QUALITY over quantity!

[Gloverwrt]

Spam mega threads seems to be one of the major problems faced by the forum today, and it is destroying quality interactions in some of our major boards, as it is the first thing you stumble on once you stride into those boards. And not every user is excited to was through tons of shitposts in search of quality.

My question is why is a thread put in the first page of a board simply because it has high comments or views, or it was just recently commented on by any user?

We can't win the war against spam if we keep highlighting this mega threads because they have large views or comments. This goes against the ethics of 'quality over quantity' and this means that such boards will never become old, as the OPs are not willing to lock them.

I propose an upvote and downvote system. Now, I'm well aware this has been suggested severally and rejected, but if designed properly it could effectively end spam in the forum.

If we allowed users to upvote a post, the post could be weighted based on the positive votes it got and would be highlighted on the first few pages of a board. To limit abuse, a users vote could be weighed based on the number of merits he/she has, so legendary member > Hero member > Sr member and so on.
So effectively the forum would highlight posts upvoted by the community, and posts that receive a down vote would be pushed further down and hopefully interactions on them would reduce till they are lost in the mass.
This way posts would be weighed based on its quality and not quantity and interactions in this boards would be encouraged. And users won't have to look to deep in search of quality.

The 'upvote' is just a suggestion, the team could name it whatever it wants to, this is just a prototype am suggesting.
What do you think?

[xtraelv]

As if spammers can't upvote or downvote.

If it was voting that counted - the account farms would win with their thousands of alts.
Some of the account farms still have a lot of airdropped merits.

It also sounds a lot like censorship - which is a 10 letter curse word.

Low quality dull threads keep the masses amused. They will just never rank up by posting in them.

[Piggy]

Somebody was suggesting to order the threads based on the number of merit received in it. Maybe adding as well some more weight given from the amount of merits received by the people posting in it could separate good threads from the bad one.

The voting alone doesn't sound right.

[TheUltraElite]

Spam mega threads seems to be one of the major problems faced by the forum today, and it is destroying quality interactions in some of our major boards, as it is the first thing you stumble on once you stride into those boards. And not every user is excited to was through tons of shitposts in search of quality.

It has been discussed for several times already. Mods are doing their best to control spam and threads which are getting out of hand. But they are also human.

My question is why is a thread put in the first page of a board simply because it has high comments or views, or it was just recently commented on by any user?

It the system of any forum to bring up the thread in the front if it was the last commented one.

We can't win the war against spam if we keep highlighting this mega threads because they have large views or comments. This goes against the ethics of 'quality over quantity' and this means that such boards will never become old, as the OPs are not willing to lock them.

Which is why people like me have suggested previously to simply lock threads which have 25+ pages of replies since the OP never comes back.

I propose an upvote and downvote system. Now, I'm well aware this has been suggested severally and rejected, but if designed properly it could effectively end spam in the forum.

If we allowed users to upvote a post, the post could be weighted based on the positive votes it got and would be highlighted on the first few pages of a board. To limit abuse, a users vote could be weighed based on the number of merits he/she has, so legendary member > Hero member > Sr member and so on.
So effectively the forum would highlight posts upvoted by the community, and posts that receive a down vote would be pushed further down and hopefully interactions on them would reduce till they are lost in the mass.
This way posts would be weighed based on its quality and not quantity and interactions in this boards would be encouraged. And users won't have to look to deep in search of quality.

Weightage by giving merit to a post is good. But the problem here is that not much merit distribution occurs in those threads. Its normal that merit sources dont want to visit or comment in those threads.

A search by merit option was also suggested by LoyceV at one time.

The voting alone doesn't sound right.

Its because it will be heavily abused by self-righteous babies who think themselves to be privileged to spam and get paid in return. The merit system for meriting good quality posts is enough in my opinion.

[o_e_l_e_o]

If it was voting that counted - the account farms would win with their thousands of alts.

Precisely. Plus you would then create a market for buying upvotes and downvotes, which since they presumably have no limit like merit, can be sold freely by any moron that can make hundreds of alt accounts.

The better solution to the problem of spam mega-threads is two fold. Firstly, remove signatures from Junior Members, therefore requiring 10 merit until you can display a signature. Increasing the limit to 10 stops the begging/buying/trading of 1 merit which is far too easy for spammers to achieve. This knocks out the vast majority of low-level spammers, who eventually give up upon realizing they will never be able to enroll in another bounty campaign. Secondly, appoint board dedicated mods to keep new threads on topic and spam-free, and frequently lock threads before they develop in to 50+ pages of spam. We know the global moderators just don't have time to monitor every board without its own mod, and we know that board specific mods work as can be seen by the spam-free Mining board.

[Gloverwrt]

If it was voting that counted - the account farms would win with their thousands of alts.

Precisely. Plus you would then create a market for buying upvotes and downvotes, which since they presumably have no limit like merit, can be sold freely by any moron that can make hundreds of alt accounts.

I don't see why anyone would want to buy an upvote if it does nothing but keep the post on the top of the board.

And the issue of alt account could be solved by giving members weighted votes based on their merits. We can go one further by using 'earned merits'and not those airdropped.
It's just a suggestion.

[zhekinsp]

If it was voting that counted - the account farms would win with their thousands of alts.

Precisely. Plus you would then create a market for buying upvotes and downvotes, which since they presumably have no limit like merit, can be sold freely by any moron that can make hundreds of alt accounts.

I don't see why anyone would want to buy an upvote if it does nothing but keep the post on the top of the board.

And the issue of alt account could be solved by giving members weighted votes based on their merits. We can go one further by using 'earned merits'and not those airdropped.
It's just a suggestion.

If the upvote has noting to do with that other than bringing the thread up then most of the signature spammers won't care about upvoting so we can see some good posts in the first pages.Any way I don't think any other system will be implemented in near future maybe we need to remove the signature completely for quality over quantity.

[hilariousetc]

As if spammers can't upvote or downvote.

Yeah. The spammers are the ones with the most accounts and some of them literally have hundreds so they could easily just take advantage of that to keep spam threads active so they can easily spam in. A much better way of tackling the spam issue and low quality posts would be to attack the problem at the source and that is signature campaigns that pay for it. They need to be punished if they continually pay for spam threads and the rubbish that gets posted in them and if that is stopped then so would the spam. If we continue to allow ICOs to pay for whatever crap they want then nothing will change regardless of any system we try put in place.

[fudster]

Why not just close the thread if it exceeds up to more than 10 pages, I doubt OP hasn't got the answers he need after that 10 pages. Or maybe there is a system that if someone has to reply to a thread considered to be a MEGA thread has to pass a captcha and has to wait for a minute or 2 before he can finally post. Some kind of a price to pay when posting to a mega thread, a merit maybe?

[coinlocket$]

I fully agree mega treds are the biggest cause of spam and the one of the best way for ICOs to get visibility.
Imagine a 100-pages thread full of shitpost the only thing you notice are the colored letters of the signatures.
The only way to eject spam is to restrict the problem to the source and not to cut the final part.
In my opinion is it necessary to remove the possibility to the newbie to post in these sections and request the minimum rank of Junior and raise the merit required for junior to 5.

[DdmrDdmr]

Creating another complementary system based on upvotes would add another layer of burden to the forum. Meriting is time consuming enough without having to decide which card to flash at a post (upvote, merit, both, none). Besides, as @xtralev mentioned above, any farmer will have the upper hand upvoting threads with a legal perk.

If a tweak were to be implemented to give preference in terms of visibility to threads with a better content, then merit is already in place for this matter, and it is down to how it can be used in the visibility game.
For example, a thread could be given a better position by combining natural organic bumps made by additional posts to the thread, with variables such as the total merit accumulated by the thread and it’s recency. The more merit on the thread, the better the position, and additional recent awarded merit to the thread improves the position versus other threads just based on regular posts that bump the thread. Time would need to play a role too, so as not to perpetuate the most merited threads in the top positions (simply computing thread merit in a moving 30 day window would suffice to avoid perpetuity).

[tranthidung]

raise the merit required for junior to 5.

If your suggestion implemented in the future, new wave of significant rising merit distribution will come for sure.
nevertheless, I agree with your proposal which requires 5 merits to rank up to Junior member.

[hilariousetc]

Why not just close the thread if it exceeds up to more than 10 pages, I doubt OP hasn't got the answers he need after that 10 pages. Or maybe there is a system that if someone has to reply to a thread considered to be a MEGA thread has to pass a captcha and has to wait for a minute or 2 before he can finally post. Some kind of a price to pay when posting to a mega thread, a merit maybe?

Since when does a thread mean it's done after ten pages? Spammers won't care about that and they will just open another one either just with a slightly reworded title or 'shit thread part 2' etc. We need to tackle the issue at the source and that is campaigns that continually pay for drivel. Spam posts in spam threads shouldn't be getting paid but until that happens then nothing much will change and it's just pissing in the wind.

[TheUltraElite]

I don't see why anyone would want to buy an upvote if it does nothing but keep the post on the top of the board.

They would buy it if it was necessary to rank up. Like for merits there has been an internal shadow marketplace grown up due the need of newbies who need to rank up an people having sMerits to spend them on. Still this is just a comparison with the upvote system. Lets not make bitcointalk another reddit or facebook with this so called upvote system and hope its never implemented.

And the issue of alt account could be solved by giving members weighted votes based on their merits. We can go one further by using 'earned merits'and not those airdropped.

How does weighted votes based on merit segregate alt accounts? Its allowed to have alt accounts in the forum but its not allowed to cheat with them on giveaways and campaigns. But if there are several merit exchanges between accounts then there arises a suspicion of them being connected subject to several points.

[Christopher_Hayes]

Somebody was suggesting to order the threads based on the number of merit received in it. Maybe adding as well some more weight given from the amount of merits received by the people posting in it could separate good threads from the bad one.

The voting alone doesn't sound right.

What about new posts though? Maybe there should be an option in the upper corner that lets you sort the threads according to different ways: by merit, new, hot topic and so on. This way, members can only see threads of high quality whenever they want, right?

[o_e_l_e_o]

What about new posts though? Maybe there should be an option in the upper corner that lets you sort the threads according to different ways: by merit, new, hot topic and so on. This way, members can only see threads of high quality whenever they want, right?

I frequently sort boards by new. You can do this by adding ";sort=first_post;desc" on to the end of the URL, so for example the URL to sort Bitcoin Discussion by new threads is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.0;sort=first_post;desc.

This has a number of advantages. It effectively filters out all spam mega-threads. You generally end up reading threads with <10 replies, and so there are very few spammy comments and usually some genuine discussion (provided the topic is interesting and not some nonsense like "Bitcoin Forever!"). Any new threads that look interesting I add to my watchlist (or comment in), and then I can easily keep a track of them after they are drowned in amongst all the spam threads.

[Christopher_Hayes]

What about new posts though? Maybe there should be an option in the upper corner that lets you sort the threads according to different ways: by merit, new, hot topic and so on. This way, members can only see threads of high quality whenever they want, right?

I frequently sort boards by new. You can do this by adding ";sort=first_post;desc" on to the end of the URL, so for example the URL to sort Bitcoin Discussion by new threads is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.0;sort=first_post;desc.

This has a number of advantages. It effectively filters out all spam mega-threads. You generally end up reading threads with <10 replies, and so there are very few spammy comments and usually some genuine discussion (provided the topic is interesting and not some nonsense like "Bitcoin Forever!"). Any new threads that look interesting I add to my watchlist (or comment in), and then I can easily keep a track of them after they are drowned in amongst all the spam threads.

Oh, thanks for this! I didn't know this could be done. Although, there should be a dropdown selection somewhere in the forum to do this so everyone could do this too, especially for those who don't know to add ";sort=first_post;desc" on to the end of the URL, right?

[LoyceV]

We can't win the war against spam if we keep highlighting this mega threads because they have large views or comments.

I (and others) have suggested before to stop low-ranking accounts from being able to bump threads. Most bump spam comes from lower ranks, which can easily be stopped if they can't bump their thread anymore.
If this were to be implemented, spammers would have to use high ranking accounts, and thanks to the Merit system they can't make farm them anymore, which means they'll eventually run out of accounts to bump with.

[coolcoinz]

We must always prefer quality over quantity.  Bitcoin.org must be all about a quality stuff, not a trash. Quantity does and should never be the matter.

I think you got lost in the interwebs, boy.