Topic: Disable signatures/bounties til a user reaches full member status. - page 6. (Read 2471 times)

Yes, indeed. But for the sake of these communtiy it should be limited just for the newbies.

You have a point, but still we can't deny that the majority of the single liner posts are irrelevant and unacceptable to some topics.
And if that will be the case, CMs are just the only ones who can take action to this.
Easier said than done. Punishments can be handled easily but the improvements regarding the posts, I don't think it will be seen as quickly as possible. There would be more cry babies will pop out because they can't construct such posts and having problems with the english language.

Some of these suggestions are similar to what the newbie jail was. Instead, of restrictions on where they can post you are limiting how many times they can post. This harms the legitimate users, and 1 post per day is incredibly low. Also, requiring a certain character count is just pointless. Some replies just require a few words. In fact, I honestly think the character requirement for signature campaigns isn't needed. A constructive post can be said, and done within a couple of words, and not necessarily 100 characters. It just invites unnecessary padding of a post.

Yeah, it should be their responsibility, and they should already have some pretty strict guidelines for the best possible users joining. However, this isn't the case because there's no actual downside of them enrolling anyone, and everyone. The person who is hiring them is happy because they are getting crazy amount of traffic because their website is being spammed across the forums, and the campaign manager is happy because they are getting paid for minimal work.

There either needs to be punishments handed out to the campaign managers as well as the the members participating in the campaign or implementation of restrictions. I'm actually more inclined to try out punishing campaign managers, and see if the quality improves.

Is banning signature campaigns not a sort of restriction in itself, though? This should be the last resort. Fundamentally, it isn't a problem that users can earn from posting. There is a problem in how this is affecting the forum, and how its currently being handled.

Right! Restricting users from doing stuff isn't always the right solution. For instance, I'm pretty sure in the coming years we will have massive traffic and restricting the sign up process on invite basis only wouldn't be the right solution.We have to go beyond that and harness the best of tech to figure out stuff.

Again, just like my point above, "Restriction doesn't always mean the best solution". Technology is way beyond VPN's and Tor exit nodes. You can never stop the attacks, you can only prevent them.

So if I start my company and would want my employee to manage my campaign, do you think forum should force me to use one of their managers? Why would I?I don't like how every solution you have mentioned revolves around restrict this and restrict that when we are here to be free from the centralised world (speaking psychologically) in the first place.

To sum up this post : Ban Signature Campaigns, forum is sorted (and dead)

Maybe this would be really unfair to those who are still in the Member Rank just like me, I really dont intend to do some shitposts in this community just to earn my post counts needed in my bounty campaign, and as for the Merit Distribution it is now getting a little bit short.
Although I'm really aware of, on how it is done but still the fact that the users that are commonly known here are just the ones whose being given some Merits again and again.

As we can see it is not just the newbies, jr members who are causing this forum to be flooded by useless posts. Although you have the point that the majority of spammers are being done by those noobs.

Being stuck here ( Member Status with 34 Merits ) isn't a bad thing i suppose?, but now i think it is. How about enforcing the noobs to study first or making their limits from posting.

Newbies - only 1 post per day, can't post if its not more than a hundred words ( if the post is good  as shit then it would be deleted immediately )
Jr. Member - only 1-3 post per day ,can't post if its not more than a hundred words ( if the post is good  as shit then it would be deleted immediately ), 5 Merits Requirement Before joining campaigns, Only from this rank with Merit can put some signatures for the campaign
Members-1-5 post per day, 15 Merits Requirement Before joining campaigns
Full Member 1-5 post per day, 120 Merits (or depends if the 100 Merits is accumulated not by default ) Requirement Before joining campaigns

Just Make The Merits Be A Requirement For Joining Campaigns

And I think it is the CM's job to evaluate the campaign member's post whether it is a useless or not.

Many Threads should be locked up first before implementing such rules.

In terms of users hunting for merit. The prospect to earn is still there, but it's just behind a rank restriction.  The users that are looking to earn through bounties, but aren't the required rank will definitely increase their posting habits in order to earn merit. As evidenced the last few months the users that are hunting for merit usually don't post high quality content.  

Paying for signatures is a little different. I wouldn't agree that the merit system could be removed if signatures would be put behind a paywall either. I think the merit system is a pretty good system, regardless if there's other limitations on signatures or not. Its not perfect by all means. However, those that haven't earned any merit since the introduction of the system are fairly easy to spot. I've also supported hilariousandco's suggestion of a pay for signature type system in the past. I think it would be mostly beneficial. Of course, the price of this would need to be carefully considered. Too low, and users won't care about spamming, and getting banned, because they'll likely earn their investment back before they get caught, and they'll just reinvest on another account. Too high, and your just pricing out legitimate users out of the usage of a signature. Several users like to link to their personal projects within their signature, and other interesting projects by others. We shouldn't be removing the ability of users to do this.  I'm not 100% for the idea of a paid signature, and don't see it as the best solution, but more of a compromise due to something needed done about the issues.

I partially agree with the suggestion.

However, there's a difference between saying "all new users are shitposters" and saying "the majority of shitposters are new users". What you suggest would be a reasonable solution (in my opinion, at least) only if the the former were true, and obviously, it isn't:


I think that mods/admins should be able to take away the signature privilege if the user abuses it by spamming. Maybe tie it into the temporary bans as a sort of probation period (after your ban is over you can't use a signature for 2-3 weeks or something like that). But don't punish a whole group of people simply because there are some bad eggs.

Disable signatures until full member status? I don't think it's a great idea. Disable or prevent people from participating in signature campaigns until full member status? Sure. Right now it seems like that would be up to the managers on that one, but maybe in the future there will be a forum-wide rule or even a feature integrated into the forum to monitor/implement that.

The spam problem is obviously complex and in order to cut down on it without punishing those who have no part in it, a good solution will likely mean changes to many rules/parts of the forum, including signatures, bounties, ranks/merit, and potentially even the forum software itself.

Why do you think this would make things worse?

If signatures were outright disabled, the incentive to make low value posts would essentially disappear, and the value of a higher ranking account would be little because of the lack of earnings potential a higher ranking account would have, so I don't think the merit system would be necessary anymore.

If people were required to pay for signatures to be enabled, we could outright remove the merit system. We could even have a system in which users each time a user ranks up they will need to pay to have additional signature features enabled. I personally would prefer to use something like this because it gives users more of an incentive to not engage in behavior that will get them banned because doing so would result in them loosing their investment in their signature features. The payment for signatures would essentially be a bounty that users will not post low value posts.

One of the biggest flaws in the merit system is that everyone who was already ranked up was grandfathered into their rank. A good number of the people I have seen posting crap have a fairly high ranking account but have received exactly zero merit since the merit system was implemented.

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As a general rule, it is trivial to obtain bitcoin to two separate addresses that cannot be linked to eachother, even if they have transactions. It takes patience, but it is also not difficult to move bitcoin to an exchange in order to consolidate bitcoin inputs if the exchange allows for multiple deposit addresses.

I am also not a fan of forcing people to conduct business a certain way.

I'm quite passionate about the forum as you might of gathered, and I'm only nitpicking so that we can actually come up with a solution rather than proposing some, and not really going into depth about them, and then this type of thread resurfaces again in a few weeks, and we circle around the issue again.


I know that there's several people who are spending their time reporting in that section. You only have to take a look at the modlog to see that there are hundreds of posts every day getting removed.

I've recently considered making a Discord/Telegram account just so I can join their groups, and see if they are offering an incentive to post on their threads, because it seems to be the trend right now. Investigating the thread whether they are offering an incentive to post is time consuming enough, let alone if they aren't, and you have to report each post individually.

Yeah, mprep is the only moderator assigned, and he's a Global moderator too. But, it definitely spills over to other moderators from time to time. I received a personal message from cyrus about a specific report so I know that he deals with reports from time to time.


Getting the bounty managers to enforce this would be difficult. Especially, because the list is subjective. I think it's a good movement personally, but it is subjective. Unless, theymos is willing to specify certain guidelines for campaign managers to follow, and actually enforce it we won't be able to get them to follow certain things that would make the campaign less spammy, because they simply don't care.


I agree. I don't like restrictions either as it normally impacts on the legitimate users more than the malicious users.


Right, even if we did try, and limit it. Several users use public wifi, and VPNs. Especially, in countries which the government isn't so friendly to Bitcoin. It would be incredibly difficult to find alternate accounts without them exposing themselves or by taking an in depth inestigations per account. Most of which would have to be done by an admin, and considering both theymos' words, and the account recovery issue right now I don't think they'll have the time too.

There's several pieces of software out there which hundreds of new VPNs are coming online, and being used. They could just use them. There would be no way to regulate this AFAIK. The users registering multiple accounts aren't likely using the most common VPNs because these have likely already accumulated too much evil points to make it feasible.

Altcoin section literally has only one mod appointed to it. Kudos to mrprep for moderating that board for years, but there won't be another mod in that board, unless one or more users start reporting aggressively. So the problem is both.

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About the full member status:

The restriction is a tad too much. For those who don't read the rules/terms of bounties, put them in SMAS/delete their replies and don't pay them. Enforce a new rule/term: If any post is made with twitter and facebook links, that user shall be banned from further bounties/campaigns and he shall not be paid.

A few lazy managers caused this spam, and now legitimate people shouldn't pay for this. And the likeliness of theymos implementing this is almost zero. He did say that this would be his last resort(banning signatures overall if merit system fails). But he is apparently swamped with things and is currently looking to start a company with the same intent as a forum,and to hire a CEO for that.

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About the alt account issue:

If there were a way for theymos to limit the number of alt accounts a person can have, that could solve a huge problem. Bots could be controlled and so could be shitposting. I don't see any legitimate reason for a person to have more than 3 alt accounts other than just to shitpost. Accessing hundreds of accounts using TOR would be almost impossible, for TOR takes a few minutes just to bypass recaptcha. So most shitposters won't likely use TOR. It'd take a lot of time.

So only the VPN issue exists, blacklist the most common VPN IPs? I have heard that there are numerous websites that have huge lists of common IPs.

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Another issue:

Autoreply bot. There is a software that has been especially made for users to post in bitcointalk without logging in. This just made things much worse. I really can't think of a solution for this, but if somehow theymos stops the forum from using cloudfare and if he hires someone or if he himself does something to replace cloudfare, he could make a lot of custom restrictions. Allowing only specific type of bots to access the forum(scrappers/crawlers) and not allow posting bots.

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If people want to clean the bounty section and the shitposters:

Limit any random person from starting bounties. Only like a few managers should host campaigns. This is a hard blow, but it might just work in the long run. And for anybody to be a campaign manager, he should be qualified for that. Qualified as in, he should have knowledge of this forum, know how to select participants, be a trustworthy individual et al.

Why I say only qualified personnel should manage campaigns is  because: Think like a real life person. People only get jobs after they are qualified for it. Campaign Management is becoming a big business and random kids shouldn't be managing campaigns, when they should be studying in school.

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Overall, I don't like above suggestions myself, but something needs to be done. A lot of legit users would be hurt by this, but that's what happens when you leave the fate of the forum at a few lazy ass managers.

I believe a simple solution would be to charge a small fee for campaigns that do not use Bitcoin as a means of payment. The cost for campaigns promoting airdrops and other bounties using ERC-20 is minimal. So they do not have to worry at all about the quality of the post from their participants. They are most benefited by the spam that those users promote.

A fee would put a cost on those campaigns. The fee could even be partly refunded if everything went well with the campaign and it was considered spam-free.

Right, so you are referring to campaign managers not accepting multi accounts? Well, most of the Bitcointalk ones do, and I think some bounties specify that its against the rules to have more than one account enrolled owned by the same user. But, it's hard to enforce, and prove. I would wager there are several accounts that are owned by the same person in the same campaign, even the Bitcoin ones. In fact this has been proven to be right in the past.

Implementing restrictions on certain ranks not having signatures would tackle this issue, though. Simply restricting multiple accounts either through campaign managers or through the forum rules isn't going to be effective even if we throw out the perfectly legitimate reasons to have an alternate account. It's simply to hard to prove. At the moment the people with hundreds of accounts probably only use a VPN, and likely don't try, and hide their information all that well. But, if we were to impose hard limits they would soon find a way around it by using VPNs/Tor, and different addresses for their multiple accounts. They might even go so in depth that they look at timing analysis or changing the national spellings of certain words between their accounts.

Could be an interesting solution to the issue. Although, this is something that would have to be adopted by bounty managers, and most of them don't actually care about the spam issue. All they care about is their advertisement, and hype around their project.

Theymos could potentially come out with a set of guidelines which bounty managers have to follow otherwise their thread will be removed. This could be an approach which would avoid too many official restrictions, but would deal with some of the issues. Whether, the forum has enough users reporting, and the manpower to enforce this though is another thing.

I'm not talking about to eliminate the multiaccount (you right is impossible) but to limit the multiaccount, since if managers will only accept full members+ people can't use 50-100+ multiaccounts to join social media bounties. (Yes someone has over 100 accounts THE SCAMMER Guinness world record on bitcointalk 1 man 1000 accounts 150k+ usd!, I can post more example but this is the biggest found so far)
Also, yes someone now has 10+ accounts for signature and bounty, and they use to join the campaings BUT if the limit of full members+ it will be real, the total number of users of the campaing it will be smaller and it will easier to check for abusers.
Also keep in mind it will be easier to find multiaccounts and to red trust them, for this reason the abuser will are not able to join new bounties with the same account.
I'm not an expert but I don't think it will a small expense for anyone to buy 50 new full merit accounts and even if they do so, it will be always easier to check. (compared to now where in some bounties we have 2000 newbie/jr with new virgin eth address with no transaction).


Also @yahoo a good idea can be to require to have some eth/btc, this it will help the multiaccount hunting for obvius reasons. (even a small amount around 100$ I think is ok)

Limiting multi accounts is impossible. It's too easy to use a public open VPN, and open an account up. Yeah, the IP will eventually get banned but, they'll then just move onto another clean VPN. They'll then post under Tor Browser, and without some very in depth research it would be difficult to prove who's an alt of who.

Plus, alt accounts have their uses. I personally have an alt account that I access when using insecure connections. Same as Loyce above, and theymos also does the same.

Requirements are generally higher because, they are run by users that actually care about the forum. Instead, of some random user that is in it for the money, and doesn't care for it at all. Plus, a lot of the bounties in the Altcoin section run campaigns with new accounts.

Firstly, I don't get why would bitcoin-based campaign generate less meaningless spam. How does that work?
Secondly, if you don't like the idea of signature campaign and you believe that it'd be better to forbid wearing signatures up until Full Member rank, than why do you keep running all these campaigns and allow "members" to join in?

It could be a good idea if converted to: signatured disabled for everybody till you get 100 merits, a shitposter is a shitposter, no matter the rank. 

I'd like to think that you have taken this idea from a comment you left long time ago on one thread of mine about people who used 100+ accounts to join social media bounty.
As I suggested at the time this is the best way to limit the multiaccount since now with the merit system is almost impossible for one guy has 100+ full members accounts, even if he will has 100 of those accounts we can easly hunt them with a little of effort and red trust them.
From my small experience here you are one of the best managers here not only for the high trusted payments campaign that you run but also because you actually do something against cheaters.

I really love this old suggestion and I hope othes managers will do the same.

I'm using the maximum length for a Newbie signature, and I wouldn't want to lose it.
As much as I hate spam, restricting legit users isn't the right solution. I'd like to see spam banned faster, especially the army of useless "great project" posters in the altcoin section.

Disable signatures-bounties until a user reaches full member rank is not a bad idea itself. It's like saying "you have been a good boy" it could be considered as a reward by allowing members to use their signature space. Sure at the beginning, we will see a lot of posts complaining about this. But basically you don't join a forum to make some bucks, you join it because you're interested to meet people with the same interests as yours.
So someone really interested in crypto will still use the forum no matter if he is able to use his signature space or not, while someone joining just to make some cash but nothing else will leave. The result will be getting targeted traffic/sign up but isn't what is better?

For sure it will hurt the "normal users" who will join the forum to promote their business in their signature (without shitposting/spamming) I am thinking about a blogger, a new coin, service related to crypto or anything else.

It's a mixture of the two. There are some ICOs/alts that use bumping services which use bumping bots. Another, exploit is by offering an incentive to post on their thread, and then finally it's just users that are trying to earn money, and post something good about the project in order to gain some favour or something.

Yeah, but this is where we could go for softer restrictions, and try to make up for it via actively reporting. Judging by how long it takes for a report to be handled the moderators aren't completely swamped by reports. If we could increase the amount of users reporting then it could make a difference. It would be nice to have statistics to offer insight into this, and whether or not reporting is actually doing something. I'll continue to report regardless, but it does feel like a losing battle most of the time.

This is still a much better suggestion compared to removing signatures for all of the users. There are some quality signature campaigns and hard working campaign managers still on site, so it's better to regulate it instead of banning it...
I usually don't belive that those jr. members and newbies posting in the alt section are not bots, simply, they post rubbish, I just can't belive they are humans and do this manually day by day...
So if they are bots (or people who don't speak English) and they leave, the forum won't lose anything but only traffic (which is still important, if we want to be the first and most active bitcoin related forum, prior to reddit, etc...)
I just feel sorry for the very few newbies, who come here to learn about bitcoin (really) because they will suffer because of the shitposter army... if we implement some strict regulation for the newbies, jr. members, etc...
If anyone had found a simple solution for this problem, it would have been implemented already, so there's no simple solution at all. If there will be a solution, that will hurt, the question is whom and how much...
You just can't report all of the spammers and get them banned, because if you get one banned, two or three new shitposter will register immediately... (unfortunately, even if you won't get one banned, the new shitposters would still register...)