Bounty spammer meets AI Chat generator. Can they be banned on the spot?

[LoyceV]

Just after I reported 4 incoherent offtopic shitposts (1, 2, 3, 4, although now it lacks context without the topics) from hasan21, I found Umaiya:

They're both bounty spammers, and now found the serious boards. The posts look almost random.

The first 4 posts were deleted quickly after I reported them, but I feel like it's not enough. Considering the recent hype on text-spinning AIs, and considering how easy it is for shitposters to produce massive numbers of posts that take some time to read through to realize it's bogus, I'd like to see them banned quicker. Maybe we can still stop this before it reaches massive volumes.

If you find more of this, please post them here as examples.

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[suchmoon]

The first 4 posts were deleted quickly after I reported them, but I feel like it's not enough. Considering the recent hype on text-spinning AIs, and considering how easy it is for shitposters to produce massive numbers of posts that take some time to read through to realize it's bogus, I'd like to see them banned quicker. Maybe we can still stop this before it reaches massive volumes.

Love your optimism, not going to happen. Even blatant plagiarists aren't getting banned, let alone word salad shitposters. This would require actual engagement from moderators - like reading the board they're responsible for and deleting/banning without waiting for reports. I haven't seen that happening since frodo was cleaning tech boards and FH in P&S.

[NotATether]

If it's spam then yes, ban them on the spot. How long the ban should be, should be left to the discretion of moderators. Otherwise, the process is largely identical to the one for human-generated spam.

[PowerGlove]

Just after I reported 4 incoherent offtopic shitposts [...]

I reported one of hasan21's posts, too. It struck me as very oddly constructed, like it was translated from another language by someone tripping their balls off or something (archived):

Although some have claimed that the record ranchers may mishandle it, it will essentially make things harder for them, therefore we should be grateful for that!
Currently, all I need to do is come up with a few awesome presents to help me reach 150 legitimacy in the next two months, at which point my actions will raise my status. Tongue

Happy about the adjustment, perhaps there won't be as many postings about novices learning about ICOs in a string for a mineable coin with almost no ICO.

On a hunch, I searched that topic for "account farmers" (which was massacred into "record ranchers") and found the original post that the above nonsense was derived from:

It may be abused by the account farmers as said by others, but it will make it harder at least for them and that is a good thing!
Now i just need to come up with some high quality posts to gain 150 merit in the next two months when activity would rank me up

Happy for the change, maybe there will be less posts of the type newbie asking about ICO in a thread for a minable coin without any ICO

I'd appreciate it if someone could make a plagiarism report (I would do it myself, here, but I'm late for something, and have to run).

Edit: Thanks @Stalker22, your report seems to have done the business; hasan21 is no more (https://bpip.org/Profile?p=hasan21).

[Stalker22]

I'd appreciate it if someone could make a plagiarism report (I would do it myself, here, but I'm late for something, and have to run).

Nice find, PowerGlove and LoyceV! I found another example and made a plagiarism report: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926895.msg61585468#msg61585468
I hope the spammer gets the permaban he deserves.

[digaran]

I didn't know AI turns emojis to words, lol .

reach 150 legitimacy in the next two months, at which point my actions will raise my status. Tongue

gain 150 merit in the next two months when activity would rank me up

There is also this post , claiming to live in a warzone country with a big family and no food to eat. If this is true maybe we should at least consider his desperation? Unless that's not original like other posts?

[Hispo]

Those post are bad enough to be funny, if you ask me. A couple of them made me chuckle because of how strange they are. 
However, I agree we should not underestimate this kind of abuse and need to stop all this non-sense before more people join into the party of AI shitposting.

If any of you care about my opinion, people using any kind of automation tools to spam the forum should be given a temporary ban as warning and then a permaban if they are caught doing exactly the same. If we do not take care of this soon enough this could become a new standard. 

[Poker Player]

Well, I in other posts defended that this IA could be positive and provide leverage but to quality and responsible posters of the forum. To shitposters it gives them a tool to spam much more and faster, multiplying the number of alts, so in principle I would like to see a measure like the one proposed by LoyceV, but as suchmoon I am skeptical.

[DaveF]

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post. I know some boards have them, sometimes even multiple ones. I don't know if it hurts legitimate posting or not, but I don't see as much spam on them vs those that do not. One car board I am on has a quick and simple one like what is 2 + 7 and that is followed by the 'pick the image' one. And there is very little spam. The other is more like here where you can just post and does get a lot more junk posts.

Don't know how much work it would take to put one in.

But, the AI / chat spammers should just get a permanent vacation.

-Dave

[Apocollapse]

I think user who post using AI Chat generator is similar with ordinary spammer where the punishment is the post get deleted by moderators. But if the user is keep spamming with AI Chat generator and didn't learn his mistake, the moderators can give him temporary ban for 7 days, the second 14 days, the third 30 days and the fourth get permanent banned.

AI Chat generator is still in grey area where it doesn't really took every words from someone articles, but claiming if you're the one who wrote every words created by AI Chat generator is wrong too.

It would be different if someone can spot there's a plagiarism or paraphrase, he deserve to get permanent banned.

First offence: 7 days
Second offence: 14 days
Third offence: 30 days
Fourth: Permanent ban

1. No zero or low value, pointless or uninteresting posts or threads. [1][e]

2. No off-topic posts.

If an AI is able to consistently create content that doesn't break any of the forum's rules (good quality, on-topic, not just a padded word salad, no plagiarism, etc, etc), I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords. Otherwise, content that violates the rules, AI or human produced, can already be dealt with with our current rules and policies in mind.

[LoyceV]

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post. I know some boards have them, sometimes even multiple ones. I don't know if it hurts legitimate posting

I'll leave Bitcointalk if that happens.

Bounty spammers don't mind jumping through hoops, normal people do:

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post.

Hard NACK. Sometimes I have a hard enough time just loading in the forum to read it via Tor, captchas, cloudflare, etc., let alone make any posts.

Rather than making things more difficult for real users, we should just try actually enforcing the rules for a change and ban the spammers. It's not a difficult thing to do.

[ABCbits]

The first 4 posts were deleted quickly after I reported them, but I feel like it's not enough. Considering the recent hype on text-spinning AIs, and considering how easy it is for shitposters to produce massive numbers of posts that take some time to read through to realize it's bogus, I'd like to see them banned quicker. Maybe we can still stop this before it reaches massive volumes.

I agree with @suchmoon, so it's more realistic to either
1. Keep reporting those posts. At bare minimum, they'll focus spamming on different board.
2. Quote their reply with detailed explanation why their post either doesn't make sense or could be dangerous towards other user.
3. Ignore them.

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post.

It'll be nightmare towards VPN and Tor user who already face occasional CloudFlare "security check". And it's publicly known popular CAPTCHA service (such as hCaptcha and reCATCHA) is hostile towards VPN and Tor.

[NotATether]

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post.

Hard NACK. Sometimes I have a hard enough time just loading in the forum to read it via Tor, captchas, cloudflare, etc., let alone make any posts.

Rather than making things more difficult for real users, we should just try actually enforcing the rules for a change and ban the spammers. It's not a difficult thing to do.

Agree. My lynx terminal is still broken for Bitcointalk as well, and it's not like I can slap a JavaScript engine inside the browser to solve captchas, especially when they will keep changing over time and use ever newer JS constructs.

[DaveF]

So...
NotATether, ETFbitcoin, o_e_l_e_o, LoyceV are all against my concept of a captcha.

Let's compromise and do it my way :-)

Seriously, it would be a patch at best to slow it down but other then reporting we have no other option.

IMO it's just a really difficult balance, you want a free and open forum. But you want to control the spammers as much as possible.

Or do you go the other way but no more temp bans for things like that. Using a word spinner you get the boot and that's it. Too harsh? Not sure.

-Dave

[LoyceV]

Or do you go the other way but no more temp bans for things like that. Using a word spinner you get the boot and that's it. Too harsh? Not sure.

Temp bans are great for normal people. Actually, I'd hate it if that happened, and I'd learn my lesson. Just like I learned my lesson back in 2015 when I posted 3 referral links, and all 3 of them got deleted. I too was once a clueless Newbie
Temp bans are useless for spammers who just open more accounts. They don't need a warning, they know they're not contributing anyway. They're just trying to get away with it.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Seriously, it would be a patch at best to slow it down but other then reporting we have no other option.

The other option is mods and admins actually enforce the few rules we do have. How much better would the forum be if we actually followed this in any way: Signature Campaign Guidelines (read this before starting or joining a campaign)

IMO it's just a really difficult balance, you want a free and open forum. But you want to control the spammers as much as possible.

There is a very clear distinction between allowing freedom of speech for controversial opinions (which I will always defend) and banning outright spammers.

Using a word spinner you get the boot and that's it. Too harsh? Not sure.

Using a word spinner is plagiarism. Additionally, using one is deliberately trying to circumvent the rule regarding plagiarism. Word spinning should be an instant perma-ban. I cannot fathom why it isn't.

[Ultegra134]

So...
NotATether, ETFbitcoin, o_e_l_e_o, LoyceV are all against my concept of a captcha.

Let's compromise and do it my way :-)

Seriously, it would be a patch at best to slow it down but other then reporting we have no other option.

IMO it's just a really difficult balance, you want a free and open forum. But you want to control the spammers as much as possible.

Or do you go the other way but no more temp bans for things like that. Using a word spinner you get the boot and that's it. Too harsh? Not sure.

-Dave

I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend, but how are captchas in each post going to help? In the case of LoyceV's report, the reported user has posted four replies in a course of approximately 40 minutes. These posts are certainly made by an AI service such as ChatGPT, as LoyceV already mentioned. I don't see how a captcha would solve that; I don't see the need, since these kinds of services are able to generate a vast amount of posts.



Anyway, to return to the starting subject, I believe that the user in question is likely to be an alt account; I can't find any other reason a newbie would make such a large amount of posts in such a short notice.

[LoyceV]

controversial opinions
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Word spinning should be an instant perma-ban. I cannot fathom why it isn't.

Combining those 2, I can think of a legit reason for word spinning: to avoid identification by using forensic linguistics. But that's not the case in any of the spam-cases we've seen.

I believe that the user in question is likely to be an alt account; I can't find any other reason a newbie would make such a large amount of posts in such a short notice.

My guess: he's trying to earn that one Merit needed for a Jr. Member signature for bounty spam.

[Adbitco]

I wonder how difficult it really would be to add a captcha requirement for every post. I know some boards have them, sometimes even multiple ones. I don't know if it hurts legitimate posting or not, but I don't see as much spam on them vs those that do not. One car board I am on has a quick and simple one like what is 2 + 7 and that is followed by the 'pick the image' one. And there is very little spam. The other is more like here where you can just post and does get a lot more junk posts.

Don't know how much work it would take to put one in.

But, the AI / chat spammers should just get a permanent vacation.

-Dave

Well, sorry commenting here, i think your opinion could be the best.
Sometimes i think of how much we could keep reporting such post or even issuing temp ban and parma ban., However, have we forgotten that the more they got ban the more account they make and if their IP are already mark for evil, believe me or not they could source for another means to create additional account to still further same process, will the admin keep banning them on the go?
In as much as we want to keep the forum clean we should also try to lessen the task from the admin & Mods, because i believe there are lot cases to be taking care of over here. For such to reduce they could implements a captcha to reduce much activities from them.