Topic: [Competition] Report spammers and pseudo-goodposters (Read 1328 times)

I don't know how I missed your answer in my Junk accounts - what is it? Are they a threat? How to get rid of them?


I like this competition very much only I am still confused if it will bring the expected effects?

As you know I have already reported thousands of shitpost and other abusers last year and I gave up finally because there was no sign of effects.

I remember to be busy for hours with reports back then and still after each one there was already 10 new spammy posts published.

Today there are not so many bounties and merit system is holding this forum in a grip so maybe there is a new chance to do something. I hope.

Since i see more disadvantages than advantages i'm giving up with this competition. We are not able to reach the goal without Theymos help. Thanks to eaLiTy [/b] and yazher[/b] for showing good will.

I see this topic changed from "competition" to very good quality report discussion. It's nice to see it.

That's the best way. They don't care about already paid posts since there is no account nuke after N deleted posts.



Well that will for sure not be implemented into competition like that but we can have reporting points based on users rank. F.e.

5 points for each deleted spam post made by Legendary member
3 -//- hero member
2 -//- senior member
1 -//- full member
0 -//- member, junior, newbie

That way everyone willing to gain reporting points will hunt for high rank spammers. Which is good in my opinion.
And those reporting points could be exchanged for badges or merits. I know that merits was implemented to improve post quality by rewarding quality posts but helping in getting rid of spam posts also improve BTT discussion level.

Add 2 weeks cooldown for spamer if more than 10 post were deleted in one week period and we have all drawbacks of such system fixed.

I often mention that in my reporting comment to try to get spam mega threads locked. I'll report spam posts within the last 7 days so spammers won't get paid for them, and then I'll report the OP's post stating something along the lines of "Spam mega-thread, x number of spam posts in the last y days reported for deletion. Please consider locking." You can even do it over the course of a few days or a couple of weeks if the thread isn't terrible but keeps filling up with spam - I just search https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine for how many good reports I have in that thread. If it's >50 posts in the space of week, that's a pretty sure sign the thread is a spamfest.

I feel you. Sometimes you end up with a bad reporting by doing that (that's my experienced). I think it is much easier for moderators to just report them on a single thread rather than tell them to check every post for deletion or nuking, moderators don't have enough time to check every post if it is really needed of deletion. If a moderator can see 200+ of reports in a single thread, they might need to trash that specific thread, rather than reading them each post.

Also, if a forum member is flooding different boards you can just report them, not all moderators are online on a certain board. So, if you report them, at least one online moderator (different board) can check them and just nuke that user (that's what I have experienced), it is much easier to detect, than in a single board report.

We do need extra moderators even if we report accurately. Spam has a different approach now than before. Honestly, the altcoin section is no longer that same old Great project, it has now conversation stuff or pseudo-goodpost like bot talking to each other. If moderators are basing only on what you have reported you will end up having a bad reporting. New batch of moderators are needed, it was already suggested and even hilariousandco is open to that, especially on bitcoin discussion and altcoin board. Beginners and Help is a good starting point on building new moderators, at least they can be a patroller since I can see B&H is no longer the same shit when I first check that board and to be honest some newbies are complaining why their post are being deleted there, it is not iron hand, it is just what a reporter thinks we read every day. Quality posters are evolving, spammers too.

Yes, that's true. I have experienced similar occasions on reporting. I guess, the handling of reports varies with global and board moderators. Sometimes, I report a post and see that they get handled along with other posts of the spammers within few minutes. Since then I have watched closely who handles the reports and seen that rickbig would probably be the only guy online at that time and he should have trashed the posts along with nuking the newbie. I am not really used to the mprep's way of handling of reports but rickbig and hilarious has done an outstanding moderation to have the forum free from spams. Other times, I just report one and comment to look onto the post history but they don't get trashed.

I have tried this too with some minimal reports (somewhere around 10). Either way, if every one of us report accurately we don't really need an extra moderator and the forum would be much more clean than it is now.

I've had mixed results with this on occasion. There have been a handful of times I've reported one post with a comment along the lines of "Serial one-line zero value spammer - please review post history and delete as appropriate/trash/nuke/ban/whatever", and the post I reported has been deleted but none of the others have been touched. In these cases, I've gone back and reported 20+ posts by the user in question and had them all trashed. It's a minority of cases, but it does happen sometimes.

200 a day for one user is ridiculous I agree, but I'm sure I've reported the same user 20+ times in a day. Not because I'm going through their post history but because I'm going through the first page of a board, and if they are spamming in every thread then I'm going to see all their posts.

5000 reports per day is absolutely incredible and would make the moderator shit in his pants. The problem with most of the reporters is that, they report each and every post if the user spams the forum continuosly. This shouldn't be encouraged. Just reporting one and commenting to take a look onto the spammer's post history would do good. Similarly if a topic is filled with referral spams, it would be better to report one and comment to look onto the other posts in the topic. With this, the moderator might trash the whole topic without just viewing each and every report. Once last year, I have seen that mdayonliner reported more than 200 posts per day made by the same spammer and hilarious PM'd him to just report one and leave a comment.

I was active in the Altcoin Section last year helping people on technical questions. But its just absolute waste of my time searching for one good topic for 30-40 mins. I just left that place once for all unless theymos creates a Tech Board for Alts or something like Serious Discussion for having good discussions about Alts. Same as btc, I am interested in the tech of the alts too.

I don't really understand how you are moderating such a massive frog pond and keeping them clean with you being the only moderator apart from mprep.

If anyone is really concerned about the health of the forum, they would surely report no matter what they receive in return.

We have access to most recent reports, but not total amount of reports handled by x user. So the only person who would be able to verify the data would indeed be theymos or presumably cyrus. Plus, I doubt any staff member would release any data without permission from theymos anyway.

You could easily hit 5000 reports a day if you were dedicated to the course in the altcoin section, and many users are reporting hundreds a day. I've woken up to reports in the thousands some days, and a lot of them are coming from the altcoin section. The place is absolutely incredible, and unfortunately good discussion does get lost there.

If anyone does come up with an idea which would encourage others to report more without the drawbacks discussed then I can absolutely get behind the idea.   

Reward (in terms of money/merit) for reports is terrible solution.

What if I buy a posting bot and create 10-15 accounts, then start spamming the local sections which have no moderator and use the main account to report the posts.
You can config the bot to directly report those spam posts created with the fake accounts.

At the end everything is automated and you do nothing at all to increase your report count.

No, if you report, do if for the good of the forum, for the community not for money.

Topics like this does generate interest in reporting more posts, but reporting shouldn't be forced to do so. Whenever you watch a spam/off-topic irrelevant reply you should report that, but initiating a competition for highest number of posts is not really good (in my opinion). Spammers have reached their limit of spamming and since they are not getting ranked up as earlier to higher ranks through their spamming, most of them left the forum actually. Other Left out people here are those really good posters and those who are still hunting down for merits and abusing them. If such a merit competition is to be created, the abusers would be aware of this and would start spamming the report section to receive their first, second or third place which shouldn't happen. Merit was not meant to be given as a award for such competition.

Another fact is what o_e_l_e_o said, spammers could easily change the report stats with just using a inspect element page and receive their merits. Or it could happen such that, they would report almost everything in Bounties (Altcoins) section. That place is just absolute trash and we can easily get around 20-30 reports added to your count daily. None of the staffs is really available here to confirm these numbers other than theymos himself and probably we are never seeing these report stats quite often. Whenever theymos thinks of providing us with the stats, he posts them. Other than that depending on him for stats is just like wasting our own time.

I guess "Spam Buster Club" created by iasenko is a better alternative and is more like a community to work together in trashing the spammers. I don't think rewarding or monetizing these reporting would really work in real time or for a longer time.

If you were to run this competition, you would need to limit which boards reports can come from, but again, you are depending on theymos to give you those data. The reason I say this is because anyone can go in to a random ANN thread on the altcoin boards and rack up hundreds of reports an hour just from the usual "Great project" and "To the moon" type posts. Doing so doesn't really help to clean up the forum, because no one with any sanity is visiting those threads anyway.

hilariousandco has previously stated that only admins have access to this data.

Thank you for providing smerits for second place.


Don't you think that this will solve issue with low quality reports?

5% might be too much but 2% will force competitiors to create as good reports as possible. It only does not solve this issue:


Which i'm not quite sure how to solve it for this comptetition. I'm also not sure if 3-10 merits are that much to made members put that much efford to win them. It is also much easier to find spam (f.e. in almost every megathread) than create alt to post spam to report it.

@Welsh Thank you very much for sharing your point of view with dealing with reports. It was very educating for me and will help to create quality reports for "pseudo-goodposters"
BTW do You, as staff member, have access to others "report to moderator" stats? Or only Theymos has it?

Monetizing report will create another headache for moderators as it will be hard to go through every report as i bet you will get tons of bad reports just for the case of getting paid , it must be a voluntary system without any perks to get the best results from dedicated members but having a annual display of good reports by users is not a bad idea either.

  
@OP i will sponsor the second place winner and since i am sponsoring i am not participating in this competition.

It really depends on if you care about report percentage, and actually removing the message. I'm only speaking of my viewpoint on this, and how I go about moderating. I'll try my best to go through the pages, and check if there's duplicate content, but if I believe that the post is unique enough or adds just enough to discussion then I'll likely leave it. Sometimes I'll ignore the report, and possibly allow another moderator to make the decision if I think its borderline.

My point being without going off topic too much here is that if you report with references its much better, although its not a requirement, and most of the time its not needed. Regular reporters, and moderators can kind of spot duplicate content from a mile off due to the fact that we get reports, and report within the same threads quite a lot.

If its a smiley then yeah it should have been deleted, and I'm not sure why it wasn't marked good, but it was probably just a mistake on the mods behalf.  0.81% is a really good margin for error, I wouldn't be bothered by making too many mistakes guys, and as long as you have a good amount of good reports then there's no real need to change from a personal perspective. Back in my reporting days I made over 200 bad reports.

My personal advice would be to go more in depth on non obvious cases. However, simply stating "spam" etc is usually fine for the majority of low quality content.

But, people get greedy, and will game the system by creating alt accounts, and posting spam, and reporting it with their mains. Then, the original goal of the campaign of removing spam is void, and we are left dealing with more spam than original. It's a hard one, but the very core of the idea is a good one.

I fully agree with your post especially with the part in bold. If a reward system like that got implemented I think that not everyone should be able to participate in it. It should be based on the stats of good reports, both quality and quantity wise. That way you would be dealing with a handful of members who already know what an off topic and spam post looks like. That minimises the possibility of abuse and gaming the system.

I'm also guilty on the copy and paste part of my reasons for deleting and nuking of a certain post.
But, do we really need to link every post that we are saying as a repeated post we read every day?
That's too long if I add more links to it (sample averaging 500 reports daily).

If I go back to my bad reports, which I did report again with links, seems like a waste of time re-reading again and linking the reports which eventually being marked as good. Reporters report a certain post because they already read the same message on the previous post.

I will just give one example of my latest bad reporting (I did report again):


Below is the post:

The above image is just one of my latest bad reporting. As I have said on my previous reply I know moderators don't have the time to read all the previous post, but, if there will be some ratings on the quality reporters I would have the lowest ratings just because I forgot or never link which post I was saying as rehash post.

I also have one report which got a bad report, AFAIK the post was just   (yup, just a smiley and got bad on that), when I check again it was already deleted. I know moderators can see this link, if I'm correct it is just a smiley >>> https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5134505

My bad reports are around 0.81% of my total reported posts. I hope it won't affect my quality of reporting, I know we all make mistakes or moderators click the wrong button and I admit I make mistakes.

Just look for people with paid signatures. 90% are spam and content regurgitation.

Yeah, I remember a few times I literally typed it out in a text editor, and then copied it over. Those where the days! I haven't taken a look at much of the development in the new forum software, but hopefully these little quality of life features will have been considered. Keep up the good work at reporting though! You are helping with my therapeutic therapy


Just to add onto this also. This is why I considered giving out payments, although that also has its drawbacks. Honestly, I couldn't care what the motives behind someone reporting is as long as they're not gaming the system. Therefore, I don't mind offering rewards up for users that are using the system properly, but as soon as payment is introduced I know that it will be gamed to no ends. I'm not a big fan of handing out merits for reporting, although I wouldn't critique anyone doing it as there's far worse things they could be wasted on.

I think I'm pretty much in line with what you've said. I report obvious bounty spamming simply as "low value spam" or similar, but anything more complicated (such as rehashed content), I include a bit more information. As I said, my "bad" reports are currently sitting around 0.2% of my total, but just wanted to make sure I wasn't making life any harder for the mods than it needs to be. Thanks for the clarification.

An additional little suggestion that might help: Expand the comment box on the reporting page. I've since started using a script to do that automatically, but it's really difficult to write a meaningful comment to the mods, especially one that needs to be a couple of sentences long, when you can only see ~40 characters at a time.

It is acceptable, but you definitely run the risk of it being bad. Generally, spam posts are easy to figure out, and reporting them for "spam", "low quality content" or any other variation is usually fine, and perfectly acceptable. However, some posts which are being reported for being repeated or duplicate content, and not providing a reference runs a higher risk of being marked bad. When I receive a report like that I'll normally check the thread to a certain point, but I'm not going to go through a 200 page long thread for example looking for duplicate content. I'll use various plagiarism  tools to see if that pings anything back, but if it doesn't then it'll be marked bad. The best practice when considering  duplicate content or replies which have already been rehashed a few times is to include a reference. A lot of the time its obvious, and can be verified only a few replies up, and then its not a big deal. However, I've received messages from users who have reported something, and not included a reference, and the duplicate was over 20 pages ago.

Generally, use your common sense, and include detail in your report if its not obvious. I haven't noticed your reports honestly, and if you haven't received much bad reports I think its safe to say you're fine. We all fall guilty of it too I definitely did back in my reporting days, and I had a few marked bad where I didn't provide enough context, and then I reported it again with context, and it got deleted. Generally, I'm aware of threads which have a lot of spam in them, and it needs cleaning up. I've been busy recently, but I'll be visiting these threads periodically, and cleaning them up now that my activity should be back to normal.

In terms of my feature suggestion. I wouldn't mark down reports for specifying "spam", because that's all that's needed. That isn't a bad quality report. I'm not expecting essays or to nail everything, but sometimes a reference is absolutely appreciated. If you know that their reply is just rehashing what someone else said you've likely seen the original message, and providing that reference goes a long way, because the moderator handling the report hasn't seen it, and needs to go looking for it. This is my personal opinion obviously, and I'm not speaking on behalf of every other staff member, and I think the report quality suggestion definitely has bigger drawbacks than positives, but that's the only way I see running a competition/reward campaign like this to work.