Proposal: Rename the "Press" board to "Spammer of the Month" board

[icopress]

Having a "press" website myself, I could moderate the board (not for free though - don't have time for most nonprofit endeavors these days) since I can tell if a page (source) is up to journalistic standards or not.

Well, let's start with the fact that you have to be a person who is difficult to surprise, since keeping the section clean you will have to delete 95% of the content. Frankly, I myself would have published VERY interesting content in the first person in this section, if this section were put in order. Because I often see uninteresting superficial crypto news that becomes fascinating if you get to the source.

For example, the McAfee archive ... has it already been decrypted? Not so long ago, I added a bookmark a post with links, but I feel it would be much more interesting if this information was in the news section, (analyzing the details together is much more fun). In addition, Theymos does not pay a fixed salary (this is probably the main thing), and for sure he will not agree to give authority to a person who is primarily interested in money ... although in vain.

[LeGaulois]

I'm one of the persons tired to report posts on the Pressboard and less and less interested to read it over the months. It looks more like my RSS than a place to discuss the latest news. I complained several times, and probably once on a topic I created but nothing change.

Look at the guys posting useless stuff, sometimes not even related to Bitcoin. "Not related to Bitcoin" is probably the most used reason I gave while reporting (and I reported so many). I don't believe (for a reason) they're rewarded by a website to post their blog posts, but guess who should we blame again ??.? 
This section is easy to 'spam': just copy past a TLTR AND and a link and voila!

The board isn't active as some others but at least it's one of the few where we can get a discussion without seeing shitpots all over the thread
I prefer to read a thread with just 4-5 replies than a thread with 10 pages full of parrots

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I didn’t check that board for a long time. If I'm correct, it was almost a year ago when I last checked and the board haven’t changed at all.

I don't think I've looked at Press in well over 4 years, and honestly I forgot that section even existed until just now.  Lol.  And to think that I get 99.9% of my crypto news from this forum.  You'd think I'd leave a section like that un-ignored, but nope.  It ought to be one of the best ones, but just like Bitcoin Discussion it's turned into a travesty of what it's supposed to be.

Not having seen what's going on in Press, I can't attest to how spammy it's become as of late, but I tend to believe Leo when he says it's pretty bad. 

I mean, there are a bunch of boards across the forums with inactive moderators who have not logged in for years. There is no doubt they should at least be removed, if not replaced.

I get the sense the positions are more ceremonial or honorary these days.  A 'preserved for posterity' kinda deal.  This place likes its history.

That's unfortunate, and why is it that this forum, with all the money it has at its disposal, can't afford to pay a sufficient number of moderators to keep boards like Press and all of the other spam pits clean and shiny?  If a mod has gone inactive, I'm pretty sure there are at least 3-5 members who'd jump at the chance to be a mod--and I'd imagine that Theymos has a mental list of members he'd consider, so why are sections allowed to go unmoderated?  I just don't get it.

[Upgrade00]

That's unfortunate, and why is it that this forum, with all the money it has at its disposal, can't afford to pay a sufficient number of moderators to keep boards like Press and all of the other spam pits clean and shiny?  If a mod has gone inactive, I'm pretty sure there are at least 3-5 members who'd jump at the chance to be a mod--and I'd imagine that Theymos has a mental list of members he'd consider, so why are sections allowed to go unmoderated?  I just don't get it.

This I do not understand.
Updates usually take an awful long time to be implemented on the forum and within that time period, the forum would likely have already lost a lot of members who for one reason or the other didn't find the forum welcoming or they couldn't cope with the tons of garbage posts. Lots of boards have become spam fests and the only solution is to put them on ignore;

Bitcoin discussion which should be the top board on s forum like this (and indeed is the top board by arrangement) has become almost impossible to read through, Economics board which was also one of my favorites had also been run over.

These are urgent issues, but the response to them is not so urgent or non existent.

[InvoKing]

Would it be an option to remove signatures on that board?

No, or you have to remove signatures everywhere. Besides, I remember seeing spammers without signatures, just spamming their blogs and websites.
The solution for this problem is easy, warning then temporarily ban, not sure if we can disable posting there for spammers.

Mod jgarzik made only a few posts in the past years, and hasn't been online for more than a year.

It is a honorary title for jgarzik rather than a position. That is what I told by a mod or an admin in the past. I can't remember anymore.
The problem with the press sub is having duplicated topics with the bitcoin discussion section. People prefer to post there because most signatures campaign accept it rather than the press sub. At the end, we have few members posting and having few spammers there will look exaggerated.
I blame partially the staff for the current situation. I should say that I reported so many infractions in the past when I was more active and they dealt with it in few hours but what I was frustrated about is that they don't ban them when they repeat several times their intentional mistakes like coinidol.
I don't want to see the press sub closing because the quality of the dozen posts there is better than the hundreds spam I see in the bitcoin discussion topics.
Good luck for everyone trying to fix it.

[PrimeNumber7]

Mod jgarzik

jgarzik is not currently a mod, the same way that MiningBuddy is not a mod or the newbie section. If you look at each of their profiles, you will see they do not have a staff title. Listing someone as a mod of a section is different than someone actually having mod authority over the section. For whatever reason, Theymos has not removed their names from the header of the sub.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The board isn't active as some others but at least it's one of the few where we can get a discussion without seeing shitpots all over the thread

Yeah. It's a real shame, because the usual one line sig spammers tend to avoid the Press board for whatever reason, presumably because it is easier to churn out nonsense in Bitcoin Discussion or Altcoin Discussion. On the odd occasion someone like DaveF posts a good topic, then you get a good discussion with minimal spam. The spammers who have taken over the Press board are a different breed as I highlighted in the first post in this thread.

I don't think I've looked at Press in well over 4 years, and honestly I forgot that section even existed until just now.  Lol.  And to think that I get 99.9% of my crypto news from this forum.  You'd think I'd leave a section like that un-ignored, but nope.  It ought to be one of the best ones, but just like Bitcoin Discussion it's turned into a travesty of what it's supposed to be.

And so goes on the downward spiral. Spam isn't addressed, non-spamming users put it on ignore, the spam worsens even further, more users ignore it, and so on, until we reach where we are now where it is pretty much an unusable board.

Bitcoin discussion which should be the top board on s forum like this (and indeed is the top board by arrangement) has become almost impossible to read through, Economics board which was also one of my favorites had also been run over.

These are urgent issues, but the response to them is not so urgent or non existent.

I've been saying this for literally years (see my post below from 3 years ago), but for some reason we have done absolutely nothing to address it and Bitcoin Discussion is still a spamfest:

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.

[Upgrade00]

I've been saying this for literally years (see my post below from 3 years ago), but for some reason we have done absolutely nothing to address it and Bitcoin Discussion is still a spamfest:

I gave up hoping to see some major changes some time back, I now only just read through and try to use a filter to choose what to interact with and what not to (I personally do not like the idea of ignoring a user or a board).
It's sort of ironic that as Bitcoin (the network) rises and gets more popular, bitcointalk (the chat forum), gradually declines, or at least a part of it does.

[Pmalek]

Almost all of his links come from Coin Telegraph, so I can only assume he is being paid by them.

Maybe they are paying him, but somehow I doubt they need such type of marketing here. He is wearing a signature, so that's where the motivation for spam might come from. Copy-pasting existing articles, adding maybe a sentence or two, and you are done. On to the next post. It's an easy way to up your post count.

Would it be an option to remove signatures on that board?

That would just cause the spam to spill over to other subs.

At one point in time, we had better moderation in the Bitcoin Discussion board, but I don't think the admins view the Press sub as an important board of this forum anymore to want to do anything to change it. You can get your daily crypto news anywhere you want now. The press board is of minor importance nowadays.   

[RickDeckard]

I gave up hoping to see some major changes some time back, I now only just read through and try to use a filter to choose what to interact with and what not to (I personally do not like the idea of ignoring a user or a board).
It's sort of ironic that as Bitcoin (the network) rises and gets more popular, bitcointalk (the chat forum), gradually declines, or at least a part of it does.

The thing is, in a balanced world, you (and other users) shouldn't feel like that. How many users have "gave up" on either reporting spamming users, stop visiting some board due to its spam/"robot" posting and even stop interacting with the forum itself due to their efforts/call of attention "apparently" being unanswered? I totally understand the forum mission to be "as free as possible" but there is a fine balance between "free as possible" and pass the feeling to the community that something is always being done to prevent this escalate of douple-triple post users and spammer one line posts (while keeping the forum motto true to its roots).

Don't take me wrong here - I'm sure that there are a lot of things that go by "in the background" of the forum structure that most of us don't even know that it exists - after all the forum already has a considerable hierarchy and I'm sure there are some kind of meetings/reunions that take place to evaluate everything : from the current workload of the mods to the state of specific boards. If this indeed does happen, one question that I totally believe some of us would make is : "If they are fully aware of the current status - in this case of the Press board for example - why aren't they doing anything about it?". I can't really give you the answer that we're looking for but I do believe that we are able to keep the forum mission alive and still manage to bring back the trust of our users regarding some subs that should be in their radar (such as Bitcoin discussion). What about having yearly, or bi-yearly meetings to really evaluate the moderation of each board and see if it's either enough / the mod is inactive / it needs another mod? We've already reached a dimension that we truly need a balanced level of help running in the background making sure that we are still captivating to new users (that is easy at the moment but mostly for the bad reasons (bounty campagins cough cough)) but also still encourage long time users to continue with us.

I believe that our staff members truly do an impeccable job of running the forum - I can't imagine what it would look like without them. I just think that it's bad to know that for some users some parts of the forum are being put on the ignore list simply due to how "spammy" they have become isn't something really healthy for any of us. I do know that finding moderators or, even better, users that could be trusted in order to run things in here is something that should be carefully assessed, but from what I see there are some reputable members that have shown solidarity and that are willing to help the forum , being in the role of a moderator or just like a "helper" of the moderation team.
[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533

[o_e_l_e_o]

I totally understand the forum mission to be "as free as possible" but there is a fine balance between "free as possible" and pass the feeling to the community that something is always being done to prevent this escalate of douple-triple post users and spammer one line posts (while keeping the forum motto true to its roots).

I'm all for free speech and freedom to post anything you like, and have defended both on multiple occasions on these forums, but I draw a line when your posts start affecting other users' ability to actually use the forum for discussion. We don't need any new rules or restrictions to clean up this mess, but rather we just need to enforce the ones we already have.

[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4538227.msg40849533#msg40849533

Interesting you should reference this post:

When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc.

Is that not the situation we find ourselves in more and more? The barrier to participation at the moment is wading through pages and pages of spam to find a topic worth reading or an interesting discussion. Many of the best people aren't going to go to the trouble of doing this, they'll just find a less spammy community. The people who are willing to wade through pages and pages of spam are the spammers themselves who are only here to try to make a quick buck.

[BlackHatCoiner]

We don't need any new rules or restrictions to clean up this mess, but rather we just need to enforce the ones we already have.

It's not easy (nor practical) to enforce the current rules. As long as someone incentivizes Joe to earn few bucks by copy-pasting articles to the Press board, it's pointless to continue reporting. Even if both sides, you as a member and the moderators, report and delete frequently, this mess isn't going to be tackled. It's like squashing the water.

What we do need is a radical change which will retain free speech, but will, alongside, discourage those users from shitposting.

[NotATether]

What we do need is a radical change which will retain free speech, but will, alongside, discourage those users from shitposting.

Maybe an update to Mitchell's bot that reports threads with OPs that use hashtags or links to the same page (not domain) - eg. A bunch of posts that all link to https:// cointelegraph .com

[Pmalek]

What we do need is a radical change which will retain free speech, but will, alongside, discourage those users from shitposting.

I don't understand the connection between free speech and bombarding the forum with low-effort posts. A copy-pasted article is a low-effort post, especially one that doesn't include a personal opinion or additional analysis of any kind. Spam and low-effort posts are against the rules and should be deleted.

But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".     

[suchmoon]

But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".     

I doubt that this helps the forum. It gives backlinks and therefore possibly some search engine boost to those "news" sites but seems unlikely to work the other way. I tried googling some of the titles from the Press board and in many cases Bitcointalk is not in the results and sure as shit none of those sites will link to Bitcointalk.

[Upgrade00]

But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".     

Not all publicity is good publicity in my opinion.
Most of the traffic generated in those boards (press and altcoin) are from spammers and bounty hunters who do not care about the forum, but are only interested in reaching a certain post quota inorder to get a couple of tokens, this is net negative to the forum as it does not improve the quality of discussions, it makes the forum unappealing to older members and puts lots of work on the mods.

[DooMAD]

I'm starting to think the problem runs deeper.  Why are we struggling to generate stimulating discussion on topical events?  I feel like it's something that should come naturally.  But lately it isn't.  How can we better facilitate engagement?

Is it purely because the topics in the press board are largely low quality copypasta which links to utter dross masquerading as news?  I think it would help to clarify what actually qualifies when it comes to "notability" and to mandate that topic starters in that sub include their own thoughts an opinions to accompany the quoted segments they're posting.  But I still don't know if that will actually fix the problem.

Is there a chance it just boils down to apathy?  Imagine if there were plenty of good quality topics with in-depth analysis.  The kind of thing we all say we want to see.  Those would naturally drown out the low-effort, low-quality topics we're seeing.  And yet there's no reason I can see why we don't have topics like that.  Aside from just the obvious fact, which is that not many people are making them.  Is it possible we're simply leaving the door wide open for shit topics because we're not making enough good ones?

[suchmoon]

Is it possible we're simply leaving the door wide open for shit topics because we're not making enough good ones?

This shouldn't be a competition. Shit topics shouldn't exist. If good topics don't exist either then we have a dead board, no big deal but at least we know there is no interest. Now it's not clear if there is no interest, or if good posters are discouraged to step into the pile of shit.

Keep in mind that producing shit is much easier than producing non-shit so you can't really win against shit on any kind of pseudo-level playing field.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Why are we struggling to generate stimulating discussion on topical events?

Because, like Bitcoin Discussion, many good members ignore the board entirely because it is overrun with spammers. Get rid of the spammers, and they will slowly migrate back again.

I think it would help to clarify what actually qualifies when it comes to "notability" and to mandate that topic starters in that sub include their own thoughts an opinions to accompany the quoted segments they're posting.

Anything from a site solely for crypto news should be banned, since these sites churn out non newsworthy click bait a dime a dozen, since that is their business model. If anyone just copies and pastes a bit of an article, then that is a low value post and should be deleted.

I just did a quick experiment on applying those two rules to the current first page of Press (ignoring the 3 stickied topics). It cuts the number of topics from 40 down to just 3, and the number of total replies from 117 to 55. That's nearly half of all the replies in just 7.5% of the topics. Unsurprisingly, those 3 topics are first, second, and third in terms of total number of replies. Those topics are where the good discussion is. If we trashed all the spam as I have suggested above, then almost the entire front page of the board would comprise good quality topics like that, which would slowly but surely attract back good users.

Imagine if there were plenty of good quality topics with in-depth analysis.  The kind of thing we all say we want to see.  Those would naturally drown out the low-effort, low-quality topics we're seeing.  And yet there's no reason I can see why we don't have topics like that.

Here's the problem with that: The spammer of the month will churn out 4-5 new topics a day with ease. If you want to drown those out, then you need somewhere approaching 10 new good topics each day. There are not 10 newsworthy things happening to bitcoin every week, let alone every day.

There are good quality topics on that board, but they only come along when something notable happens. In the meantime, we get drowned out with non newsworthy spam.

[BlackHatCoiner]

links to the same page (not domain) - eg. A bunch of posts that all link to https:// cointelegraph .com

And when do people link to the same, exact page?

I don't understand the connection between free speech and bombarding the forum with low-effort posts.

You will pay no attention to a thread that is fulfilled with low quality posts, because you'll consider it pointless. However, some may had a dialogue which is:

1. Constantly interrupted.
2. Doesn't have your opinion in it which may otherwise had.

In other words, you're discouraged to speak out sometimes.

I was going to say this;

Keep in mind that producing shit is much easier than producing non-shit so you can't really win against shit on any kind of pseudo-level playing ground.

You can't beat them this way; the game is theirs. We have to get rid of this dirtiness in order to welcome good quality content.