Topic: Altcoin Discussion section needs some adjustment (Read 405 times)

Allow me to come back to this thread. First of all, Joan Baez is specialized in singing other people's music, which makes me think a bit about the copypasters in the Altcoin Section. Not sure if that's a compliment.

Second of all, the sad thing is that sometimes, there really are quite a lot of interesting topics (and yes, there are still some interesting blockchain projects) in the Altcoin Section.

But every time you try to add something to the discussion or some point of view or ask a question, after a few hours already, your post has been completely snowed under by "yes i agree" and "great project sir" posts from activity pumpers. Most of them only read the OP. I can tell ya, that's horribly frustrating.

It really can't be the intention of this forum that the Serious Discussion and the Ivory Tower are the only places left, were you can discuss (in a serious way) blockchain topics and projects. I can't imagine opening a thread about a project I believe in, in the Serious Discussion boards. Even if I did it to avoid all the spam, I'm quite sure I'd be nuked to dead.

So yes. We need some adjustment and need to get rid asap of those spammers.

I've always felt the altcoin section should be treated rather like the end of Silent Running - left alone to drift off into space to tend to itself in a poignant manner. A bit less Joan Baez though.

I think the creation of the altcoin speculation section was a fine idea. There's a higher quality of discussion in there by adding a little focus to it.

Perhaps there should be an upper tier alt section where a thread becomes eligible for entry if it has accumulated a certain amount of merit in total. Quite a few of the threads have someone actively running them so perhaps they could also agree to hold their users to a higher standard as a condition of entry.

Crap you're right. It's just on the announcements & bounties boards.

Should probably be on the discussion board too.

But my point still remains, leave the dumpster fire as is. We don't need it spreading.

Just my view.

-Dave

That's still punishment though. Decent topic starters shouldn't be banned.

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The coin republic?

Spamming is often done anywhere, discussing Altcoin, Economy, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin etc.

People very often and easily do spam because of factors.
1. Post to make it easy and easy.
2. Some do fun, the important thing, post, do not care about others.
3. There is a will and opportunity to spam.

Broadly speaking, spam does not generate any benefit for many people.
There are things that have the worst impact on spam, this is a disease that is hard to destroy.
I agree with your idea number two.

Fighting spam, indeed the hardest task for all members, today it reports 100 spam, tomorrow creates another 150.

The bumping changes were supposed to help some, and I think they did.

You are never going to be able to clean it 100% due to the number of people that it would take to monitor it.

Removing sigs from that area much like some other areas might help. It also might not, don't know for sure there are sill people using bumping services that don't work so taht is kind of a tough guess.

Also...

Sometimes it's better to let the dumpster fire burn then throwing water on it trying to put it out.
You just wind up with a wet dumpster and a fire over a bigger area because of the grease and oil that was in the dumpster when you tried to put it out.

Do you really want the mods to have to combat worse spam on other boards because people are not getting paid to post there?

*Full disclosure that while posting this I am wearing a sig, if in the future I am not wearing one when someone reads this.

-Dave

A reward (maybe financial but not necessarily) could be a temporary solution, for instance, only for a week or a month. Or only during a certain period of time, f.i. for a few days every 4 months or so. Just to avoid leaving people the time to consider a way of abusing the system.

I can confirm that spam reporting is a time-consuming activity and not exactly satisfying since the quantity of spam doesn't seem to go down even a little bit (which explains my eternal respect for the Spambusters club who do this on a daily voluntarily basis). Some sort of reward from time to time could motivate people to report more and might actually (and hopefully) result into a really visible diminution of the spam on these boards.

I agree with the premise of your idea, I just don't think we need to create a new title and appoint dedicated "spam busters". I would suggest picking the top two or three reporters from Altcoin Discussion, for example, and just make them moderators of that board. Then they can directly deal with spam without having to wait for it to be handled by a moderator, as well as acting on spam reports from other users, freeing up global moderators to deal with more important things like plagiarism or posts offering illegal trades.

I would definitely like to see the reporter badges, but I'm really not sure about offering a financial reward for reporting. It seems like it would be too easy to abuse.

Here's the catch, appointing more moderator won't have any effect per se if there aren't users constantly reporting this spams so that's why I used the word above. Firstly we need more dedicated spams busters then maybe more moderators to handle this reports or to make the situation much easier, I them suggested the spam bursters can be made moderators themselves i.e they'll have the power to delete the spams themselves instead of waiting on the moderators.

What I'm trying to say is moderators aren't appointed to report spams and this spam reporters (bursters) are those we need more if we want to succeed in the fight against spammers. Moderators are like judges while spam burster are like the police, we need more police and the forum should work towards achieving that whether is by introducing the Badge recognition idea (to serve as motivation to increase more spam reporting) or hire dedicated reporters.

Isn't this essentially the same as just appointing some new moderators, and choosing from the pool of users with the most reports? A spam buster with the ability to delete posts themselves, as opposed to reporting them, is essentially a moderator. I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with your suggestion - I think several boards could use dedicated "spam busters"/moderators to "patrol" those boards, as it were.

I agree with TP here. We know that there are often disagreements or uncertainty among the moderating team as to which posts should or shouldn't be deleted, as is proved by unhandled reports. You would essentially be trying to enforce shifting rules, depending on which moderator at the time happens to be looking at the thread in question, as what one considers spam another might not, and vice versa. Additional, this is a mountain of work. For each thread, you are asking a moderator to constantly monitor all new posts, monitor all the posts which are being deleted, compare the two, and decide whether or not the OP is doing a good enough job. You would need to employ a whole team of moderators just to do this, and if you are going to do that, then you might as well just cut out the middleman and let this team run wild on deleting all the spam and banning the spammers themselves.

I completely agree that the Altcoin boards and Bitcoin Discussion are in need of a clean up, but I've always been an advocate for dedicated sub-board mods and being far more liberal with escalating temporary bans and/or signature bans for spammers.

The biggest problem in alt-discussions is link spamming, which I still believe newbies should not be allowed to post links in Alt-discussions or even ANN sections.
There's a lot of copying and pasting of articles, with a link at the bottom.


The next biggest problem, is hunters posting in alt-discussions, which I don't really have a solution for; since most are trying to meet a quota.


Other than that, alt-discussions has relatively become more engaging over the year, with posts/price-discussions being moved to speculations sections.

Absolutely right.  I had un-ignored Altcoin (speculation) and I think Altcoin Discussion for a while, and my unread threads feed was filled up immediately with stuff from those sections and after visiting them to look for meritable posts, I quickly realized most of the threads were total garbage.  Not just the posts within the threads, but everything in them.  Even if you made it so that every single thread was self-moderated, it wouldn't do jack shit. Most of the time the OP doesn't even come back to the thread they started to engage in the so-called discussion.

Rule #2 wouldn't work, either, because that would require a judgement call on the part of a staff member and would basically be unenforceable anyway.  There's no way a mod or anyone would be able to monitor all the spam in these sections to tell if the thread starter was deleting spam.  It just wouldn't work.

But OP, I agree with you about how bad the problem is and it isn't only in the altcoin board.  Bitcoin Discussion--which should be one of the best sections on the forum--is a cesspool of trash.  Just report shitposts when you see then and hope the mods take action.  That's all I can recommend.

This could effective, although there is a chance of abusing the system? Well, it would be more good than the bad part, same as the report (even your reports are not counted as good, you are still encouraged to report more).

PM or reporting to moderator is still available to all of us. But something needs to be changed. Well, if it's not a temporary ban, it can be a temporary ban for creating new topics?

On number two, our local board actually has a rule set by the local (global) moderator:

Translation: Be responsible, if you created a thread, don't leave it, otherwise, if I see spam posts in your thread, it'll go directly to the trashcan, so you have to report spam posts in your thread or lock it.


For the first suggestion, maybe add a local rule to warn others from posting off-topic replies.

I don't quite agree with with the third suggestion. If a post isn't low value or not for the sake of advertising some website or blog, he/she should shouldn't be punished. The better solution is to PM the user or report to moderator to lock the topic.

I am sure this is easier said than done, but could it maybe be possible for an OP to give management rights of a thread to a small group of members so they can use their own teams to manage the threads rather than draining moderator time? Altcoin Discussion has always, and in many ways will always be kind of a cesspool, but this combined with some self moderation ability might be a way to focus moderator time where it is more needed. Nothing is preventing anyone from raising issues about abuse in other parts of the forum, and via the trust system if they feel self moderation is being abused. It makes sense too because who has more interest in maintaining the quality of a thread than the team/individual hosting it?

Creating every topic self-moderated will only create much worse situation in altcoin section.
I would do the opposite...not allow creating self-moderated for new embers

It is easy. Doing one of two or both:
1. Disable signatures in spam mega threads. Altcoin discussions are same as most of other discussion boards, burried by spam.
2. Don't count posts made in spam Mega threads to activities and post counts.

Two suggestions need admin's hands but I don't think admin will do it. It takes time because of natural evolution of spammers who will surely move to other boards to spam and create their new spam mega threads.
The net effects from merit system and bump score are good enough.

Having new type of official resources to fight spam will require another funds to pay for new forum staff category, spam busters. There are already voluntary spam busters who are actively report in iasenko's spam buster club.

The fight need help from users who will give their hands by reports but then why we have to visit spam mega threads, which we rarely or never visit, to clean spam posts. It is a very big question.

Self-moderation is an option, and not a mandatory thing that thread creators have to obey. Self-moderation has its local rules from creators plus current forum rules that have not one rule to ban OPs if their threads turn to spam mega threads.

Wall Observer has its interesting history because of the thread ownerships changed by theymos after community vote as I know.

Tend to agree with this, topic creators also didn't know that they are posting a redundant thread, also a shitpost content that all they are wanted is to create for having magnetic spam for their own benefits to having post counts. I rarely visit there but sometimes I saw interesting topics, I will not generalize the altcoin discussion board are all spam topics.

We had a solution regarding this matter by clicking the "Report to Moderator", we can help moderators to do their job and let them handle and decide whether that is a spam post or not (not just by our own judgment) and locking spam mega-thread will stop them to keep spamming. Adjustment is too conflict and how about suggesting theymos adding moderators staff in every discussion boards that usually having of flood spam burst. Not just altcoin discussion, also the Bitcoin discussion and gambling discussion.

Altcoin discussion or in general, most of the altcoin forums are prone to spam. That is a fact. However, your ideas to combat it is not something feasible. Even if you enable self-moderation for all posts, which in fact not a lot of people know of, it does not mean that people will actually moderate their threads. On top of that, you can't really force a person to "moderate" their thread. They did not sign up to this forum for it. They should not have to monitor their thread and watch for shitposters 24/7 if they don't want to be reprimanded by the staff. Rather than forcing the people to moderate their threads people need to use forum's report to moderator feature a lot more often. There are really a lot of threads and posts that go unnoticed. If you devote your time to actually searching for them, you should be able to report at least a hundred posts a day.

Most of the threads itself are shitposts, why enable self-moderation on them, when they should be outrightly deleted.(those shitposters know the rules, they just choose to ignore/break it).

I could help with a suggestion though, I do post in the altcoin discussion(few times though), and it's obvious the good posters abhor that board, but I think they should not, I might be correct to even say many of them have set ignore option on that board, don't you think if good posters make more thread in that section it could help, come to think of it, if there are sensible, good threads and replies on most of the front page of that section, then the effect of the shitposters wouldn't be so glaring.(remember that almost every section in the forum gets shitposts from users now and then, but the AD is run by the shitposters and their posts, this suggestion could help to balance the equilibrium).

I don't agree with these suggestions.
The forum has some moderators and they are responsible for deleting spams and useless posts. Users should report the posts and the final decision should be made by moderators.  
There are many topics created every day and each of them has its own creator. If topic posters are responsible for deleting posts, there would be a different behavior for each of threads, In my opinion all the threads should be treated similar to each others.

Fighting spam by regular forum users should be a voluntary action and not been enforced by the forum on its members. It won't be a fair punishment if I get temporary banned for not doing a job I didn't bargain for in the first place considering I didn't intentionally make my thread self moderated. Your suggestion might lead to a misused of the  self moderation feature since most newbies will be force to use a system they don't understand which might lead to them deleting replies just because they don't agree to it.

Here's a suggestion, from my observations moderators don't move around the forum hunting for spam instead they work on the cases been reported so how about the forum appointing dedicated spam busters to surf around the forum to report spams then moderators handle the report or give the spam busters direct control to delete the spams themselves.

It won't be hard to find users who're capable of doing this, since their report record is quite enough qualification to give them an appointment, now the payment might just serve as an encouraged to continue their impressing duties in spam bursting.

Making every threads as self moderated will not change anything and I am not sure how someone can consider it as spam with in self moderator thread which will be working on their own set of rules.

So I guess increasing the moderators for that board might help and this could be the only possible solution to control the spam in altcoin board.

We all know what's going on there. Repetitive spam, zero value post, low quality etc. This section has been a mess for the actual interested person. I had created a topic with self moderation and I'm now deleting some post which I think was a spam shit post.

What can be done?
I have thought a lot on this, couldn't find a good solution to be adjusted. I found an option which might help the garbage to be removed and have a little better discussion.

1. Enable self-moderation for all topics there- by default (With a notification of the rules and probable punishment.).
2. Create a set of rules for topic creator- must have to delete the spam within a certain time, must have to lock the topic after enough discussion.
3. If topic creator don't follow the rules, a temporary ban will be given. Edited Or some sort of punishment like- topic creator will lose the eligibility of creating new topic for a certain period.

I don't know how much effective it will be but I guess it will create a better place.
Please share you opinion, what else can be done which have not been suggested before. We must have to get out of that tons of mess garbage posts.