Topic: A different approach to solving the sig spamming problem. (Read 722 times)

Nobody, it is awarded automatically, but moderators have the ability to reduce it as part of the post reporting processing.

To make it more interesting,I'll start from the ending and  go to the beginning.


Yet, even among the DT leaders, certain weaknesses of voluntarism are evident.


Because of its algorithmic nature  activity does not depend on  on anyone's will, nor can it be decreed through resolutions of  people  with  a privileged status here on forum. Thus whole thing with it  seems to be completely right.


As I have already said above  merit is a metric for responsible posting and in theory every individual here has the same right to decide upon wording of forum's members. Nevertheless, this is not what occurs in practice.


That raised  a major question. Who's to judge?

Why would that account matter? Having a donator/vip account doesn't give you dominion over others and neither would new donator ranks.

Even the VIP user, TradeFortress, turned into scam one.
The account has very 'amazing' negative trust point, at -9999.  

I known about his history by chance through the following topic:
Legendary profiles of bitcointalk. (by Ariem)
Therefore, I don't think that Donator or VIP users should be given many priorities.

PAR is not money. It is a token to allow members to obtain privileges.
Merit is a token to open the gate to higher ranks.
Activity is a token to travel along the upranking path to the next gate, It also reduces various posting restrictions.
Trust is a voucher to allow members to participate in various signature campaigns.

Merit and activity are independent, and should remain so. As I stated, they serve two different functions. Activity is the fuel to travel along the road. Merit is the voucher to cross the toll bridge. It doesn't matter how much fuel you have, if you haven't got the voucher, then you can't cross the bridge. Your signature is the advertising on the side of your van. If you have the fuel, you can drive around in the car park and display your advertising. Changing your speed, or the number of circuits of the car park won't get you over the bridge without the merit ticket though.

Theymos Said he doesn't want money.

I wanted to donate to the forum and asked about new donator ranks (as 50btc is too much for me) , and he refused.
You can check here
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.48273277

PAR could be awarded automatically, and could vary between boards. Negative PAR could be a tool for the mods as an alternative to banning. They could punish poster with variable amounts as well as just removing it for a low value post.

Another advantage could be the provision of additional shop items. Avatars could be one, but those are already provided for in the current system.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. I list some of what you say below with a few small corrections.

Let's take these

Ranking - A reflection of the seniority and activities of members, and higher ranks gain benefits for forum participation.

was an objective metric applied the same for everyone until merit got some sway over it.

Activity - this is the primary tool for ranking, and it includes a 14 day cap to prevent prolific posted from rocketing up the ranks.

This is no longer the primary tool for ranking up it is now impotent without merit with regards rank.

Merit - This is a blocking system, and is designed to allow the community to decide on members who should be allowed to increase their
rank. There is no scope for a demerit function,as this would lead to the obvious abuses.

I agree this is exactly what merit is it decides who has what rank and therefore who can paid2post and at what level. I will speculate a lot of new users are no interested in high rank to demonstrate they have been here a long time and have been very active helping us push toward and end to end trustless decentralised arena but really just want higher rank to get higher rates of paid2post.

However you can not provide motive for selfish and unfair meriting and give no criteria nor punishment for not following the mandate and the criteria. This system has broken the objective nature of ranking up and replaced it with one that helps control newbie spam to a degree but now has opened the entire thing up to wide abuse with no comeback,

Why would demerit be open to abuse any more than merit?? you can not abuse a system with no rules and no set criteria. To me demerit would actually help balance the system. I would have merit sources 50% legends and demerit powered individuals 50% legends. I would then mandate the demerit club to remove merits where they have been awarded to posts that are proven to have been incorrect or based on false assumptions and on people who clearly abuse the merit system. Legends have more to lose so should act according to mandate or not act at all or face account getting perm banned or no sigs ever again for them.


Trust - This was intended to report on the trustworthiness of members who are active traders. Recently it has become a ranking for the moral fibre of members, and has become the victim of abusive and vindictive reports.

agree 100% another subjective system with no clear criteria nor punishment for abusing the mandate and criteria set. To me this system should be related only to financial scams where you have clear evidence this person is demonstrating behaviour which will lead to them scamming money from you. Any other red trust issue needs a clear set of criteria and punishment for not using trust as the criteria and mandate specifies.


The only way to fix it all up is to take subjectivity out of any system of control. You allow subjectivity you allow abuse.

Of course at a top level of control ie judge or mod or theymos then sensible human consideration will make final important decisions on any grey areas .......this though is fair because they are not motivated to be in competition with normal users and will. Also when you just have one mind looking at things from their own perspective at the board the board gets the same appraisal. This does not happen when you have 100's of people all motivated to act selfishly and are in competition with those they are controlling.


I do though think you bring up some very good points and PAR is good so long as it is given objective criteria that people need to go by. If par alone controls sigs and will be based on objective analysis of posts I like it.

 I still say merit if left subjective with no punishment even for blatant abuse.. needs to be decoupled from rank after snr. Rank should be an objective measure not controlled by others who benefit from the ranking system.

 PAR - i like it if we will not attempt to make merit an objective useful score right now and PAR can easily be implemented.

Of course I believe always with financial reward you will be fighting against people trying to game the system for more money and not caring about damaging our environment for debate and conversation in a natural way. But we can try our best.

Your par is actually though a FAR BETTER solution than many others I have read and i would give you merits but I am almost run out now and I don't know when I get more filled up to give away again. I seem to have given most of it away already.

Sorry I haven't expanded on my basic concept. I left it deliberately vague because I was interested in community feed back, and I am grateful for all of the replies.

Part of the problem is that Bitcoin Talk is a large and established forum, and it has a diverse membership, with  vast range of skills and abilities. It is also multi-lingual, but with a big advantage for English speakers. The structure has evolved over the years, and any changes must be implemented with considerable care. At the moment there are several methods of rating members, and there is some interaction between them. These are -

Ranking - A reflection of the seniority and activities of members, and higher ranks gain benefits for forum participation.
Activity - this is the primary tool for ranking, and it includes a 14 day cap to prevent prolific posted from rocketing up the ranks.
Merit - This is a blocking system, and is designed to allow the community to decide on members who should be allowed to increase their rank. There is no scope for a demerit function,as this would lead to the obvious abuses.
Trust - This was intended to report on the trustworthiness of members who are active traders. Recently it has become a ranking for the moral fibre of members, and has become the victim of abusive and vindictive reports.
Moderation - This takes up quite a bit of time for moderators and staff, and seems to be limited to post editing or deletion.
Post reporting - A voluntary action by some members, and intended to help the moderators.
Banning and blocking - A fairly extreme last resort for admins

SMF includes a shop plugin, and my idea is to use this to introduce some control over forum benefits. If the shop had a token - lets call it a PAR ( Posting Activity Reward ), then PAR could be spent to purchase benefit such as monthly signature use. This would have some side benefits, for example, if expired signatures were removed automatically from inactive or deleted accounts, then that could remove links to old scam projects. The moderators would have an additional tool that isn't as extreme as deleting a post. They could remove the award for an "under par" post, and this may discourage low value bumping replies.

I'm sure you guys can think of some other advantages that wouldn't be too disruptive to the existing system.

You can't possibly say that signature spamming is not a problem. The Altcoin boards are essentially unusable because of it. If you go on to Altcoin Discussion and pick any random mega thread, it is filled with one line spam from bounty hunters. Take this thread on the front page, for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4582124.780. Almost 800 replies, including such insightful comments as:


Every single page is the same - meaningless drivel posted by users enrolled in some trash bounty campaign for some shady useless token. The current situation is working fine for the signature campaigns and the bounty hunters, but their endless spam is suffocating entire boards of any meaningful or sensible discussion.



It's very easy to filter the good posters from the spammers. The issue is the bounty managers don't care. They are quite happy to pay for quantity over quality. As long as we allow that to continue, the spam will continue.

there is no point in solving a problem that does not exist in the first place.

the current situation is working just fine for the forum itself, the signature campaigns and the members participating.

it's all up to the signature campaign managers to chose their participants, it is not hard to filter the good posters for the shitposters. but most campaign managers follow the bulk ads sort of way.

plus, shitposters will always find a reason to shitpost, if it's not for money then for fun.

Signatures are used for marketing proposes, i don't think the forum has to introduce a shop to sell the signatures privileges if it already has the Advertise rounds as you can see on: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/advertise-on-this-forum-round-265-5092259

Now let's focus on marketing, what do you think is better, to promote a bitcoin project on the forum or to spend that money on Facebook and Google for a campaign. I would say it's better to keep that money between cryptos enthusiasts and not spending it with those nasty marketing beasts. At the end this forum still the best way to get customers for any new crypto business, and limit signature campaigns would be like make a step back in the bitcoin world. We can say the business need from this signatures campaigns to become popular.

Now about the campaign spam, we could fight that with the campaign managers, is in their hands to control the spam and to avoid it. If the campaign manager allows the spam that will be a bad reputation for the business he is advertising, so, if you want to report any spammer now you know where to report him  

This problem is solved very simply. You can hire a couple of dozen enthusiasts who will tag spam. No additional expenses will be incurred by the forum budget.
Do admins only decrease work.

Combat the spam and at the same time  "license" it via the shop  is something really weird. As things stand at present merit is a metric for responsible posting and this metric  should not become  a pardoner and purveyor of signature spam.

For sure. Bitcoin campaigns are OK. But:
Unfortunately there are way much more ICO/ANN/bounty etc. campaings out there (where you get your 'salary' in altcoin/token/other worthless thing and not in bitcoin) which don't help bitcoin at all.
Of course, people have to exchange these crapcoins to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin to fiat if they want to make a living out of it, but in this case the Bitcoin just appears on the exchange, which doesn't help the adoption but only the exchanges...

Don't you guys think that signature campaigns are good for bitcoin adoption?

Personally, before I joined this forum, i had only one wallet that had something like 10 transactions. I bought Bitcoin only to sell it in a higher price later.

Few months later I discovered this forum and the many bounties/campaigns here. I started to use bitcoin as money. Now I have multiple wallets, dozens of addresses with hundreds of transactions.

Spamming is a problem here. However, spammers are adoption Bitcoin. They are contributing to the network, as they are receiving money and transferring it. In other words, they are adopting Bitcoin as a currency (for their spamming efforts, which is questionable..)

Also, there are legit services here that advertise through the forum. I believe all those signature marketing could be easily converted to forum's income, if theymos disabled signature and put ads everywhere. But that wouldn't contribute to BTC adoption.



Eidt: ofc spam is a problem and this problem should be at least reduced. But radical proposals may have an even worse result than the spamn problem

Reporting the spam post is the current method to control spams but most of the posts were going so still reporting,deleted by the moderators can be a solution but too much of work for them.So having a kind of upgrade will be better that is why the discussion going.

The forum is a funny situation. At first we fought spam. The administration imposed various restrictions but the main problem was not solved. Now spammers have become less because interest in cryptocurrency has fallen. Now we have come up with a new problem - this is spam in the signature
Any problem needs to be solved with current resources, and there are plenty of them on the forum. In any Russian forum, if the admin finds something to be spam, then he removes it. Post this or a topic, it does not matter. Admin is always right.
The signature for the forum member is its property. If the participant places the prohibited information there, write reports to admins.
The funny thing is that for this useless discussion, participants receive a lot of merit.

It can work, but can be abused as well like all other systems around.
A good/responsible post could be a post that earns Merit(s) which would automatically earn credits for the member. And a bad post could be a post that has been accurately reported and deleted by a mod-- resulting a deduction of credits. Earned credits should be given per Merit received by the post-- e.g: 5 Credits per Merit or something. The same should apply for the deduction. If a user earns 2 Merits and gets one of his posts deleted in a thread, he would still have credits for 1 Merit.

This is a forum,and if any rules should be implemented,it should cut across every member in it, no one has any rights or foothold in here,for the administration to consider when making a decision,why do you feel the old members shouldn't be discredited but all newbies should,you're on a signature yourself,now can you stop playing the holier than thou attitude already.
Likewise a lot of newbies also,and the both ranks mostly do it wearing one signature or the other,mostly Chipmixer, so why are you complaining then about newbies also putting on signatures,if you're as fair as you claim you are,then all signatures should be off,from every member,and airdropped merits removed
You really need to explain this part of your post,doesnt make any sense to me