Topic: [FARM SUPPRESSION] Clearing the Horde of Spammers (Read 1797 times)

The following list will be updated as the unhandled reports continue to trickle through the report queue. There are roughly 1600 left, though this may overlap with some "no-action" results.

List of users sorted by no. good reports filed against their posts, from approximately June 2020 onwards:


Total reports: 4508
Total users: 87
Average reports/user: 51.81
Worst offender: onrise

Yep, and the other "issue" would also be sig campaigns like the mintdice that I am wearing now.
For a hero, it's $2 / post but max 25 posts week paid. 5 of which are supposed to be in the gambling sections.

Hate to say it, but although some people think limiting # of posts cuts down on spam, it just makes farming easier because the bar is that much lower.
I hit the 25 posts, get my $50 then switch to the next account say with bitdice get my 30 posts for another $85 for 30 posts and then sports bet for $100 for 25 posts.
So 80 posts a week in my 3 "real" accounts gets me $235 Total that up it's $12,000 /year for what can be considered part time work.

Adding in the "Stupid" accounts making 80 shit posts that the 3 accounts are talking too does not take up too much time because they are not what you really care about.

Double that you are at 160 real posts, say 160 fake posts and $24,000 a year.
Using those #s you have 320 posts a week, / 40 hours is 8 an hour.
Assuming you hit the 160 fake posts, which is a lot. Because you can respond to other low thought posts and the ones in that are just replies in the gambling forum.


I have no idea why LoyceV chimed in here but look here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-get-to-my-bitcoins-5176404

Newbie question, about $1 million USD of BTC from 2014 worth 30x that today, just does not scan as a "legit" post in my opinion but it has a lot of responses.

Take a look at what I replied to earlier today:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52189597

I really had to think before replying to it. Is this legit, is it not?
In the end I replied because it is asked a lot in the HW sections so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Probably a waste of my time, but I can at least defend it to a certain extent.

Take a look at 1st post here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-build-a-bitcoin-exchange-5170721

Hmmmm, newer account asking about setting up an exchange. Seen that a lot, no big deal. Everyone want to get rich doing something like that.

Now, look at his post history.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/shahanakarthik-2532622

Yeah.....

Thus ends my Saturday night incoherent ramblings.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

-Dave

Or the farmer could work with other account farmers, the more accounts involved, the harder it would be to detect them.

It should set off red flags if the same group of people are always participating in the same threads. If you compile a DB of everyone's posts that includes at a minimum the thread ID, this should be fairly simple to detect, and if the reply number, or the date/time of the post is also tracked, one should be able to detect this with few false positives if a sufficiently strict criteria is used.

After flooding my eyes with scores upon scores of these inane posts, I can certainly agree with you.

A smart account farmer would create a hierarchy of "intelligence" between their accounts. Set aside some accounts to act ignorant and ask stupid questions or make uninformed remarks and then respond to them with your "smarter" accounts. This guarantees at least 3 posts with user A asking the question, B responding and A reaffirming the answer (or potentially continuing with pretend-ignorance).

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You could easily feign conversations and have all your accounts accompany one another in the same threads, lowering the amount of time for searching through viable threads of meaningless discussion.

Trivia: from July 13 to today, we have a total of 16790 reports. The holistic count would be 21369. Today's total is at 1490 (currently) with 1461 unhandled reports (pending or otherwise).

After reading this thread and the Limits of s--tposting thread. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50683160
I started to wonder how many people are having, somewhat intelligent conversations with themselves.

Take a look here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/8-ny-state-tax-on-resold-miners-5174189

Yes it's all legit as far as I can tell. But, after thinking about it, how difficult would it really be to have a new account ask a question and then have 2 or 3 of your other accounts have a discussion about it over a couple of days. Keep repeating. Other people will join in, some merit will flow. So long as you are not a total idiot and don't post in broken English how many posts can someone get away with?

If you don't think of it as posting but, instead think of it as typing out a conversation it seems much easier to hit 3 campaigns @ 25 or 30 posts a week.
Or a little more then 1 post per account per hour for a 8 hour day 3 days a week. Sitting at home on your couch. Not going to be "rich" but if all 3 are @ .0125 week you are at over $20k for part time work.
Not great not terrible.

Lets be honest:

Does anyone here REALLY know that I am not actmyname and PrimeNumber7 ?

-Dave

Update: there are now 324^(!!) users with 10 or more good reports against them. 80 of those users have 50 or more reports, and of those 50, 17 have 100 or more reports.

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Since there were only two high activity days, here is the breakdown.

(Aug 7 to Aug 8)

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Total reports: 2827
Total good: 2397
Total users: 99
Average reports/user: 24.21
Worst offender: MFahad

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Note: there are still numerous chunks of unhandled reports... they might be touched later. All statistics in the second post use the snapshot of the entire report history at the time of editing.

I think the easiest way to wipe out spammers, especially newbie spammers, is tighten rules (global rules) in the forum, that only Junior Members / Copper Members and above can post in Bounties boards. Then, thousands or millions of Newbies will be stored in trashcan. It will not stop them to spam the forum, but just part of them will be actively here, might be to spread FUDs, or phishing attacks, something like that.
Patrol page clearly shows that major of Newbies make Post of Authentications (PoAs). This is their main reason to be here.

Restricting rights to make posts in bounties to Copper Members is likely a good solution, because purely newbies will stop spamming; and if they want to join bounties, they have to buy Copper Membership. Somehow, it will help the forum in two aspects: Spam Reduction, and Extra income.

I raised this point earlier in a different thread but there's still a difference between 60 posts/hr (not really sustainable) and 60/day. Not enough slots in BTC paying campaigns or potentially being blacklisted is still something he'd be likely to face.


The patrol page has only Newbies' posts to check for the worst of spam posts. Monitoring everyone who decides to pay for a signature is going to take a lot of moderators' time, you have to visit the thread and read the OP to see if the reply is at least vaguely on-topic or not, and other users' replies to check if the investigated user isn't simply regurgitating other users' content to pad his post count.

Only Global mods have the required permissions to ban regular users (those who have >150 posts, or those who have >30 activity with 1 merit or more), or temp ban, and I think only admins can issue sig bans, and I don't think it's likely to change.

I don't think actmyname would be able to extrapolate his one hour performance into a longer time period. He reported being able to make 59 posts, but in the first two pages of his experiment, I would probably have reported 5 or so of his posts as low effort/content posts, and his post quality tanked in his third page as he moved into the gambling sub. I would say that he made 35 or so posts that shouldn't have been removed in his hour experiment. In my experience actmyname generally is someone who puts in more than enough effort into his posts, but if he were to post 400 posts similar to the posts he made in his experiment, he probably would eventually get banned, sig banned, or removed from signature campaigns, and possibly put on one or more various blacklists for spammers.

I somewhat suspect there is a lack of tracking in regards to the underlying reasons for moderator actions against users. I also don't think banning users is given a very high priority, which I understand because banning a user removes him from the community, and may mean he looses interest in bitcoin. One solution might be to be more aggressive in giving out signature bans, and in addition to time elapsing, that a number of posts and/or login time elapse before the signature ban expires. My reading of the current policy is users have an escalating time in which they cannot post, but IMO it would be more effective to only hand out 3 day posting bans that also come with an escalating signature ban.

A second solution would be more/better tracking of users. I am not precisely sure what goes on behind the scenes, but I have my doubts that much tracking is done, and I have no idea if anything similar is already in place. If someone is making a lot of medium effort "sloppy" posts, someone can check if they have a lot of accounts making a lot of these posts, and if they are making enough of these posts, a special exception to the ban evasion rule can be made so that all their accounts except one or two is banned, and they are told they cannot use commercial signatures with more than one or two accounts. If someone has enough posts removed for 'off topic' or 'low effort' while wearing a commercial signature, they can automatically be reviewed for a signature ban.
What you say may be true, but this does not change the fact that corruption causes a lower standard of living among the average citizens.


The framework for this is already in place. The copper membership paid rank permissions can be copied into a new paid rank, and the permissions of existing ranks can be modified. The date and starting post counts of when the new paid rank is purchased can be tracked, and their posts can be put into a tool similar to "patrol" until their current post count AND the current date are high enough above the values when the new rank was purchased.

In Western/Southern Europe you can find people living off half of that without being poor, especially outside bigger cities. But yeah, I may have overstated the amount of available slots. There are probably way more slots with altcoins/tokens/ICOs/whatever but it's much more of a gamble whether they'll get paid or whether whatever remuneration they receive is going to be worth the effort.

BTW, 400 posts/week or more isn't unfeasible as actmyname has previously demonstrated.


True, we could do with some more mods. Another problem are users whose posts are of barely acceptable quality but not bad enough to get banned.


Corruption and oppression thrives where they live because there isn't enough outside pressure. It's easy to see when comparing Eastern European countries, those which joined the EU started improving even before joining the EU, those which stayed outside the EU largely remain poor and corrupt. In Southeast Asia countries which opened themselves to outside investments and liberalized their markets have also seen corruption decrease because that's one of the ways you convince foreigners your country is a safe place to invest money in.

Also, when poor countries have more money, jobs for which there is demand locally also start paying more.


That sounds like a lot of work, starting with theymos having to rework moderation tools, but not an entirely bad idea.

I assume that by "profitable" you mean that someone could be a sig spammer for a living.

In theory it is possible for a sig spammer to post for a living in a 1st world country, but I don't think this scales the same way it does for those in 3rd world countries.

I would assume you need to earn at least 0.1 btc per week to reasonably use sig spamming as your only income. With btc trading at $11,000, this works out to $57,200/year, but you will need to pay self employment taxes totaling 15.3%, so your income would be around the equivalent of a salary of $49,600. If you remove $4,200 for health insurance/HSA ($350/month, which is probably on the low side), you have an income of roughly $45,400/year.

Most sig deals have rules against having multiple accounts, but we can ignore this for the purposes of this exercise.

The best paying deal, Chip Mixer pays 0.0375/week, and has 58 slots.

I estimate that sportsbet has 6 hero/legendary slots that pay 0.01/week, and 10 senior slots that pay 0.005/week.

Using the ChipMixer and Sportsbet campaigns:
3 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), two hero/legendary SportsBet spots (0.02/week), and one senior SportsBet spot (.005/week)
one person could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), and 6 of the remaining 7 senior SportsBet spots (0.025/week)

The above would take 8 ChipMixer spots, and would leave 1 remainig senior SportsBet spots.

YoloDice has 5 hero/legendary posts that pay a maximum of 0.015/week (rounded up from 0.0147), 5 senior spots that pay 0.0105/week, and 5 full member spots that pay 0.0065/week (rounded from 0.0063). This includes all bonuses.

Using the ChipMixer and YoloDice campaigns:
5 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), one hero/legendary spot (0.015/week), and one senior spot (0.0105/week) to earn 0.1005/week
1 person could take 2 ChipMixer spot (0.075/week), and 4 full member spots (0.026/week) to earn 0.101/week

The above would take 12 ChipMixer spots, and would leave one full member YoloDice spot remaining.

The BitCasino deal has 5 slots that pays 0.018/week

Using the ChipMixer and Bitcasino campaigns:
2 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), and 2 BitCasino Spots to earn 0.111/week
1 person could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), the remaining BitCasino Spot (0.018/week), the remaining YoloDice spot (0.0065/week), and one spot on a very low paying deal.

The above would take 6 ChipMixer spots, all of the BitCasino spots, and the last YoloDice spots.

The FortuneJack deal pays 0.015/week and has 10 spots

Using the ChipMixer and FortuneJack campaigns:
5 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), and 2 FortuneJack spots to earn 0.105/week

The above would take 10 ChipMixer spots, and all of the FortuneJack spots.

The Bitsler deal has 15 spots that appear to pay $150/week.

Using the ChipMixer and Bitsler campaigns:
7 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots, and 2 Bitsler spots for a total of ~0.1 btc + $25 / week

The above would take 14 ChipMixer spots, and would leave 1 Bitslet spot remaining.

The Bustadice deal has 16 spots that pay a maximum of $100/week. As with the Bitsler deal, it is unclear if there are limitations as to how many spots there are for each rank.

Using the ChipMixer and Bustadice campaigns:
4 people could take 2 ChipMixer spots (0.075/week), and 3 Bustadice spots

The above would take the last ChipMixer spots and leave 4 Bustadice spots remaining.

I would estimate that one person could take all the Crypto-games spots, and all the remaining Bustadice spots, and the one remaining Bitslet spots to earn ~0.1 + $50 / week. This person would need to make a silly amount of posts each week that I don't think is realistic.

An additional 4-5 people could take the remaining spots between Wolf.Bet, and WinDice, but they would need to make a silly amount of posts each week.

The above demonstrates at most 30 people from 1st world countries could earn a living from signature advertising, or maybe around 35 if you count those needing to make silly amounts of posts (>400) per week

I think this partially stems from a lack of moderation. The lack of moderation leads to less non-sig spammer users being interested in reading/posting in these sections, which increases the percentage of spam in these sections, which cascades into even fewer non-spammers wanting to post in these sections.

Low standards of living is most commonly caused by corruption and oppression in governments.

There are also many jobs that must be done on a localized basis.

Probably most importantly, the sig-spammers use very similar skills that basic globalized jobs require, which implies the sig spam problem is not a lack of jobs in their local economy.

The idea is that these people are dealt with quickly enough so that the investment cannot be easily recouped if all you are posting is garbage. Those that have recently paid the fee, and are wearing a commercial signature could be closely monitored for the first couple months, and garbage they post can be aggressively removed. If someone has enough low effort/garbage posts removed (not bumps, nor off topic posts that have moderate effort put into them) within a specific unit of time, they should be considered for a ban automatically. 

Re: [EXPERIMENT] Testing the Limits of Shitposting

Considering how account trading is such a large market, this makes sense. Back in the day people would even talk about ROI with regards to accounts.

Depending on the board one visits, it sometimes seems as if there are entire orchards of rotting apples...


I'd say there are two reasons:

a. not enough globalism, there is enough for people from poorer countries to spam for money because they have Internet access, but if the world was more globalized there would be no need for that as they would have more opportunities at 'normal' jobs, because it would be easier to invest money where they live, and they would have an easier time moving to richer countries;
b. it's easy to run the numbers that sig spamming can be profitable even for people in one of the richest countries (i.e. 14 Eyes countries) if done using multiple accounts.


They'd just treat it as an investment soon to be recouped.

I think the good associated with signature campaigns probably outweighs the negatives. From what I can tell from reading old threads, signature campaigns have allowed people to get paid to learn about bitcoin. They also provide a medium in which bitcoin companies can advertise and expand their user base with a fairly modest budget. Both of these will increase adoption in bitcoin and help the economy of bitcoin companies.

Unfortunately, there are a few bad apples out there that take advantage of the money making opportunity associated with signature campaigns. This highlights some of the drawbacks associated with globalism (globalism is not perfect, but is a net positive to the world economy, and the standard of living of everyone). Ultimately, disincentives need to be given for users to not post garbage, and incentives need to be given for users to post useful content. A modest fee (by third world standards) to enable signatures with any meaningful features would probably put a fairly large dent into the amount of useless posts because those who spam would be afraid of loosing the money they invested in their fee to enable signatures.

Nah, I don't think so. I think as long as theymos is an admin here, signature campaigns will stay. There might be more restrictions on using signatures, or penalties for sig spam, I don't know, but I think he'll still try to make it work.


You can report individual posts, or PM Global mods, or post here, or start your own topic in Meta. Thanks.

Bitcointalk Agricultural Department

If it's a fairly large account farming ring, you could create a thread in Reputation. PM me, we can discuss this.

I think I found a farm, where to report it?

I honestly wish it was a full time job of mine, but life gets in the way. I think I've grown attached to this forum over the years, and have some sort of passion for it. It's annoying to see spammers destroying what we've all worked so hard to achieve. Eventually, I can see it happening that signature campaigns will be removed for good, despite theymos being against the idea I think the spam problem as Bitcoin popularity grows will force his hand. It would be a tremendous shame that we would have to lose a sort of ecosystem within the forum because of that though. We could put warnings out to those that are spamming, about the long term implications they are having to their "career", but it would likely yield more negative results than positive.

Totals are currently at 269 users that have 10 or more good reports. 66 of those users have 50 or more reports, and of those 66, 12 have >100 reports.

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Here is the breakdown for the past week.

(Aug 1 to Aug 7)

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Total reports: 4478
Total good: 3825
Total users: 180
Average reports/user: 21.25
Worst offender: Irvinn