Poll: is it OK to send merits to your own alts?

[TheMatrix101]

should we care more about "spam" comments

• Yea probably, but as long as it's not fud frankly we don't care, you could post "this is a weird project" or "who cares about privacy" and we probably wouldn't delete those either

Right. As long as it's not negative, you'll let trash through. I see. Too much of a bother, eh?Inundating your team account with merit is not something that makes sense. That's artificially increasing the reputation of the posts, whether you care or not.

When a new system is introduced, shouldn't you generally check to see how it works and what effects it has upon other systems? If you had done so, you would have only sent 1 merit.^*

_{*assuming you were ignorant}

I havent sent merit to anyone (i dont think at least) i did look into how it works and i disagree with the impact it has on other systems. There is no way to "not use" the merit system as you are required to have x amount of merit for each bitcointalk level, you should know this as you are telling me to look up how it works.

As for negative comments, frankly i dont care about those either. There is a massive difference between negative/critical comments and fud/shitposting and you should damn well know that.

Matrix

[1715411689]

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[1715411689]

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[eddie13]

And while I think it's certainly abuse, I don't believe Theymos wants DT members tagging members who merit their alts.  DT members have done it in the past, but in the past few months I don't think a lot of merit-swapping deals have gotten negged.  It all depends on how blatant and extensive the abuse is and IF a DT member feels like giving them a neg. 

I agree and this is basically what I was trying to express earlier in this thread (post #4)

I don't mind that this tag was placed since it is an unethical act and was quite a few merits but the post referenced does lend credence to the claim it was a mistake made out of pure ignorance.

I have seen in the past seemingly legit companies ruining relations with bitcointalk out of pure ignorance and at times it feels a shame that they just didn't read the rules and understand the cultural etiquette here before they made mistakes.

It would depend a bit for me on the scammyness of whatever this "KORE" project is. I haven't really looked at it..
Can anyone that knows give me/us a quick scammyness rating of this on a scale from 1 to 10? (apart from this merit problem)

If the scammynss of this all is relatively low other than this meriting I think it would be nice of Suchmoon to possibly make a deal on this issue..

Some things I can think of......

1. Burn the merited account.. Send the password of it to Suchmoon for destruction of the account..
I think this would basically destroy the sent merit and Mike would just have lost the smerit..
Maybe all of its posts can be deleted too before burning it..

2. Maybe make mike read the rules and make 100 good reports and/or make him write you a small essay on the working of the merit system and the ethics thereof so he will be henceforth educated..

3. Make him wear the red for 3 months or so as a warning to others and then change it to a neutral..

If he otherwise seems to bring value to the forum..

Also depending on these "attacks"..
If he has been belligerent, violent, extremely disrespectful, threatening, much bad behavior otherwise maybe he should keep the red just for his reaction if it has been terrible..
I'm not sure we have all of these PMs/"attacks" available..

[suchmoon]

It would depend a bit for me on the scammyness of whatever this "KORE" project is. I haven't really looked at it..
Can anyone that knows give me/us a quick scammyness rating of this on a scale from 1 to 10? (apart from this merit problem)

I don't know about scamminess. But the thread is extremely shitty, self-moderated but not really moderated, and MikeMike himself multi-bumps it a lot with his own account and alts. Disregard for forum rules just like most shitcoin threads.

If the scammynss of this all is relatively low other than this meriting I think it would be nice of Suchmoon to possibly make a deal on this issue..

Some things I can think of......

1. Burn the merited account.. Send the password of it to Suchmoon for destruction of the account..
I think this would basically destroy the sent merit and Mike would just have lost the smerit..
Maybe all of its posts can be deleted too before burning it..

I have already agreed to not red-trust his new alts, just the two involved in the 40-merit trade. Normally I would neg-trust any known alts because a scammer is a scammer. So this would allow him to create the "team" account he wanted and abandon the red trusted one with 40 merits.

I hate these kinds of deals though because now it obligates me to watch if MikeMike and/or the team is involved in any shenanigans and if anything untoward happens it's going to be my fault. So that's about as far as I can go with it.

Also depending on these "attacks"..
If he has been belligerent, violent, extremely disrespectful, threatening, much bad behavior otherwise maybe he should keep the red just for his reaction if it has been terrible..
I'm not sure we have all of these PMs/"attacks" available..

Nothing violent in PMs. Just the regular "I didn't do anything wrong" spiel in a dozen different ways. The posts that I deleted in this thread had some ad hominems but I'm not gonna hold personal grudges. I'm not the nicest person to deal with so I expect nothing less in return

Defense of being slandered is not whining.

Please create a new thread in Reputation and post anything you want there. I will add a link to it here.

I'm deleting all this nonsense from this thread because you're clearly not listening. Your "defense" here is over and you're no longer welcome to post in this thread.

[r1s2g3]

Lol, 10% of the poll results choose "Yes". Have they entered their reason in this thread? Or they give irony reasons because they did it (sent merit to their alts)

One of them did it (MikeMike). Not sure about the other "yes" votes. There is some reasoning on pages 2 and 3 but it kinda got drowned in off-topic nonsense.

Anybody can create sock puppets accounts to vote Yes or No. Every vote is counted equally no matter how intelligent or stupid you are.
It is sad that users have created so flawed logics or feigned ignorance just to suit themselves.

[khaled0111]

...
Anybody can create sock puppets accounts to vote Yes or No. Every vote is counted equally no matter how intelligent or stupid you are.
...

"Democracy is the power of equal votes for unequal minds." Charles I of England

[suchmoon]

Lol, 10% of the poll results choose "Yes". Have they entered their reason in this thread? Or they give irony reasons because they did it (sent merit to their alts)

One of them did it (MikeMike). Not sure about the other "yes" votes. There is some reasoning on pages 2 and 3 but it kinda got drowned in off-topic nonsense.

Anybody can create sock puppets accounts to vote Yes or No. Every vote is counted equally no matter how intelligent or stupid you are.
It is sad that users have created so flawed logics or feigned ignorance just to suit themselves.

I was more interested in reasoning than the vote count. I don't think I've heard a compelling argument why meriting alts would be acceptable. There might be some disagreement as to what the correct remedy is though.

[LeGaulois]

I voted NO
It could be forgivable if the member just has a problem with his ego/self-esteem, the same way people like their own post on Facebook.
But we know very well that the reason is to be able to participate in bounty campaigns. Nothing wrong to participate in, but I just see it as abusing the forum, its members, the campaign manager, and the project advertised

[quote page 4]Anybody can create sock puppets accounts to vote Yes or No[/quote]
No

[quote page 3]Are ALT accounts ethical?
NO[/quote]

I would say No too but I am thinking someone could need an alt because his account represents a company/website, it's understandable.

[cabalism13]

Nope. It's not an ethical thing to do. And also it just represent an unfair distribution of Merits, no one will ever respect the system if they were given the rights to do that. I do have an alt but sadly I can't use it for I still needed to pay for its Bad IP.

And yet I dont even think about sharing my Merit to my alt, I'll be just fooling myself. I'd rather spend a year or two on ranking up than to be banned because of that Merit thing. Even if you think your post was good enough, I think letting it be, and wait for the others to notice it is still an achievement that's why its unacceptable to share Merits on Alts. (I can let myself an example to this for I was not caring about Merits, though I simply care about ranking up but the fact that I'm really not good on starting some posts,I'm really used on waiting for the others give some credits on my replies and comments. And now here I am having 67Merits for over a year of stay starting on 0 Merits. - Its already an achievement for I've been able to escape the shitposter zone)

[NavI_027]

And yet I dont even think about sharing my Merit to my alt, I'll be just fooling myself.

You nailed it! I also disagree on the concept of one's giving a merit into his alt account/s. Okay let's say that we will not put the violation of rules and being unethical into considerations yet for me it was still a terrible idea because you are only fooling yourself (like what cabalism13 said). Have you ever heard a story of a heroic soldier who gave himself the Medal of Honor as a reward for his own bravery? Of course not! There's no such thing like that. A true recognition should came from others — from other people who appreciate your work and effort, not from yourself. Giving merits to yourself is a form of "lifting one's own chair" and that is nothing to be proud of.

[rhomelmabini]

Definitely not, it is just like praising oneself for the thing that you've just did or laughing to your own joke and I think that is only present to fools.

[NeuroticFish]

Have you ever heard a story of a heroic soldier who gave himself the Medal of Honor as a reward for his own bravery? Of course not!

It's even worse. Why is merit needed? To rank up. Why is ranking up important? For earning (bounty, signature,...).
So if somebody merits his own alt, next steps would be either use the alt (too) in signature/bounty campaigns, either sell it.
The result would be that some older members of the forum would cheat/defeat the actual purpose of the Merit system.

Indeed, the obvious answer to the poll is no.

[LoyceMobile]

It's even worse. Why is merit needed? To rank up. Why is ranking up important? For earning (bounty, signature,...).

I just want to wear a(nother) hat

[rhomelmabini]

Indeed, the obvious answer to the poll is no.

Yes answers will be persecuted as it will not be aligning to the norm.

I just want to wear a(nother) hat

How I wish I can get one someday.

[NeuroticFish]

It's even worse. Why is merit needed? To rank up. Why is ranking up important? For earning (bounty, signature,...).

I just want to wear a(nother) hat

you get plenty of Merit for your helpful posts even for the second account, and you named both accounts the same. You'll get your hat, don't worry.
You know that this was not about you, you don't pose a risk to the (Merit) system.

[TheMatrix101]

It's even worse. Why is merit needed? To rank up. Why is ranking up important? For earning (bounty, signature,...).

I just want to wear a(nother) hat

you get plenty of Merit for your helpful posts even for the second account, and you named both accounts the same. You'll get your hat, don't worry.
You know that this was not about you, you don't pose a risk to the (Merit) system.

False, you get plenty of merit for posting helpful posts in the RIGHT threads with the RIGHT people, i have seen plenty of posts that were exceedingly helpful and they gained 0 merit. some were understandable as they were much older posts however i have seen plenty of new helpful and informative posts in random threads that received no merit. i could easily heavily abuse the system with a simple dataminer and then go to the right threads and post long and informative posts to get loads of merit. how would you do it?
simple, the forum software is very simple, you notice that the post url is just a post ID and not a post name this means you could make a timed for loop in python
e.g.

Code:

import urllib2
from time import sleep
header = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
       'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
       'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
       'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
       'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
       'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

for i in range(10000): #goto every page between 1 and 10001
    urlbase = "https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic={}" #of this url
    request = urllib2.Request(urlbase, headers=header) #with this request
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request) #and download the response
    html = response.read() # and read the downloaded response
    print html

    sleep(5) # then sleep for five seconds so as to not trigger the ddos-protection blacklist

then you could easily parse the data for who merits the posts and how much they merited (i am not going to post the code for this because im not going to enable, if you know enough (literally that code is exactly seven minutes of google and writing (i dont code in python)) then you could run another script to check the profile of the users who merit the most and then view where that user mostly posts and output that to a file, spend 20 minutes researching the coin and post in their thread a detailed help system for new users and bam easy free merit. its a broken system that is crazy easy to abuse, in an hour of my time i could easily abuse the system to get tons of merit. of course id have to run the python script overnight to get enough data and parse it to be able to use that hour best but still, one day and you could have hundreds if not thousands of merit.

you don't pose a risk to the (Merit) system. Wink

This is not a threat, but i myself, someone who doesnt know a damn thing about python, could easily destroy the entire merit system by finishing that little script, integrating a database utilization, and releasing it for free. Bitcointalk would need a massive update to how the entire software runs in order to mitigate that, not just to the merit system.
first, they would have to remove the ability for you to see who merits you, then they would have to remove the ability to see what posts were merited, they would also have to change how the forum recognizes threads, as well as blocking you from seeing who has what amount of merit. blocking that specific header will do nothing, i know how to have things use random headers.
hell i dont even need access to the post, this url gives me everything i need and MORE

Code:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u={userID here}

If you truely think the merit system is not broken in any way, boy are you sorely mistaken

Matrix

[LoyceMobile]

Lol, you don't have to scrape threads to find merit, theymos publishes a data dump for it.

[NeuroticFish]

If you truely think the merit system is not broken in any way, boy are you sorely mistaken

I can't tell it's already broken or not. I can tell for sure it's not 100% functional yet. I have the feeling that many users that could send merit don't do that or do it insufficiently.

Lol, you don't have to scrape threads to find merit, theymos publishes a data dump for it.

There's also that website from Vod's signature, with all the data nicely structured for each user.

[Harlot]

Its like judging your own work. If this is how we grade ourselves during our thesis phase I would grade my 1 page work to 100 even if it is just the cover page. I don't see how this is any different from trading merits because one way or another your alts will send back some merits to your account/s. It is simply an abuse of the merit system in my own opinion. BTW MikeMike's reasoning is really bad 40 sMerits on an announcement? I wish I was the one announcing so that I could earn that easily.

[suchmoon]

i have seen plenty of posts that were exceedingly helpful and they gained 0 merit. some were understandable as they were much older posts however i have seen plenty of new helpful and informative posts in random threads that received no merit.

Then you should report those posts instead of cooking up plans to abuse the system: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5093271.0

[VINSIN]

Ok, definetly merit system fucked the forum. People just merit posts in their favor (Vod). And there are so many posts that are so much worth the merit and everyone just avoids them just because they are newbies.

There is not enough merit on going on the network. This is what I believe.

Also I have seen dark green trusted member getting merit for 2 words posts. Those people should be banned. That's my opinion. I might be wrong