Topic: @Admins: Merit not working as configured, trolls just don't care (no surprise) - page 3. (Read 1269 times)

I gave my reasons I disagree with the OP here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.35059537

Paying to post is effectively a tax that the spammers could pay. Making it mining is just a different payment method of the tax.


You earned it. 

There's a number of good suggestions about. The most effective would be to ban the ICO bounty campaigns from advertising here. They've already been banned from taking out banner ads on the forum and extending that to signatures would reduce spam dramatically.

Well, spammers can mine, spammers with $ can pay, merit can be traded, accounts can be created in masses.

I got it the way things can be improved only, not totally fixed.

PS. But thank you, I at least won "The wackiest idea" prize

That's got to be the wackiest idea yet. Is there any particular reason that you think spammers can't mine?

Probably charging for posts is too much, but it could be acceptable to require some amount of PoW instead? Say, mining one of the Cryptonote based currencies for btctalk account?

Pretty much this. Under this system most of the default trust network would be banned within the hour as all the scammers and spammers they had red-tagged retaliated against them.

That's pretty close-minded, mate. Rejecting opinions just because others don't offer a solution to a problem isn't logical. It's just ignorant.

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That's something along the lines of a Russell's Teapot argument where you place an onus on the opposition.

You definitely cannot do anything in which users have administrative power over others. The red-trusted scammers would have a field day just using the system against the people who had sent them the feedback.

Providing an alternative is not a requirement for disagreeing with someone's point of view, and not providing an alternative does not make my argument any less valid. Your system is too open to abuse and manipulation.

Okay, so you don't like my suggestion but didn't suggest an alternate approach yourself... Forgive me if I don't take your rebuttal too seriously, then.

I still don't think this would work. There are a number of members with large numbers of alt accounts who could still easily abuse this, and mods are busy enough as it is without having a bunch of fake bans to review.

I really don’t believe paying to post inspires conversation and theymos has made it abundantly clear that while he intends to continuously moderate and promote people to moderate, he does not want to inhibit the discussion at all. It seems to be one of his main goals when determining who is capable of the responsibility.

I believe signature campaigns are still fine, but I don’t understand why there is a necessity to make people post x amount of posts in a week, that should be against TOS because it incentivizes posting. Those that are higher ranking got that way because they’re active already and don’t really need to be told how to contribute to the forum and those who are lower ranking shouldn’t be as active in an ideal situation so why are we okay with bounties telling them to be?

Also- I feel like we’re all focusing on punishments or deincentivizing current activities. I don’t think this works well with any problems we encounter that include others. I believe what we actually need is a reason for the spammers and trolls to stop posting here. Eliminate jr member, make newbies and members have a scaling post limit(% result of posts/merit) until they get to full member at 100 merit and create a very very slow merit drip site like in a telegram channel that allows spammers to earn .5 merit after 500 posts but have a bot that deletes duplicates, spam, links and advertisements. I’m okay with someone posting 1000 posts on a chat channel to earn 1 merit if it eliminates the 1000 posts that individual would have posted on btt and earned 4-5 merit for. Plus if they do it too much, telegram has anti spam capabilities already monitoring the users that would allow mods to remain focused on the forum itself and promote personal responsibility because it might have an effect on their telegram account. OR.. you know, just have a scaling post limit.

The entire situation reminds me of dealing with children. Telling them what they can’t do rarely works as smoothly as you’d expect, but distracting them by telling them what they can do works like a charm. We need to give trolls and spammers an avenue that allows them to benefit, because they will find a way to benefit regardless and we're currently trying to stop an entire flood with a bucket. Isolating them from the communal aspects of BTT is a strong approach and I'd be surprised if they didn't go willingly to something they believe benefits them more than junking up BTT.


We all have our suggestions and there are reasons all of them won’t work. Merit is pretty new so it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if they revamped their policy with new specifications in the future.

I agree with this part only. This would be the first pay to post forum, sure its revolutionary, but more likely it'll fall flat on its face.
Like if you started to charge for breathing air, then people will just go somewhere else to breathe

Hence the overly-smiley emoticon... I didn't think that suggesting charging for sigs (or avatars, etc.) was terribly original, either.


That's why I said it had to be x number of different members, where x is greater than 1 (and less than, say, 10), and that the temp-ban could be appealed in meta - if a moderator/admin looks at the offender's post history and sees that they are not, in fact, shitposts/scams/etc. then it would be those who unfairly reported the posts that get the ban.

That said, I have long since grown weary of "free" services/sites on the internet. How is that Facebook doesn't charge any of its is >2B users yet still brings in >$12B in revenue each quarter? Well, that's because you are the product... Honestly, I would much rather pay for a service like that rather than exchange all of my privacy for the proverbial beads and trinkets; same applies here - it is undoubtedly costly to host this site and paying an annual membership and/or to unlock various accessories/accoutrements would not only be fine by me, it would be preferable.

Not quite. I've been suggesting we remove signatures from ranks for years.


I don't think they'll be able to game paying a hefty fee for a signature, but any way of being able to achieving anything here naturally will be gamed/abused though.


This would be abused. People would just report or bot people's posts they don't like.

Agreed...

Hmm Interesting perspective.. Didn't thought of it in that way...

Hah, my suggestion to charge for sigs has taken hold subliminally! 

I did think there might possibly be some merit to charging a fee for posts that varied inversely with rank, but upon further consideration I now think this is unavoidably regressive/centralizing. Dedicated spammers/scammers will figure out a way to game any system so I am starting to warm up to the idea - which is not at all original - that such offenders be automatically temp-banned if, say, x different members mark any of offender's posts as "shitposts." A possible implementation would be to scan for keywords in a moderation report such as, shitpost, bot, spam, scam, off-topic., etc. Temp-banned users could appeal via a single thread in meta - same as now - which only non-bots would attempt. If the same user is auto-banned three times then make the ban permanent.

The forum is wall-to-wall shitpositng but I don't think this is the solution. Simply banning the crapcoin campaigns that do nothing but pay for any old broken English spam would go a long way and is the bare minimum we should be doing but if we were to charge for anything it should be for a signature. If you get money back for receiving merits it will just lead to even more abuse and the system is already heavily exploited by those giving merit to their alts and "friends" so this would just happen in even greater numbers when there's cash refunds on the line.

If people have to pay for their post do you think they will ever post BTC development enhancement for free from their part or they will post bounty related material so that they can earn back some reward, furthermore once we set some kind of fees they will post whatever they want and without fear of getting caught because they consider their posting as paid posting that more like advertisement then anything else

What if we don't allow newbies and jr. members to open a new topic everywhere, just let them to open a new topic in the off-topic section? (this is not my own idea, I have read this somewhere, but I like this idea).
(Newbies can buy copper membership, if they really want to "grow up" earlier...)
They will have to use the search function, if they have a question, not randomly open a new thread for every type of headache... and if they don't like the forum's own search function, they still can use the google one, like searching for "bitcoin price increase /site:bitcointalk.org" and voilá....
If they find the proper topic (because as you have mentioned, 99% of the newbie questions has already been answered, most of them several times in several topics), they can still ask a question there, and it would be on-topic post, so it would improve their posting habits as well...

With thousands of posts, the search function does not guarantee the specific question of a newbie.
Not all good posts can have merits, that is the problem of the community.

This is the real problem.. This perspective needs to go away.. Do you expect to get paid when you use facebook? The short answer is no! so you shouldn't have a mindset like this here at bitcointalk.. If you want to discuss technology then its fine.. But why do you need to be that desperate for some extra cash? Also i feel sad for people who think that they can live their life off through signature campaign earnings.. you guys need help.. Do something better for yourself... There are far better things and ways to make a living than spamming a forum.