Topic: Cleaning up the house in Bitcoin/ Altcoin/ Gambling Discussion boards (Read 1176 times)

Freedom is the basic of the forum. There is nothing mandatory required for all. Even rules, we only have unofficial ones.

Regarding to what you all discussed about the negative feedback on spammers (or neutral), let's see theymos' opinion on this.

As far as I know of, @The Pharmacist and @actmyname are the two (at least ?) who pioneered to leave negative feedbacks on spammers because of massively terrible spam endemic on the forum circa late of 2017 and early of 2018. I don't know where they began to report and tag spammers but I read their replies in some threads about their works back in that period.

They claimed that they stopped leaving negative trusts and reports (reduce in intensity) after the merit system was kicked-off.

Yes and in the end we here have different perceptions and I am very sure that the aim is the same for the best and useful forums and users.
You both are wise parents with broad thinking so I who are still growing up have to learn a lot from you. The point is I will not ask all DT members to mark this spammer, I am just thinking of how to reduce the number of spam posts on various boards in addition to reporting on moderators and temporary bans.

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While I only think that reporting spam posts every time we find it is a mandatory action and dont ignoring it so that the moderator can consider the appropriate punishment given to them.

The action required is for more users to start regularly reporting spam posts rather than just ignoring them. I don't browse the altcoin boards, but I know there are plenty of non spamming and intelligent users who regularly read and post in Bitcoin Discussion. If every one of these users reported only a couple of posts each day, and we had the mod power to quickly handle these reports, the board would rapidly improve.

I do think we should be more liberal in handing out escalating bans for repeat spammers, though. I get so tired of reporting the same users for spamming day in and day out.

Maybe it would, but on the flip side I still see plenty of users with historical red trust for spamming continuing to spam. Regardless of the answer, I don't think it is an appropriate use of red trust, since being a spammer doesn't have any inherent link to your trustworthiness in a trade or the likelihood of you trying to scam. You are free to leave red trust to spammers if you want, but you are unlikely to convince many DT users to do so. I also think temporary bans would do more to push users to change their behavior, and this is the route we should be advocating for rather than leaving red trust.

I disagree on this here too. If a person is a spammer, and since spamming will normally lead to low content value, and therefore be against the rules, then he should be reported and let the mods evaluate and deal with him accordingly.

Tagging should be essentially commerce related, and we cannot turn it into a sort of self-made pseudo-mod-like feature to tag/pardon for spam, each with his own personal criteria.

Even Neutral for this or anything like it are not my piece of cake:
   

Agree, when everyone cares about the activities of spammers on various boards in the forum, the forum will look healthier. But I think if we have to talk about it continuously without action, the results will not change at all.

I understand what you mean, but when I am active as a bounty hunter, not many managers will accept participants with negative trust and that is what I think. Negative trust with the tag "spammer and will change to neutral if proven to change" I think will help the forum to reduce the number of spam posts on various boards.

The negative tag with the comment "spammer and will return to neutral if the user is proven to change" I think does not automatically make that user untrustworthy. This tag is only to make them deterrent so they want to change their bad habits into members of a good community.

This is a good solution and must be done by everyone, and so far the action must continue to be socialized to all forum members who want to contribute. Keeping forums clean from spam posts is an obligation of all forum members, ignoring them will not help the forum because they will continue to post and post endlessly without our knowledge. Banned is the last solution for spammers who dont want to change and I will support this forum and the good of all members.

Disagree. The trust system shouldn't be used to tag spammers. Spamming is against the rules, and these users should have their posts deleted or accounts banned. Being a spammer doesn't inherently make one untrustworthy. Negative trust also doesn't matter to the majority of spammers. Most bounty campaigns which pay them in their worthless tokens don't care about negative trust. What does matter is having their posts deleted because then they don't get paid for them. I would encourage everyone who frequents these boards to report spam posts rather than just skipping over them.

Isn't it a bit better now at least in the Bitcoin section? Last few weeks I reported a few threads that were actually made for discussing altcoins.
On the other hand there are still topics created by fresh accounts that hare even shorter that one liners with boring (already discussed 1000 times) subjects. You can't stop this.

I don't visit the Altcoin section, except when there is a shitpost in patrol which have to be reported.

The 3 boards that you mention in the OP are targeted by spammers to publish posts. I am sure of that. Are there any efforts to reduce the number of spam posts there? I am sure there is a way and one of them is to report posts that are useless and of low quality for removal by moderator.

There are dozens of up to hundreds of "possible" users who are willing to report these submissions to the moderator for removal. But the best efforts for all those who realize that not participating in increasing the number of spam posts there. In my opinion, if a spammer is a disease then negative trust is the cure until they are fully aware and recovering from the disease. I have seen DT members send negative trust to spammers on my local board, but what about spammers on other boards especially the 3 boards that you mentioned on the OP ?

We have been coming closer to the 10th anniversary of the forum (10th anniversary art contest), and now it is very good time to contribute keeping it as clean and informative as possible. From your decent posts, you can make your very minor contributions to help the forum, simply from your time, efforts and your dedication to help.

By now, there are changes on bumping in some boards, and soon if the spamming issues in Bitcoin discussion, altcoin discussion, gambling discussion boards don't change, I believe theymos will soon apply bump score in those ones.
Bumping changes on some boards
Therefore, I think that it is time for spammers to seriously think of their posting styles because if they don't change, the admin will move further and they will be destroyed. If someone looks around nowadays, you will see that there are some campaigns started to reject posts made in altcoin announcements. It is a very good signal that more ones will apply the same rules.

Almost, it finds the posts and removes them. It removed over 500 of those quoted posts.

Do you mean when there are spam waves with same post contents, you will add those contents into your bot, to find spam posts automatically, and do spam reports?

The bot looks for certain phrases/words/links that are known to be spam/being spammed/etc and I usually only add the ones that are quite bad/annoying (for example, the Telegram spam we had for a while). It indeed only removes the post and nothing more in case it's a false-positive.

Moving the spam from one board to another doesn't really solve the problem or address the underlying issue. These kind of posts, where the same small number of users just spam copy-and-pasted articles and links from one of these trashy crypto "news" sites, shouldn't be allowed on any board. If you come across an interesting article which you want to discuss, then by all means post it, and add in some of your own thoughts to kickstart the discussion. However, spamming these articles which aren't newsworthy and most of the time aren't even accurate, without a single original thought, is not contributing anything of value and is just abusing the forum for free advertising.

Users who repeatedly do this should be banned.

Thank you LoyceV, I been noticing that as well, and I went as far as 6-7 page deep of the Bitcoin Discussion thread and reported as least 10 post in the last 12 hours. Those guys are really paid shill, just posting the articles links without giving their thoughts, worst, there was one newbie, just posting the link. Luckily all my reports are 100% success.


I think they should be just restricted to Press Board. However, it doesn't make sense if those shill accounts (mostly newbies), will just post the link. It's better if they can stir some discussions.

LeGaulois made this thread a few weeks ago, where it was pretty much unanimously agreed that these threads don't really belong in the Press section either. They are not from notable sources, and half the time they are neither about bitcoin nor are they news (often just same vague price speculation or something about blockchain technology in general). Since that thread, I've been reporting them for deletion as and when they show up in the Press section, and looking at my reporting stats I've had 26 threads from that section trashed in the last 2 weeks, which is pretty significant given it usually only gets around 3 new topics a day.

I have noticed, however, that several of these users are now realizing their threads in Press are getting trashed and are instead spilling over in to Bitcoin Discussion. Example: goozij20. It's not a huge deal, since whenever I report their threads in Bitcoin Discussion they get trashed there as well.

I'm of the opinion that users like the one I linked to there should be banned. They are not here to contribute in any meaningful way. They are simply here to spam whichever two bit "news" site is paying them.

I'd prefer the merit system to be used as intended, and only reward merit based on good quality posts made by the user. Just because you know what a good quality post is, and can approve it doesn't mean you write quality posts yourself. Approving posts would be much easier than writing good quality content yourself, and therefore this would be abused to rank up. So I would be completely against the idea of implementing a merit reward system.

Mitchell's is custom coded, and I'm not entirely sure of the contents of it. However, its been pretty effective in finding spam posts. The thing is with automated systems there is a margin of error, and they will hit false positives. That's why Mitchell's script doesn't ban or anything like that. I've seen some of the automated reports coming in, and you can tell which ones they're.

I don't know what Mitchell has, but there is script to report.
[HACK] One-click mod report, not for the faint of heart
If someone have interests in userscripts and addons, they can find more there: List of Bitcointalk.org Userscripts/ Add-ons

One way to overcome this is that users would receive some merits reward depending on their activity.
That will engage more users to be active in cleaning the forum.

This should be only for certain parts of forum that needs most cleaning, and not for whole forum

A kind of democracy sort of input could potentially prevent too much abuse, and any posts that do get through could then be handled by the moderators. I guess its something in theory that could work. It would be interesting how many users would be willing to put time, and effort into this though for no return other than making the forum cleaner. Looking at the reporting statistics that theymos recently released there isn't too many users that are reporting a high amount of reports when compared to the size of the forum. So, I think we would still have the problem of many users not actually approving posts, and probably only the select few which already do report regular would contribute to that.

Then we would have complaints about their posts not being approved. I think certain sections such as meta shouldn't have this filter, because this section is generally where users come to complain about something, and that shouldn't really be moderated via an approval system.

True.
But if we set the rule that not only 1 but more users need to approve the post,
then it should be much harder for them to do it.
For example 5 or 10 or more users need to approve the post, or it will self-delete in X amount of time.

Sure, if theymos wished too. Although, the issues with that is they're pretty much doing what a moderators responsibility is, and this could easily be abused via higher ranked accounts allowing their alternative accounts to get passed the system by approving them. There's also the issue of higher ranked members themselves not posting the greatest quality content, and allowing rubbish to get through effectively making the shadow ban ineffective. Higher ranked users aren't necessarily good at finding and spotting good quality content, and knowing the forum rules.

The best way would be to have the highest quality users, and those that are familiar with forum rules too approving posts, because that's when it would be most effective. Then again, they might post good quality content, but might not be familiar with the forum guidelines. If this was ever implemented then it would make sense to have a bigger moderating team who are familiar with the rules so that its as effective as possible. As a moderator you sort of learn the ins, and outs of the guidelines more than a normal user. I'm still learning a great deal.

Thanks!

As for shadow-ban, is there no way to include regular higher ranked users for that work, and not merit sources?

Go to your profile, and there's a setting that can be clicked called "Ignore Board Preferences". Here you can check what sections you want to ignore.

This link should work for you: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/dkbit98-1410401

If not then just follow the instructions.

Thanks.
I know I can ignore posts or users, but how to ignore (or hide) for example Arabic language board
and not all local languages ?

Depends on the specific thread I guess. I don't deal with a lot of reports within these sections so I can't really pitch in without seeing them myself. Although, if they're links to articles then generally press is more suited. However, if they're just copying the articles text, and pasting a link this could potentially be deemed a duplicate if there's other threads like it. I would favour higher quality threads over ones with just links, and no input or anything.

If they're obviously advertising, and its of low quality it might just be outright removed.

You can ignore whole sections within your settings on the forum. Also, the shadow ban system that you're implying here has been discussed to death, and the only logical way this would work is if there was more moderators or merit sources were allowed to approve threads. However, this really isn't a merit sources job, and I'm not sure if merit sources would be willing to go through queues of threads. Generally, a lot of merit sources are just browsing the forum like they would, and meriting as they come across good quality posts.

I agree that this should be moved to Press board, news or maybe Politics and Economics for some specific non-promotional.

It would also help if member could ignore whole boards, like some local languages, some altcoin boards...
That would make it look cleaner, even if in reality it would be the same.

Maybe also some kind of system where certain amount of higher ranked users need to approve post before it is released.
Before that post would be not visible for others. Some kind of temp pre-post state.
Now active users need to check them before approval, not only moderators/admins/staff

We have several different users reporting a large amount in several sections of the forum, however when compared to the amount of spammers its a drop in the ocean. Although, I definitely for one appreciate everyone that reports! It makes our moderating responsibilities easier. If users want to be more efficient when they report within my sections, then they can report with "Spam post; More in the thread" instead of reporting all the individual spam posts. I'm willing to go through the entire thread with any posts that are reported like this. Although some other moderators might prefer individual reports I don't really mind either way, unless it's bumps then the oldest bump can be reported, and state there's multiple old bumps within the thread that need deleting.

We apparently have a few users now automating reports, and reporting high amounts of posts. These automated posts seem to be decent enough with only a few bad reports mixed in. I can only speak about my sections as that's the only reports I see, and those reported that are newbies. I've personally seen a rise in reports the last few weeks compared to a few months ago where we had a little more of a dry spell in reporting. Must be the summer holidays everyone took.

Mitchell does have a bot which automatically finds certain spam posts that they have inputted in their script. There are also users automating reporting.

I've long given up on the altcoin-boards, but Bitcoin Discussion should be much cleaner.
I notice a lot of people who mainly post links to bitcoinist.com or cointelegraph.com. No doubt they're being paid for it.
Shouldn't this be restricted to the Press board? They basically just copy some text, add a link, and create a topic.
Or, as an alternative, these links could be restricted to one big topic only. There's no need to create many different threads only to promote a certain website.

How about the Spambusters Club?
I have my own report count but it's nothing compared to these guys.


None that I know of. I also don't think there will ever be one since determining whether a post or comment is spam is also subjective in some cases.

I don't know exactly where they come from, but likely due to long-lasting complaints on terrible spamming and garbag posting in those following boards:

• Bitcoin Discussion
• Altcoin Discussion
• Gambling Discussion

People usually visit threads in those boards, and instantly start writing, without few seconds to read last post(s) before they write. They probably only read thread title, and jump directly to make posts.

With supports from recently re-raised questions by those threads:
Limit signature campaigns
Spam sections
There is likely a cleaning-up wave in those boards. Heavens for spammers have been narrowed down dramatically.

Questions:
- Are there people manually report and help to clean up those boards?
- Are there bots recently activated to find spam- / garbage-posts, and help bot owners to report more productively (like what we saw with plagiarism)?


Requests:
- If someone can retrieve data on how many posts /threads deleted in those boards last week, and figure for a few previous weeks, please help
- I have an assumption on the same cleaning-up wave happens in Politics & Society / Trading Discussion / Economics boards, so if you can get same figures for those boards, please help.
List of other requested boards:

• Politics & Society
• Trading Discussion
• Economics
• Speculation

Posters can do it by avoid pyramid quotes or nested quotes. They can say making good on-topic posts is difficult, I don't know what I should say about that but spending a very few seconds to delete unused parts in quotes is not difficult. Posters should do that, at least.

By the way, please read my thread, if you are spammers/ garbage-posters.
Since 2018, what did you contribute to prevent signature ads removed globally?
CopperMembership ~ real Member rank in campaigns - Is it fair ? (this one, likely reduce positive net-effects of merit system)