demotivated from what is going on here and it's seems too bothering to find a proper solution without putting a lot of time in it.

So here the community is offering help and support to him and hopefully he will get the notice.
 I know its difficult to trust all those anonymous users here after a cases like MagicalTux, but that's all we can offer, and I'm sure im not talking only for myself but many like me.

[DarkStar_]

What causes the need for a special group of DefaultTrust members? Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

[pugman]

Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

Yes. Trust system isn't meant for that apparently. Otherwise we would have seen hilariousandco sending his deepest regards to sylon. 
I don't get it, how will you stop managers who accept shitposters by giving them negative trust? They will bitch about it for a while, leave retaliatory feedback, and then they would go back to doing what they did before. Or they'll start doing the same through another account. People will easily get opportunities to manage shitcoin bounties.

And also, please do not involve trust system into this. There'll be repercussions, says the psychic in me. 

[DarkStar_]

Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

Yes. Trust system isn't meant for that apparently. Otherwise we would have seen hilariousandco sending his deepest regards to sylon. 

I believe it was hilariousandco (not 100% sure, don't quote me on this) who left negative trust to secondstrade about 2.5 years ago for the spam their campaign caused. (side note: that was almost 3 years ago  ) I know for sure that a DT member left them negative trust.

You could argue that someone who doesn't care about the damage they are causing is untrustworthy/possibly a scammer.

[Welsh]

Negative trust only prevents high ranked accounts from operating though, and that's assuming the advertiser cares about trust. A lot of them don't, and only care about exposure. Anyway, even if we did neg all the bounty campaign spam managers then they would just create a new account, and post it as a Jr member. The users that are participating in these campaigns don't really care about the rank of the manager.

[hilariousetc]

What causes the need for a special group of DefaultTrust members? Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

There's nothing stopping you or anyone leaving negative feedback for anything they want. The idea of a group was to make it more impartial like having some sort of jury and if the majority or all agree the campaign gets warned first and then negbombed if nothing changes. I don't think it should be left up to one person to decide though and I certainly don't want to be that person hence why I proposed there be a team to police them.

I believe it was hilariousandco (not 100% sure, don't quote me on this) who left negative trust to secondstrade about 2.5 years ago for the spam their campaign caused. (side note: that was almost 3 years ago  ) I know for sure that a DT member left them negative trust.

You could argue that someone who doesn't care about the damage they are causing is untrustworthy/possibly a scammer.

I did, but I removed it after a while. I recently left negative on ElonCity due to the absolutely ridiculous amount of copy and paste bots and farmers that had been permabanned baring their signature. I was banning a dozen a day at one point and have probably banned upwards of 100 from that campaign alone. This can't be acceptable. Signatures on these campaigns should be blacklisted because negative feedback or bans don't stop the members from posting while the campaign is banned.

[TheBeardedBaby]

What causes the need for a special group of DefaultTrust members? Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

There's nothing stopping you or anyone leaving negative feedback for anything they want. The idea of a group was to make it more impartial like having some sort of jury and if the majority or all agree the campaign gets warned first and then negbombed if nothing changes. I don't think it should be left up to one person to decide though and I certainly don't want to be that person hence why I proposed there be a team to police them.
~

Well I don't think we can do anything else, without theymos intervention. Something has to be done and if we have on other option, then we can just do it.
If you are willing to the SmapBusters can focus on the bounty participants and if we gather many shitposts participating in one campaign we can make a list for tagging.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

[audaciousbeing]

What causes the need for a special group of DefaultTrust members? Is there anything that prevents current DefaultTrust from leaving negative feedback on managers that create spam?

This would be the only potent way to combat against spam on this forum. Just like I have earlier proposed until when managers especially in the bounties section are being held responsible for the actions of their participants, things will not get better. Its so bad that I have seen people posted that the manager was even notified on the activity of a participant but chose to ignore and went ahead to pay. A whole lot of managers don't even bother to check during the week until when its time to do calculation couple with the huge number of participants, it become rather impossible to keep an eye on the effectiveness and contribution of participants in the forum.

[pugman]

There's nothing stopping you or anyone leaving negative feedback for anything they want. The idea of a group was to make it more impartial like having some sort of jury and if the majority or all agree the campaign gets warned first and then negbombed if nothing changes. I don't think it should be left up to one person to decide though and I certainly don't want to be that person hence why I proposed there be a team to police them.

Oh you cannot be serious on this one... A jury on bitcointalk? That will never be any good. So long as people have egos here, the jury is going to be dead in the water even before it starts. The supposed jury may go ahead and give negative trusts but as far as bitcointalk's history is concerned, things go awry after a while. Also, you're asking for users to spend their time on doing something, that'll have no gain for them whatsoever.
 

I did, but I removed it after a while. I recently left negative on ElonCity due to the absolutely ridiculous amount of copy and paste bots and farmers that had been permabanned baring their signature. I was banning a dozen a day at one point and have probably banned upwards of 100 from that campaign alone. This can't be acceptable. Signatures on these campaigns should be blacklisted because negative feedback or bans don't stop the members from posting while the campaign is banned.

Didn't you neg sylon too? If I recall correctly, I think I once saw him bearing a negative,possibly from your main account? I could be very delusional but idk.

Perhaps global mods can have the ability to blacklist or whitelist signatures? Perhaps?

[hilariousetc]

There's nothing stopping you or anyone leaving negative feedback for anything they want. The idea of a group was to make it more impartial like having some sort of jury and if the majority or all agree the campaign gets warned first and then negbombed if nothing changes. I don't think it should be left up to one person to decide though and I certainly don't want to be that person hence why I proposed there be a team to police them.

Oh you cannot be serious on this one... A jury on bitcointalk? That will never be any good. So long as people have egos here, the jury is going to be dead in the water even before it starts. The supposed jury may go ahead and give negative trusts but as far as bitcointalk's history is concerned, things go awry after a while. Also, you're asking for users to spend their time on doing something, that'll have no gain for them whatsoever.

What do you think juries are for? They're to remove the possibility of bias from the judge. Would you seriously prefer it just to be one person who presides over this? What happens about their ego? If a problem campaign is spotted then you get the opinion of the other members in the group so you don't have to rely on the possibly bias opinion of one. It's taking away power and responsibility from one person and sharing it among several allowing for more impartiality.
 

Didn't you neg sylon too? If I recall correctly, I think I once saw him bearing a negative,possibly from your main account? I could be very delusional but idk.

No, but he's a campaign manager who should have faced some punishments because he's been allowed to 'run' his campaigns by doing absolutely nothing other than paying people as long as they bothered to make the spam.

Perhaps global mods can have the ability to blacklist or whitelist signatures? Perhaps?

But what about the "egos" of the mods?

[TheBeardedBaby]

I decided to take the opportunity and test hilariousetc's idea for the DT's Team.

We /The Spambusters/ gonna try to analyze those who we report and collect some data for the bounties and the managers.
I'll make a list with the accused managers and will try to provide some proof for further consideration.

After the big change we have to wait the things to settle down for a while. Then we should focus on the campaign manager and see how they're doing their work.

I wrote a list with suggestions for short rules for conducting sig. campaigns but the draft got deleted due to the long time between edits, I'll write it again soon.
I think we need clear guidelines because now there are just a few stickies here and there but nothing concrete on one place.