Topic: Cleaning up this forum (Read 887 times)

I know what you're aiming at sir and I know your kind of person

I think mods simply don't have resources to filter all the crap, this forum has a giant amount of traffic, imagine how much work it would be to investigate each new announcement. But you are wrong saying that community is ignoring this issue, there's Trust System and people who take their time to give negative reputation to scammers, no matter if it's shady ICO, cloud mining or some ponzi scheme. I think this solution is the best we can have right now.

This is getting quite meta. As for your earlier postThere are people still offering those things(except the minecraft hosting thing I guess, but you can still make a thread about it and someone is bound to work for you), bitcoin is just more widely used now.

All I see here is "bla bla sig campaigns are bad"(we've had quite a discussion about this before, use the search feature as you yourself suggest) and "I used bitcoin before it was cool".

As for you getting paid to clean up the forum, not happening as far as I can see it . Because :
1) Mods are already paid to do this, and believe me they go through a whole lot actual spam to filter(I know because I can report like 50 a day if I myself worked at it harder)
2) There are better candidates even if theymos decides to take up a staff member. Let me ask you how many posts have you reported? I have reported over 4k and am still 5th or so member with the highest reporting accuracy(+reported posts ofc).

"moderators do not remove likely scams"

And that is what is exactly wrong.  That is why this forum is a cesspool of crap.  Scams, get rich quick schemes, and basically nothing else.

-AndrewBuck

I've read the reason these threads aren't deleted: it creates a false sense of security.
Basically there are 4 options:
A. Thread is legit.
B. Thread is a scam but hard to find evidence for.
C. Thread is legit but suspected to be a scam.
D. Thread is a scam.

While D can easily be deleted, it leaves the risk of deleting C, while B gets away with it. The forum is very clear about it: moderators do not remove likely scams. It's up to the user to understand and investigate, instead of being blinded by money and falling for even the obvious scams.

Doing a bit of poking around the forum for comparison purposes was kind of interesting.  While I was browsing to look up examples for my last post I thought I would have a quick look back at some of the old posts, and I encourage others to do the same.  If you click to the last page of threads you will see a bunch from back in 2011.  Almost without exception they are people offering real services for sale in bitcoins.  Programming, web hostings, vps offerings, offers to teach people things, minecraft hosting, etc.  Now compare that to the current front page of this subforum and you won't find any of that.

-AndrewBuck

The way you reduce scams is to delete the threads that are scams.  This thread right here... https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/expending-bitcoin-mining-farm-1798996 is a scam.  It outlines a nonsense business proposition, it was called out by the very first poster in the thread, it was created by a user with no posts, it is a scam; and yet there it is, visible in this forum, just waiting for someone to be suckered by it.  Now I am citing that thread as a particular example, but it is far from the only one.  When you leave scam threads available and just cover your eyes and say "it is up to the people reading not to get scammed", no... that is not enough.  If you know people are using your platform to scam people and you don't try to stop it, then other scammers come in and you ruin the platform.

The current policy seems to be, "well, we will just let people comment in the thread saying it is a scam to warn people".  The problem with that is every post doing that just brings the scammer back to the top of the forum and puts them right in front of more gullible people who ignore the warnings in the thread and get scammed.

-AndrewBuck

Edit:  Here is another example:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/open-get-025-free-for-easy-signup-on-website-task-1-1670537   This is clearly someone who is running some kind of scam.  Now the scam is not that they are not paying the people, they probably are paying the 15 cents per person that signs up... this is not the scam.  The scam is that they are filling some fake site with fake profiles somewhere so they can scam other people somehow.  Not sure what they are doing exactly, but its pretty hard to imagine an altruistic reason to populate a site with fake profiles.  And here is the thing: this forum is complicit in that.  Whatever money they steal from subscribers to that site, or from investors who think the site is popular, or whatever they are doing, this forum played its part in helping them do that.  Why do you want to be a part of that?  Why do you want to enable that?

maybe Andrew should give a suggestion on how to reduce scam, it might help. One thing am sure of is that scam cant be eradicated it can only be reduced

I agree with you and I understand how frustrated especially if you had been involved in the forum in earlier years. Although, I joined not too long ago but I have equally seen alot of efforts being done here by the moderators and even managers trying to sanitise the forum as much as possible. But the issue is in as much as  they are trying to sanitise the forum, I believe alot of the blame is on individuals trying to damage the reputation of the forum. And for those who have been scammed, I believe there are lots of warnings by the moderators to guide against this but greediness I guess overshadowed alot of people sense of thinking.

Although scams aren't moderated by forum moderators and admins, the community (DT1 and DT2 members) do everything they could in order to notify others by leaving appropriate ratings.
This is where the rules are stated: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-list-of-official-bitcointalkorg-rules-guidelines-faq-703657

Since on your 1st post, you mentioned "this subforum" then Services sections would always contain such threads and posts. For quality posts and discussions, you should look at other boards although I agree with the fact that the quality has been lower than what it used to be in the earlier years.

It's still the same place but as you said, it gets buried quite soon (few hours on page 1, then those threads go down to page 2 and so on). Services section should have it's on different sections (it's very disorganized).

I think you're mixing posts made by bots to those made by humans.

There used to be a warning on top of "Investor-based games section" about warning everyone in general but I can't see it anymore. Regardless of it, people should do their own work into identifying things and learn to not get involved (although were talking about people and in general majority always fall for such things).

I do agreed that many of the forum now in this industry has being used by the obvious scammers/ spammers, and its really frustrating that many scam coins has been rise up in crypto world. But for the past few months many rules and policies that has been changed especially in different signature campaign more campaign managers also became more careful on choosing their participants in the campaign that they are going to handle it during the whole event project. But still in the last there are few left campaign that are legitimately operating it up to now.

I think the same is also what you think Andrew, her special on ANN tread lot of ICO project scam
plus the participant Signature Campaign which has rules in post, which makes the participants to be more active in posts in this forum post when the quality is not constructive, all they do is post to reach the target post in the signature campaign

Above all of this, may I ask you a question, are you new to this forum thing? Scams are everywhere and the concern here is the people's view about that scam thing.

Some of a newbie knows what is an obvious scam others just want to have some instant and quick profits. You can see that it's really depend on how a person will look into a certain program.

People involved in an online forum must adjust rather than the forum itself will adjust for them. Moderators and staff can minimized those risk but they can't fully control it 100% so we have to accept the fact that scam thing are really associated especially in online world.

That is what I think is the problem though, the idea that because scams happen and people fall for them then we should just let them post here and search for new rubes.  And furthermore that there is not even a sticky post with rules like "Straight up ponzi schemes are not allowed".  There are rules that could be enforced that would cut out a lot of the more obvious kind of nonsense.  Rules like "posts asking people to make fraudulent statements like signing up accounts under a false name will be banned".  It is a simple rule and easy enough to enforce.  It doesn't necessarily take just the moderators to enforce this, rather the whole community should be in favor of stamping out this kind of stuff.  We are all here because we support bitcoin, why are we letting its reputation be tarnished by this kind of crap.

-AndrewBuck

As long as people want to believe scams, scams will exist. Example: cloud mining! The last big "mining" ponzi I've seen took off with thousands of Bitcoins. New ones instantly popped up, and people jump in again.
Sure, some people actually profit from these scams, and these people have a huge interest in getting more people to join, but in the end "investors" lose everything they have in there. You can warn them, but if people choose greed over warnings, it's up to them.

I dont think you should worry about the signature campaigns. The managers are really getting strict about this.
It is now about the members here. Will they join a campaign that is not handled by a good manager just so they could create money by spamming without control.

I will agree with you with the other things that should be cleaned up.
I have one that I experienced with sign up and account hacking. I dont think the moderators can do much about this by checking every threads that will be made specially here in services.
Examining each will really be a hard task.

I looked through the front page of Services and I don't see (m)any (depends on criteria) of those schemes you mentioned. There are threads that offer money making methods, but that doesn't mean that there is a flood of them nor that they are necessarily illegal/blackhat.

There is illegal activity around the forum, and I don't believe that we are making a very active push against it. The forum is, however, banning illegal sales in Digital Goods, and most people who are involved in those illegal schemes are tagged with a negative trust by a member who has, by default, trust ratings visibly shown.

As another example, there is a thread where someone is trying to find someone else to get their adsense account verified because they don't have enough traffic to their own site to meet google's criteria for activation.  This is outright fraud just on its face, and could be blocked on those grounds, but furthermore it is not too hard to imagine that once they do get their account verified they will be using it for nefarious purposes.

-AndrewBuck

@NeuroticFish I guess this makes sense, and thank you for the reasoned response.  Like I said in my original post, I guess I am just ranting and somewhat frustrated.  I came back to the forum after a long time away and it just saddens me to see how this forum is used now, compared to how it used to be.  I understand moderating is a thankless job, even to just deal with true spam (like viagra posts and whatnot that I am sure they are flooded with), but that is why I am kind of surprised to see things like captcha solving being allowed on the forum.  Why are we making it easy for people to create spam that our own moderators (and everyone elses) has to clean up?  Why are there not rules about this kind of thing?

-AndrewBuck

There was discussion about this, actually such discussion happens from time to time, especially on obvious scams (Investor based games, heh).
The conclusion was basically that moderating / checking everything is too much of work and it would restrict the freedom of speech.
So basically people has to use their own brain.

About the amount of spam, yeah, it's quite a job. Obvious spam (like the link-only threads) is removed by the mods and I can guess that's a lot of work there, unpaid work, you know.
Then there are a lot of newbies asking ... things ... and it's not so easy to tell which questions are genuine and which are trolling or sig-spam targeted questions.

Another long discussion was about limiting the newbies and the conclusion was that will add too much work and not much benefit, while genuine newbies with genuine problems will not be helped.

So with all the good intentions it wasn't found anything better than what we have now...


Edit: I see now that you wanted only this subforum cleared. Well, most of what I said still applies. Reporting everything you/we find fishy is a step, but for the reasons I wrote most (even obvious scams) may not be deleted.
Edit2: This is an answer to the post after this: there is, for example, an altcoin called Raiblocks, which is mined by solving captchas. Many recruit workers to mine Raiblocks and pay in BTC so it's a legit, cryptocurrency related service. Of course, this was the good example. One of the few...