Disable links for new accounts

[takuma sato]

I've been seeing stuff like this around:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5423058.0

Brand new accounts posting a clickable link with colourful and bold letters. I don't know what BitcoinSuprex is and im not accusing of scam or malware because I haven't clicked on the link or researched this, but let's say it is. Shouldn't it be at least more difficult for someone to post a clickable url link? This is common practice in other forums, and seems reasonable on a forum like this to be disabled until you have an higher rank than Newbie.

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[Plaguedeath]

AFAIK the moderators restrict brand new accounts if they post suspicious link, the url of BitcoinSuprex doesn't look like suspicious link, that's why I think they allow it.

The sign will be like this and the link isn't clickable:

Code:

[suspicious link removed]

No one like colorful and bold letters, I don't think there's higher rank create thread or post that colorful since it's annoying and hurt eyes.

I think it's make sense to disable clickable link for new accounts, I don't think reaching Jr. Member rank is hard since you need to be active in this forum for 2 weeks and get 1 merit only.

[hugeblack]

There are many restrictions imposed on newbies and adding more of them will force scammers to rank-up to reach the next rank, and so on, in return, new members will avoid this forum.
So the solution lies in awareness, avoid random clicking on the links and trying to report when you I saw such links.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

I've been seeing stuff like this around:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5423058.0

The topic moved to trash or deleted so I can not see what happened but I can assume it had links.
The only way you can help is to report it to the moderators.

It's usual aggressive promotion of a website/service where the user create same/similar thread on multiple boards. I've seen this kind of behavior at least once a week. I disagree about disabling link for new account/newbie, but people really have some security awareness and report this kind of post with note off-topic, spam or self-promotion on wrong board.

We are already too harsh to newbies/jr members. Putting more restrictions will suck it more.

[UserU]

We are already too harsh to newbies/jr members. Putting more restrictions will suck it more.

The problem is that there are victims that fall scam to those fake drivers/ updates. Perhaps disable it in certain subforums?

Seen it happened to a few, especially on the mining boards.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

BitcoinGirl.Club said my mind, and to add to all the other users have said...
I think bounty managers will disagree with this feature big time, and I also disagree because disabling the links for newbies will not allow affect their participations in bounty in the altcoin board, this will also give bounty managers a really tough time checking weekly posts requirements of their participants...

Remember that majority of users who participate in bounty campaigns in the altcoin board are all newbies, and they are required to make weekly reports of their posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, tiktok etc, this report requires them posting direct links to their posts about the project they are promoting on the campaign thread, if newbies are stripped off the ability to post links, you give the managers a very hard time checking those reports.

So on behalf of the bounty managers on this forum, I say no to this feature.

[tranthidung]

If you see something suspicious, you can use the Report button and report it, then moderators will handle it for you.

[Unofficial Guide] Reporting effectively
Forum already has many restrictions on newbies and theymos does not want to implement more. Please read his post

Right, I don't care about making money from the forum personally. (I've actually thought about getting rid of the forum ads, since it's often a big headache and the forum has enough reserves for a long time, but operating at a significant loss while there's money basically just sitting on the table feels wrong, even if the level of loss is sustainable for quite a while.)

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. 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. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.

Primarily, it's just that freedom + size = mess, and with bitcointalk.org I've chosen to keep freedom about as high as possible, for example allowing paid signature ads, poor English, micro-earning services which often attract a spammy crowd, etc. Banning these things (and other noise-generating factors) would be easily possible, and would immediately lead to a cleaner environment, but it'd also be a less free environment. IMO there are enough highly-controlled platforms around, and I'd prefer to try maximizing the freedom axis. (Maximizing freedom on the forum was a policy started by Satoshi when he was an admin, BTW, though it was years after he left before the forum became large enough for freedom to actually come in conflict with signal much.)

Bitcointalk.org is under active development on two parallel paths:

• First, although the outward appearance hasn't changed much at all since 2010, I have made tons of changes to the code, including many features. About a year ago for example I added the Merit system, which has improved signal-to-noise quite a bit, by means of changing incentives.
• Second, a completely new software platform has long been in development. This software is open source, can be run now, and an instance of it is available for example at https://www.cryptos-currencies.com/ . But I don't think that it's quite complete enough to migrate bitcointalk.org to it yet.

On both development paths, we try to tackle signal-vs-noise by methods such as categorizing posts better, improving incentives, trying to create smaller sub-communities, etc., but not via restriction, if at all possible.

While I don't claim to have nearly maximized the signal-to-noise which might be possible even given a high degree of freedom, bitcointalk.org is pretty anarchic, and it will always be so. (Though note that some sections are much better than others.) If that doesn't appeal to you, then you should use a different site. Smaller communities, like IRC channels and similar, can be both free and have a high signal-to-noise ratio. This was bitcointalk.org in 2010-2013, but it's now too large. You can also have large communities that are more strictly moderated, like r/Bitcoin.

Some restrictions on Newbies

• Newbie PM warning
• Newbie PM changes to address phishing
• New PM limits
• Newbie PM opt-in
• more

[Xal0lex]

I've been seeing stuff like this around:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5423058.0

The topic moved to trash or deleted so I can not see what happened but I can assume it had links.
The only way you can help is to report it to the moderators.

You can take a look at the topic here. I looked at this site with the extension, the site certainly looks like something childish The extension they offer can be downloaded as a crx file from github. Checked on virustotal, seems to be clean. But virustotal engines don't always detect viruses, as I've seen recently. It is unclear why their extension is not in the Google store.

[Welsh]

This might be a little bit too complex, but making it by default that all links in posts are disabled from your point of perspective, but can be enabled in the forum settings for those that do want automatically clickable links. The thing is with that, it's likely to resource heavy. I do think there's an issue with the time to react to these sort of things. For those that get caught by patrollers fairly soon the damage is mitigated, but sometimes these sort of posts can go unnoticed, and potentially downloaded by several hundred users.

I do think there's a common theme at hand here though, we keep restricting new users, that they basically don't want to sign up to the forum or continue using it because they feel restricted. Whereas, places like Reddit might not have such restrictions. So, we're sort of competing against something that's already probably more appealing to the vast majority of new users coming into Bitcoin.

I personally think a shadow ban system for new users would be nice, but then again you could argue that's even more restrictive, and we'd have to have quicker response time than your average ambulance for it not to be too much of a problem.

[dkbit98]

Brand new accounts posting a clickable link with colourful and bold letters. I don't know what BitcoinSuprex is and im not accusing of scam or malware because I haven't clicked on the link or researched this, but let's say it is. Shouldn't it be at least more difficult for someone to post a clickable url link? This is common practice in other forums, and seems reasonable on a forum like this to be disabled until you have an higher rank than Newbie.

Let's say moderators block all newbie accounts to post links, they will just write more crap posts until they will be able to post links, so in best case you would only delay posting of scam links.
It should be said again that scam is not moderated in forum, and this stance was clearly repeated several times, so I don't think anything will change regarding this.
More limitations would also hurt genuine new members, and I this is why I am against more strict restrictions.

[UmerIdrees]

Brand new accounts posting a clickable link with colourful and bold letters. I don't know what BitcoinSuprex is and im not accusing of scam or malware because I haven't clicked on the link or researched this, but let's say it is. Shouldn't it be at least more difficult for someone to post a clickable url link? This is common practice in other forums, and seems reasonable on a forum like this to be disabled until you have an higher rank than Newbie.

Let's say moderators block all newbie accounts to post links, they will just write more crap posts until they will be able to post links, so in best case you would only delay posting of scam links.
It should be said again that scam is not moderated in forum, and this stance was clearly repeated several times, so I don't think anything will change regarding this.
More limitations would also hurt genuine new members, and I this is why I am against more strict restrictions.

Yes, this is not a good idea to disable links for the newbie accounts. Let's suppose i am new on the forum and I am the owner of a legit crypto or gambling site and I want to post my site link on the forum. So I will not be able to do it as I am new on the forum. Also, i won't first be doing useless posts to increase my rank, get a merit and then share my site link after become Jr Member.   

Genuine site owners will leave the site when they come across so may restrictions. Only the scammers will stay to first rank up and then share their scam links. Also, not everyone wants to buy a copper membership to overcome all these restrictions.

[KingsDen]

There are many restrictions imposed on newbies and adding more of them will force scammers to rank-up to reach the next rank, and so on, in return, new members will avoid this forum.
So the solution lies in awareness, avoid random clicking on the links and trying to report when you I saw such links.

I support your idea, adding a couple of newbie restrictions will have the following effects;

1. It will divert the attention of scammers to merit abuse, where merit selling will become rampant.
2. It will not stop the sharing of scam links, it will only delay it.
3. It will discourage newbies especially casino companies that came to promote their business. These newbies are able atleast make posts that link to their websites before they are advised to buy copper membership.
4. It will distrupt the activities of the bounty hunters who earn some coins by sending links everyday.

The odds is in the side of the users to avoid clicking random links especially when it comes from newbies.

[hugeblack]

I support your idea, adding a couple of newbie restrictions will have the following effects;
The odds is in the side of the users to avoid clicking random links especially when it comes from newbies.

The only logical thing would be to prevent newbies from using this feature or at least to show both links individually.

Code:

[url=Fake URL] Real URL[/url]

Otherwise, adding more restrictions will not solve the problem.

[LoyceV]

I don't know what BitcoinSuprex is and im not accusing of scam or malware because I haven't clicked on the link or researched this, but let's say it is.

His claims and responses gave my all the reasons I need not to trust him. He got on my radar for spamming the same topic on several boards, and after reporting them, he posted them on other boards again (several times). He now has 12 deleted posts, and I hope he has at least a temporary ban.

Shouldn't it be at least more difficult for someone to post a clickable url link?

That conflicts with:

the forum's mission to be as free as possible.

Banning links would mean no new user can promote their casino or exchange. That won't make the forum better, and the scammers will just wait until they've reached the rank needed to promote their scam.

AFAIK the moderators restrict brand new accounts if they post suspicious link, the url of BitcoinSuprex doesn't look like suspicious link, that's why I think they allow it.

The sign will be like this and the link isn't clickable:

Code:

[suspicious link removed]

As far as I know, that only happens to links that are manually added to the list of "suspicious" links. Obviously, new domain names aren't on that list.

people really have some security awareness and report this kind of post

People should also really stop trusting random links and software they find on the internet!

[PX-Z]

Disabling links will cause more damage than those malware and malware-assumed links. Instead of disabling links for new accounts, posting more educational threads/posts for awareness then reporting the post is the very best way to do. Well, reporting posts solves any bothersome posts so, yeah.