Topic: [Competition] Report spammers and pseudo-goodposters - page 2. (Read 1360 times)

I am probably guilty of this. In cases that require a little bit more investigation on my or a mod's part I always include a longer message, such as providing links and signposting to the relevant parts in cases of plagiarism, or explaining why I think a thread has run its course and deserves to be locked. However, the majority of my reports are for simple low/zero value meaningless shitposts which add nothing meaningful to the discussion, and I always report them with the same message, unless I think it's not complete obvious why it's spam (for example, if the post isn't bad, but is a rehash of something that has been said 10+ times already). I have a very low percentage of "bad" reports, so I had always assumed using the same message was acceptable.

Where is the balance to be had here? I could expand my report message for these kind of posts, but it would then take me probably around 10x longer to make a report, so 10x less posts being reported. Is the same repeated message fine in these cases of obvious spam?

I've considered doing something like this in the past, but the room for abuse, and bothering theymos ultimately stopped me from pursing it. I had the idea in mind of rewarding Bitcoin to those that outperform others in reporting in an attempt to get more reports coming in for the mods. Although, the quality of the report has to be taken into consideration, and its not all about quantity.  Doing my time moderating I've come to the conclusion that there are a few users that report a large amount of reports, but they copy, and paste their report message, and it is often inaccurate or doesn't supply enough information for the moderator. It would be nice if moderators had an optional rating method of rating someones posts, and when displaying their report count, and accuracy to them it would also display quality of reports rated by the moderators. Having a drop down menu where we could rate the report from 1-5 or something. Then, if theymos was willing to display individual reports based on a competition or movement such as this we would have a good idea of those that are reporting higher quality reports than the rest, and not just spamming. For example, there's users that report individual bumps when it would be more efficient to report the oldest bump, and specify that there are more bumps within the thread. That would be a higher quality report than reporting all of them. This of course is all subjective, but I think this would be the only way to do something like this, and unfortunately including a rating system would likely have drawbacks which I won't go into here.

And this is why I think for something like this to be plausible we'd have to have some rating system put in place, but then differing opinions on quality, and that extra bit of workload that the moderator has to do to rate the report are all drawbacks. Not to mention that users will likely create new accounts, and post spam with them, and report it in an attempt to pad their post count. Which would create new workload on the moderators. The idea in general is a good one, and would likely increase report stats, however putting it into practice is complex, and probably would lead to too much abuse for it to be plausible.

Similar things have been suggested before. In the end it comes down to rewarding members with merits, like a payment, for offering a service (finding spammers) which is not the reason why the merit system was implemented.
It could create a huge log of reports for moderators to handle. Users will report as much as possible only thinking about their end-reward.

Personally I have nothing against users getting some sort of reward for helping out the forum but not sure that the admins will agree that it should be merits. Curious to see their response as well. 

I've already said that he is right. Graphic editor is not necessary. You can change every text on your website in 10 second in html editor (f12 in google chrome). As I said. We are stuck with this competition and I won't start it until one of moderators will post his support.


Thank you for reports tips.

Now I see that it might not work since even good pseudo-goodposter report might fail.
Do you have any idea how to fix that? Or maybe whole challenge won't work and best idea is to close topic and let it sink?

o_e_l_e_o is right. Also any user who knows how to work in the graphical editor can fake their statistics reports in a few minutes. I think that the screenshot can not be evidence in this case. Archiving user statistics does not work.

Some points on reporting:

1. If a certain thread has already 100+ replies, it is a signal that it has repeated replies or pseudo-goodposters.

2. Don't be discouraged if you have bad reports, moderators don't have the time to check the previous replies of that specific thread. Moderators only act on what you have reported, unlike us reporters that we dedicated our time reading first some previous replies. Sometimes I got 400+ good reports with 32 bad reports on Bitcoin Discussion only.

3. You can just report again your bad reports, most of them are being handled as good when you report them again. Different moderators have a different viewpoint on a specific report (basically human judgement kicks in, unlike bots who just ban, kick, or mute when they see spam posts).

4. Some bad reporting are just duplicated reports. I usually used right click when reporting a specific post on a flooded thread for nuke or deletion. So, be very careful when using the right click, sometimes I end up clicking the back function instead of open link in new tab and stupid me reporting the same post because they are just the same shits that we read every day.

Example:

View image


View image

5. When a thread is being bumped and you found old replies that you think it is spam post, just report them, especially if the topic is worth reading. Based on my experience there are threads worth reading with old shitpost that can affect the value of that specific quality post.

6. I know some of you are just limiting their reports to avoid bad reporting, I got 515 bad reporting for some reasons moderator didn't agree on what I have reported, because as what I have said on number 2. Just continue to report, as the report page said: Do not worry about your accuracy too much; one accurate report is worth many inaccurate reports. I still have 100% accuracy, even if I have 515 bad reporting.

7. IMO, merit has nothing to do with report function. I mean, it is hidden and only users (reporters) can see their own reports.

I guess you have changed it in HTML. It's great that you have pointed it out. I didn't thought about it.

I think Theymos will only have to check one random person out of top 3 (or whole top 3) - none will risk red trust for cheating to get 3-10 merits if he will know that there is a possibility that it will be checked.

So we got stuck and we can not start with competition until Theymos or any moderator (if he has access to this data) will post that he support this competition by checking at least 1 person.


Thank you. I've updated OP.

since I haven't use my Smerits this year, I was waiting for this kind of opportunity to happen. I just want to say I will sponsor the 3rd Prize.

A nice idea, but altering the screenshots to fake how many reports you have made is trivial. See below for an example, taken seconds apart. The only way you could do this without the risk of cheating would be to have theymos report every users' reporting statistics, and something tells me he probably has more important things to be getting on with.  

^{For now on we are stuck with this competition}

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^{I hope my post do not violate any BTT rules and is healthy for BTT community. I was looking and didn't found any rule that it may violate.}

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Spammers are real pain in the ass for every BTT member. I think its time to be pain in the ass for them.

I'm presenting Report spammers and pseudo-goodposters competition.

Rules:
1-From now on until 29.04.2019 - I'll be happy to get as much feedback (positive or negative) as possible to improve this competition.
2-From 29.04.2019 to 1.05.2019 I'll collect applications from members willing to participate (I'll announce it in this thread). Applications should consist of screenshot with your current "report to moderator" stats : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine
3-1.05.2019 competition starts and will last 7 days (I'll post countdown gif). After countdown end all participants will have 24h to post screenshot with your current "report to moderator" stats.
4-I'll calculate how many good reports each participant have made and then I will rank them. To avoid abuse each participant with 5% of fail reports during competition period will be kicked from competition (be sure that your report is legit, do not report every post because you are only making moderator's work harder). Only reports from competition period interest me.

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Reward:
1st place - 10 merits form me
2nd place - 5 merits - I can't guarantee your reward. I'm looking for sponsor for your reward. I hope that someone will post his good will in this thread before competition starts. sponsor : eaLiTy
3rd place - 3 merits - I can't guarantee your reward. I'm looking for sponsor for your reward. I hope that someone will post his good will in this thread before competition starts. sponsor : yazher

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What is a spam post:


What is pseudo-goodpost


Example of pseudo-goodpost

28.12.2018 Bull created topic asking if there is any good crypto exchange that allows trading with altcoins without KYC. After 14 min i replied with my answer suggesting binance. Case closed? Naah.
Today I get notification form Maggiordomo bot that someone quoted me in this topic. On page number 11 Kang Bahar quoted me just to say that he agree with me but he also quoted another person who say opposite thing and guess what ... agree with him too adding few obvious statements from himself.



Those are posts that are not spam but damages BTT even more. To get rid of those posts we need to report all of them. But don't waste your time on old posts. Those are already paid. They don't care about them. Report new, this week, unpaid post. That will make them to improve post quality.

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Let me know what you guys think about this thread. Again if it validates any BTT rule than I'm sorry. I didn't know.