Topic: ㅤ (Read 1647 times)

Due to yesterday's updates related to reporter restrictions, I am completely ceasing this activity.

My final stats for fighting low-quality posts:

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Thanks to everyone who supported and helped in the development of these statistics.

It really makes no sense to touch recently published posts and reserve posts in active topics, but I always reported crossed out posts and reserve posts from rather old topics. For example, in the bounty section, mprep removes such posts without any doubt, but why does this logic not work in the service section? This is weird. I have also noticed that the reserve posts of banned OPs in their created topics are also deleted, but not in all sections the moderators are of this opinion. What would you personally do with such a report?

Often, reserve posts are generally limited to just one character or letter, for example, R, M, [, and other variations. at one time I reported such posts, several thousand freely accumulated in a week. Apparently newbie decided to use this option for bookmarking the forum in order to return to these applications later. In general, the problem of reserve posts, although not on the same scale as in bounty, is observed in the service section, in topics with signature campaigns. I do not quite understand the actions of moderators who put BAD on reports of posts with one word Reserve. What is the point of these posts, in topics from 2020 or 2021, when the campaign has long ended? I think such posts have a place in the trash can. Or some users do not want to delete their irrelevant applications for participation and simply highlight the entire post in the code:


I tried to report such posts and got BAD. What is the point of such posts and why the moderators do not consider them low-value posts remains a mystery to me.

You mean my story, why did I start doing this? In short, when I was a simple reader on the forum in 2018 (without registration), I was interested in trading and I was insanely annoyed by the fact that until you find the information you need, you have to flip through many pages of all kinds of spam and off-top. After I registered in 2019, I decided to help the forum get rid of some of the spam and off-topic so that only information on the topic topic was presented and nothing more. Then I had a goal to make the Russian locale the first section on the forum, where all sections will be completely cleared and structured the way it was intended when creating these sections. In the section about altcoins, only topics about altcoins, in the section about tokens, only topics about tokens, without referral spam, old bumps, phishing, and other things. So far, the implementation of this plan has been completed by 60%, when it is completed by 100%, then I can say for sure that in the entire Russian locale I, as a reporter, have nothing else to do (except for reporting fresh posts).

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Yes, then the posting activity was really artificial, just to increase the post counter. And after this period, a lot of rubbish remained, the rubble of which reporters and moderators are still trying to clear. What has definitely become less is one-line posts, at least in those sections that I constantly monitor, there is a big difference compared to what it was in 2018-2020.


Lately, spam activity has moved in a different direction, as far as I know, and it is invisible to most users, but the moderators definitely know about it. This is a crazy activity of phishers who spam links in the mining and altcoin sections. I have been watching this since 2021, thousands of bans in the modlog of various newbies and fresh registrations. I wonder how this spammer or a group of spammers managed to get so many IP addresses to register thousands of accounts and evade a proxy ban?

Unfortunately, this spam reduction has a downside. All the same with spam, the number of active users and the total number of published posts also decreased:



Obviously, the amount of spam has decreased because the total number of posts has decreased. I think that with the past popularity of the forum, we would not have seen a big difference in the amount of spam published.

Go to sections Bitcoin Discussion, Marketplace, Gambling, Altcoin Discussion, Bounty. There are thousands and thousands of spam messages.


I had a system built up, thanks to which I managed to achieve such values. It wasn't just random browsing around the forum to increase the report count. The approach was deeper. In short:

- I took a whole section, for example, the Russian section for miners: Maйнepы.
- Next, I archived each page with topics.
- I went to each topic of the selected page and looked through all the posts, starting from 2018. Reported all detected violations, including spam, referral links, multi-posting, off-top, etc.
- The next stage of work was to identify topics that do not correspond to the theme of the section.
- And in the end there was the identification of duplicate topics from one author within one section.

After all these operations, a completely edited section was obtained. The way it was conceived when it was created, without spam and off-topic, and all the topics were really dedicated to bitcoin mining. All garbage is completely cleaned out of this section.

Comparison of such work:
- Before reporting the entire section: https://archive.fo/3tKWh
- After reporting the whole section https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=21.0

As you can see, the section has decreased by 9 pages, and each page contained 40 topics. Of course, not all topics were deleted, some were simply moved to the appropriate section.


Mostly Russian locale, Marketplace, Bitcoin Discussion, Altcoin Discussion.

 Congratulations, Ratimov! At least someone has to be some sort of shitpost police and I commend this effort! Wow! 100,000? I guess your determination to rid the forum of unworthy posts has paid off. Honestly if there was a place set aside to record such feats( like a Guinness book of records sorta thing on this forum), your name would take first place.

Yeah, I don't doubt it. Although, it's definitely increased recently, which is the weird part of it all. We've moved on from the "great project" era, and now we've got the reserved posts era. Like I said though, I'm hoping to restore the sections I moderate into something that can be read comfortably. Of course, a lot of users here will still complain about the section due to the actual projects being crap, but technically that isn't against the rules. Anything that's against the rules I'm hoping to have caught up to present day by the end of the year, which sounds crazy, but we really did have a ton of spam in that 2017 to early 2019 period.

Hopefully, reports will start picking up again, but that'll probably require another spam influx which isn't ideal.

I report posts like this, and I see it a little differently. Basically, these are bot machines that work; they leave their posts in any bounty, probably to increase their activity. Further, you can observe how these mature accounts simply copy other people's reports. But the more such accounts are killed, the more difficult it will be for cheaters to create new accounts. Someone will eventually win.

It's just the difference on the interpretation of moderators. I've noticed things that myself, and mprep does in the Altcoin section, isn't universally done in other sections. I've actually had to change reporting habits based on that too. For example, merging posts together, something that mprep is very active in doing, isn't always the case elsewhere. However, there might be reasons for that, but I haven't dug into it as I don't think its a big deal. I personally, don't care much about my report accuracy. I've racked up a few bad reports for duplication reports recently. Honestly, it's probably the majority of my reports, despite having a userscript to try, and avoid it.

I can't talk for other moderators, but generally recently made posts I'll have a little more tolerance for. So, if they've posted today, and it's reported I'd just leave it unhandled, and keep an eye on the post. Although, for the most part these posts are weeks old, and they get deleted by me for sure. Some of them are years old. So, yeah I delete them. The only one's I don't are the reserve posts by the original poster of the thread. However, anyone else that posts these random letters gets deleted or any bounty submissions which don't have anything filled out, and have been there for a decent amount of time will get deleted. Honestly, I'm not a fan of users posting this type of content. It's spam at the end of the day.

Basically, for me the longer its been there the quicker I remove it.

Yeah, and bounties will continue to be a problem likely. This has always happened, but I've noticed, and I know a few other moderators have noticed, but users reserving posts, and never coming back to it at all. This is quite common with bounty threads. Instead of filling out their details like the other bounty submission posts, they just leave it blank, and go onto another thread, and do the exact same. It's like they're trying to secure a spot on the bounty, and do that across various projects trying to maximize their chances. I don't know how many of those I've deleted recently.

Reserving posts has always been a problem, but not on this scale.

Yeah, but also the amount of activity in peak levels was due to the ICO/bounty craze, which we're still recovering from. That wasn't real activity it was just users coming in to post spam. I'd rather smaller activity, and real discussion than that.

That's what most reports are these days is cleaning up from the peak activity, because these days I find that the quality of discussion is much better in general. There's some problematic sections for sure, such as the Altcoin Discussion, Bounties, Gambling Discussion, and the Tokens section. However, the bumping changes actually reduced a lot of the spam in the altcoin sections.

Sometimes i also wonder if Ratimov is a kind of robot that has been doing this jot only being consistent about it but it never affects his postings and the quality delivery he had always give to the forum, i hope you know what it means to report a post that you must have gone through it and concluded it's not what should be, also @AverageGlabella if you think you want to get this aspect as of interest then i think the altcoins section is full of spammers and the bitcoin section as well and those that are common in doing this shitpostings are the newbies, but remember it need to take your quality time, Ratimov should have his own side of the story to tell as well regarding this, I also got motivated by this.

It can only be because more members are trying to be better on their posting habit and discard spamming. It is good that many more are showing repentance. That is not to conclude that there are less spam posts but there are less number of members who post spams now. A small unit of members spamming now unlike before where more units did it. But no matter how anyone sweeps this forum for spam posters, the gambling section, altcoins and Off Topic threads will always have spammers.

Wow! I have only 3826 reports and I thought I was doing good. It was easier to find spam a few years ago I do not find as much as I used to. How are you finding 130000 posts to report at all? What boards are you reporting in? I see you are from the russian local board is there a lot of spam there? It is odd that you have not been made a mod yet but I agree with the others I think you should be a global mod with that many reports.

Yeah, we do. I've made sure this year that I'm doing a lot more of that (plus I've got a lot of time now that certain big events in life have passed). I delete hundreds a day since the new year has started, which are simply me going through my sections, and deleting the spam. I've actually convinced myself it'll make a difference too, and I'm hoping that by the end of the year we'll have caught up with most of the spam within those sections.

So, while the reporting from users has definitely significantly reduced, which we absolutely miss getting those reports. The moderators are still doing quite a lot behind the scenes on their own accord. I know I'm definitely not unique in that situation. Just take a look at the modlog, and you'll be able to estimate how many actions are being taken, that's separate to the monthly statistics that hilariousandco puts out.

I don't think it is really necessary for any moderator to take action against a spam post or any post which violated the forum rules only if there is a report made against it, If I am not wrong mods regularly visit their boards and lock the spam mega threads when its too spammy and also they handle the reports made by others.

There is one problem with OP becoming a moderator, he wouldn't be able to combat the spam anymore because he would need to wait for reports to act upon. Though he could use an alt to report and use the main account ( mod ) to deal with the reports, considering the amount of accurate reports, this should be easy to hire him as a mod.

But definitely, the forum needs an active member with such high analyzing skill to tackle the spam, I can't even imagine that number added with 100% which is insane to be honest so you deserved to be and if possible I vote for you to become one on the gambling board so we can get rid of the same and same topics created about gambling, blah blah...