Request: Disable merits in the Wall Observer thread

[dkbit98]

The simple solution to the problem is to disable the meriting of WO posts. Much like how signatures were disabled in that thread, it will discourage spammers from flooding the thread.

Solution is not that simple, they can just move to another board/thread and continue ''business'' as usual.
Sure, there is a chance Wall Observer thread could get cleaner, but I seriously doubt that this will happen even if merits gets disabled.

[SamReomo]

The simple solution to the problem is to disable the meriting of WO posts. Much like how signatures were disabled in that thread, it will discourage spammers from flooding the thread.

Disabling of merits on that thread will be an injustice to the senior and most well known members who have been active on that thread for a long time. Some of those members don't post on other threads at all, and if merits are disabled on that thread then their accounts may also not get new merits. That's actually not a problem because those members really don't need or care about merits that much because as far as I have noticed that none of them is in a signature campaign and they don't really care about signature campaigns at all.

The most members of the thread are true Bitcoin enthusiasts and they love to spend their time on that thread, and whenever they see a good post on that thread they can't stop themselves from sending merits to those posts. I think nothing is wrong in that kind of merit sending and the ones who are basically there for merit fishing won't get any better even if they receive 1000 merits which are required for legendary rank. I don't think that any manager would accept such merit fishers in their campaigns because most of the managers want high quality posters who could create useful posts for promotion of a campaign.

[_act_]

I don't see it in your way and most of what you even narrated are very good reasons for it to be disabled if possible. Merit earning and sharing are not all about whether or not you are established or whether you can redistribute it better, the first requirement is for you to share value through quality posts.

I've read through WO many times and posted there about two times, but the truth is you will hardly see anyone sharing value there. The thread has degenerated from what @infofront created it for.

Imagine someone who did not share value earning 32 merits in a single post. This is alarming. Should it be disabled? I say Yes if it continues like this. But No if they can return to the reason why it was originally created, and it should be better moderated with strict rules.

I have visited WO very well and I can see how they are sharing and cycling merits, but some of the exciting posts can be sent merits. I think I like what The Sceptical Chymist, LoyceV and other and many other people said about this. You can read what they post about this.

Merit is not what that is 100% accurate, but it is keeping the forum from shit posting. There are some posts on local board that do not worth the quality of posts on general board but showered with unnecessary merits.

If theymos do not see how this is affecting posting on this forum, he will do nothing. I am very sure that he will do nothing about this. Everything is working good even if some people are smart enough to receive merits with little efforts.

[suchmoon]

Cutting merits off completely might be too harsh although some merit sources in that thread could do better. It takes just a few seconds to stop and think "does this post contribute anything positive to this forum (or thread)" before hitting that merit button. Some of them clearly don't do that and this goes against the intent of the merit system IMO. Unfortunately evaluating this and giving them some guidance and/or restricting their merit allocation is not something I imagine theymos has time for, and if anyone else tries to "investigate" then it would likely result in bias accusations etc.

But if someone were to attempt it, I think the percentage of merits earned inside WO vs outside of WO, particularly for low-rank bounty-and-signature users from non-English boards would be a good starting point. If it looks like this... might be a problem:







Edit: spellign.

Disabling of merits on that thread will be an injustice to the senior and most well known members who have been active on that thread for a long time. Some of those members don't post on other threads at all, and if merits are disabled on that thread then their accounts may also not get new merits. That's actually not a problem because those members really don't need or care about merits that much because as far as I have noticed that none of them is in a signature campaign and they don't really care about signature campaigns at all.

The most members of the thread are true Bitcoin enthusiasts and they love to spend their time on that thread, and whenever they see a good post on that thread they can't stop themselves from sending merits to those posts. I think nothing is wrong in that kind of merit sending and the ones who are basically there for merit fishing won't get any better even if they receive 1000 merits which are required for legendary rank. I don't think that any manager would accept such merit fishers in their campaigns because most of the managers want high quality posters who could create useful posts for promotion of a campaign.

You're a living example of campaign managers not giving a shit about "quality" or "useful" or anything of the sort. The irony of you posting in the "AI spam" thread hasn't escaped me either.

[Who is John Galt?]

I will abstain from voting. I found an ignore button for myself, and now, personally, dumb copies from Twitter don’t bother me anymore. And on other issues, both votes for and votes against seem reasonable to me, so any option will be useful and harmful in some ways.

But guys, voting? You say that the WO thread is filled with alts (which is quite likely), but you hope that they will not guess to come and vote from all their accounts in the way that seems most interesting to them? The number of votes against is not yet in the lead by a wide margin? I would consider only reasoned comments, not voting, where you can vote from any number of alts!

[Igebotz]

I don't support disabling merit on WO,because the regulars are the ones giving out these merits and they are some of them that are merit source who attached themselves to that thread only. I think that the regulars are enjoying or entertaining themselves with the post from those shit posters which is making them to merit their post.

The high rank users and merit source that is focused only on that thread attention should be drawn to this thread as suggested early by @Skeptical Chymist and @Poker Player so that they can minimize the way they give out merits.

You can't tell people how to use their earned smerits or source merits, and most users on WO thread don't pay attention to discussion or care about posts outside of the WO thread, so I doubt any of them would care. Nothing can be done about it as long as they are not trading it. Theymos says lose no sleep over it.

I've had WO on ignore for a long time cuz there's nothing there that interests me. Filled with alts anyways.

[philipma1957]

its a time killer thread.

I post there a lot and in mining boards a lot.

Most people with a ton of merits don't care about whom they give their merits to.

I can tell you really trying to give merits to deserving people takes hours of effort.

First thing you need to do is read every post the person made in the last month.

Second thing you need to do is try and see if they copy or pasted.

Then you can give some merits.

When I first saw  "Who is John Galt"

I was going to give him merits then I wondered if he was a cheap alt being feed by master accounts that have tons of merits.

I am still not sure if it is a stand alone non weasel account. So I hesitate to merit it a lot.

Altoguht once again he wrote a decent post  back a few posts.

To me the biggest problem I have on the WO is anyone with under 400 merits I simply tend to not post as I fear them to be a false alt.

[SamReomo]

You're a living example of campaign managers not giving a shit about "quality" or "useful" or anything of the sort. The irony of you posting in the "AI spam" thread hasn't escaped me either.

I don't really have anything with you because I know that I'm doing good and trying to improve myself every other day. I don't think that it's fair to discourage someone in such a harsh way only because you don't like the way of someone. I'm satisfied with my posts and I'm constantly trying to improve myself. If your criticism is in a positive way then I'll do whatever I can to improve the quality of my posts even more, and if you're just criticizing me because of some personal issues which I don't think we have, then that's something that I can't really change.

[PowerGlove]

This is a tricky one. On the one hand, I like this request; it'll make it much harder for account farmers to rank up, and I'm all for that. On the other hand, restrictions on users' freedoms are from the dark side of the force, and I (mostly) get theymos' reluctance to control things too much.

My first thought is that completely disabling merit distribution in the WO thread is too heavy-handed. I think basing it on rank (e.g. you can't receive merit in the WO thread unless you're at least a Hero Member, or something) makes a nice compromise between dropping a spanner in the works of account farmers but still letting WO regulars have their fun.

My second thought is that this could actually be implemented as an SMF feature, in the same vein as self-moderated threads. Something like this:



That way, the community has another tool to self-govern with, and other merit "soft spots" (like contest threads) might be hardened up, too.

[suchmoon]

If your criticism is in a positive way then I'll do whatever I can to improve the quality of my posts even more, and if you're just criticizing me because of some personal issues which I don't think we have, then that's something that I can't really change.

It's not my responsibility to tailor criticism to some made-up criteria, it is your responsibility to not post for the sake of your campaign quota and/or merits.

To be clear, these days I don't give much of a shit anymore about shitposters - it's easy enough to ignore them and/or avoid threads where they congregate. However when I notice someone like you stepping into a thread without reading it, and posting a couple of paragraphs of generic tripe - I may point that out. Most of the time said shitposters are happy to respond with more padding to their post count so it's not like I'm hurting the primary reason of your presence here, am I?


As for WO - at least the thread is somewhat about Bitcoin. Even if someone gets a merit for a copypasta meme from twitter (or whatever it's called today) that's probably not as bad as getting merits e.g. on altcoin or bounty boards. So if we were to disable merits somewhere (which we almost certainly won't) I'd start there.

[SamReomo]

If your criticism is in a positive way then I'll do whatever I can to improve the quality of my posts even more, and if you're just criticizing me because of some personal issues which I don't think we have, then that's something that I can't really change.

It's not my responsibility to tailor criticism to some made-up criteria, it is your responsibility to not post for the sake of your campaign quota and/or merits.

To be clear, these days I don't give much of a shit anymore about shitposters - it's easy enough to ignore them and/or avoid threads where they congregate. However when I notice someone like you stepping into a thread without reading it, and posting a couple of paragraphs of generic tripe - I may point that out. Most of the time said shitposters are happy to respond with more padding to their post count so it's not like I'm hurting the primary reason of your presence here, am I?

Well said buddy, but I must let you know that I'm part of signature campaign that doesn't have any special post quota requirement from previous week. I really don't post to meet the campaign quota because whenever I like a thread and I know that I can provide my opinion in those topics then I try to present my ideas in those threads. I don't think that sharing one's opinion and knowledge in a thread is a form of shit-posting and if it is then almost everyone is doing it to a certain level.

I don't know about the thread that you're trying to referring to where I posted a comment without reading the thread because I always read the threads fully and I also try to read as many comments as possible in those threads before sharing my opinion in those threads. I spend most of my day's time on this forum to learn about different things and also to share my opinion and knowledge with others. I won't claim that I'm better than you or anyone else because my main focus is to improve myself rather than comparing myself with others. I'm truly sorry if I hurt you unintentionally but I don't think that my presence could be harmful to you or anyone else.

I believe that everyone has their own set of skills and each human can contribute to a site or forum with his/her ideas and sometimes those with less knowledge can also provide helpful suggestions to the ones who are more knowledgeable than them. I don't really know that in your eyes what is considered as a good post, but I would like to share my knowledge in a  genuine way and that's what I have been doing. I know that I post a lot on this forum and some people may consider members like me as shit-posters, but I believe that the more I can contribute to the forum the better it is. I still thank you for letting me know the weaknesses that I have and I'll most probably try my best to improve those weaknesses in future.

I respect you a lot because you're a very reputed member of the forum and I'll most probably try to improve my posts quality even further from now on. I know that there are some days when we can't really post good quality comments, but still hoping for better always takes us to better levels, and we can learn from our mistakes. Thanks once again for all of your words.

[nutildah]

My question is, why regulars there are not more selective when meriting as its in their best interest in order to keep the thread clean from that thrash.

Most of them are... but there's a couple who don't care and it appears they enjoy having their buttocks smooched upon, which is another tactic frequently employed by the farmers.

Who aggravates you all more.. those throwing the booze/merit around to the shitposters, or those shitposters trying to get the booze/merit being thrown around?

This is a good question. The loose merit givers are at least limited in number whereas the shitposters are amassing an infinitely large zombie army. Yet their growth could be stopped (at least in the WO thread) if the loose merit givers tightened up... which for whatever reason they refuse to do. I dunno, I guess the zombies aggravate me more.

Solution is not that simple, they can just move to another board/thread and continue ''business'' as usual.

The whole point is to stop rewarding them for shitposting in the WO thread where moderation is basically non-existent. I don't care if they move to another thread -- if they try what they're doing elsewhere their posts are likely to be deleted as spam, anyway.

The irony of you posting in the "AI spam" thread hasn't escaped me either.

   I had also noticed that but am trying to be willing to forgive for past mistakes and all that.

That way, the community has another tool to self-govern with, and other merit "soft spots" (like contest threads) might be hardened up, too.

This is brilliant BTW. You're really good at coming up with this kind of stuff (novel, implementable solutions to forum problems).

[BobLawblaw]

I just mercilessly Ignore merit farmers.

Zero tolerance.

[UmerIdrees]

Isn't the problem with the people who Merit them? The WO-thread has been very lenient on sharing Merit for years, not only for new users, but also for "the regulars". They don't need Merit, and in my opinion many of the Merited posts don't deserve it. But, as far as I know, several of "the regular WO-users" are Merit sources too, which must mean "upper management" approves. And many of the Merited posts are actually worth it. So I don't think disabling Merit is a good solution, and voted No.

If the people at the WO thread won't give merits to these " News / Tweets" posts, they will automatically be discouraged and won't be posting there for merits. However, those who give them merits aren't wrong either because they may find these tweets / news informative/entertaining.

Last time when this topic was discussed here, some of those people said that they weren't active on Twitter and they found reading these tweets as informative.

Finally, i will also say that Merit should not be disabled in the WO thread, After all, there are many good posts there that deserve to be merited and we can't take these rights from the posters only because a handful of users are using it for other purposes.

[eXPHorizon]

<dumb worthless attention craving post>

[skarais]

Disabling the merit system in the WO thread might not be a wise decision, it's too harsh for anyone who isn't abusing the system for the purpose of farming an account. I agree with most that tightening distribution is a wiser choice, but of course each user is still free to share his merits in his own way. Some users there don't really care about merit so there's a chance they're just having fun with it on some funny post or something.

[LoyceV]

You can't tell people how to use their earned smerits or source merits

Sure you can:

I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

And for Merit sources:

It's conceivable that someday you and I will end up disagreeing too much about this stuff and I'll remove your source status, but it's really not a big deal.

I like the last part: it's not a big deal.

My first thought is that completely disabling merit distribution in the WO thread is too heavy-handed. I think basing it on rank (e.g. you can't receive merit in the WO thread unless you're at least a Hero Member, or something) makes a nice compromise between dropping a spanner in the works of account farmers but still letting WO regulars have their fun.

Or, as a BOFH solution: don't count the Merit received in certain threads, just like posts in Off-topic aren't included in your total post count.

My second thought is that this could actually be implemented as an SMF feature, in the same vein as self-moderated threads. Something like this:

As much as I would like more features like this, it would be very bad. It gives users power over other users. There have been requests before to make it impossible for certain Ranks to post in your thread, but that too was never implemented. Disabling Merit for the users who need it the most to earn their place in this forum would strongly discourage real users. May I remind you: proxybans have collateral damage too. Denying Newbies from earning Merit even when their posts are good is not fair.
Merit requirements per rank are already very high. In 5.5 years, 300+ users have earned enough Merit to be self-made Legendary. A couple (hundred) Merits more or less doesn't matter much.

[El duderino_]

Hmmm…. I do merit the WO mostly from my source merits
But I think mainly sending merits to OG accounts who have been contributing the WO for years and the rest of the forum. But also I see a lot of new accounts every day almost begging for merits… But we cannot be to harsh for them who write some good content in that topic.
I hope most of my merits end up well with some honest posters over there.

Maybe limited sending merits to legendary accounts or members who are posting in that topic for like few years or something ….

[Nwada001]

I also joined the few who voted. No, I have visited the WO street a few times, but I can't remember dropping any posts there yet, as I find it difficult to flow with things happening there most of the time.
The way merit is distributed there to me is part of the things that encourage the kind of conversation that goes on there and have made that place very active.

Disabling the merit on WO doesn't look like the best solution to me, but those who are not actually putting in some real effort to make quality contributions that are worth meriting should be avoided. If those merit farmers post 3 to 5 times without receiving any single merit, then they will realize that what they are doing is really not adding up, and as such, they will either put more effort into being organic with their post or better yet, copy and paste with a link to somewhere else.

[El duderino_]

Isn't the problem with the people who Merit them? The WO-thread has been very lenient on sharing Merit for years, not only for new users, but also for "the regulars". They don't need Merit, and in my opinion many of the Merited posts don't deserve it. But, as far as I know, several of "the regular WO-users" are Merit sources too, which must mean "upper management" approves. And many of the Merited posts are actually worth it. So I don't think disabling Merit is a good solution, and voted No.

I do agree and disagree for some reasons

Like I actually do send merits and some big numbers too regular OG accounts…
Reason … they are contributing accounts for first and for years.
For myself I have some out the forum occupancy and there fore I always empty my source on Good forum user as I know they will resend on quality posts… and Theymos said send merits are better than merits not send.

I try to skip sending to merit farming alt accounts….