Topic: Flooding on this forum, users not caring about other people's replies, please... (Read 302 times)

That's a nice analysis. I never thought about that.

To sum it up, if a signature campaign got stricter, the number of traffics for ICO (that want free promotion) will decrease & in return affect interest to bid for the forum ad-slot, CMIIW.

If the problem is about ads & traffics, the idea of increasing ad-slot might help it (not a new suggestion). But I don't think ICO or other advertisers would use that, so far there are only a limited number of companies who bid on ad-slot and got advertised. Many still choose to run bounty campaign and pay their participants with $1,000,000 (tokens).


True. The No low-quality post or spam rule is just bullshit most of the time. Or they probably don't understand what low-quality or spam means.

Bounty managers are just don't care. They do their work, they manage people bots spamming the ADs of their customer on the whole forum.
Customers are fine, they have a huge visibility. Because they are fine, they pay the bounty manager.
Bounty manager is fine, because he/she has been paid.
End of the story here for now.
luna latrantes canes non curat
Means something similar in English like this:
The moon does not heed the barking of dogs/wolves....

The ICO managers must prohibit each participant's posting in Altcoin/Bitcoin discussions (by not paying its). Even though this doesn't solve the problem because they can do it in other sections at least, those sections are somewhat clean of garbage. Can ICO manager hear our scream? I hope they hear it before @hilariousetc advice is applied (no/not yet) by theymos

I ignored so many shitty member, junior and newb accounts so far.

They don't even try to post something meaningful. They are probably google translating some random stuff they had in mind and post it. I've joined sig camps before, managers usually check your post quality and you get a kick in the butt if you are just posting shit.

Fucking ICO campaigns has no dignity at all. Their promoters are as shit as their product.

That's one of the very first thing I noticed about bitcointalk after I joined.  I thought I was making witty and/or well thought-out posts that people would respond to.  Some of them were straight up trolly posts, true, but on any other forum those would at least get a reply.  Not on bitcointalk!  This is the reason I've gravitated away from many sections here.  The thread OP referenced was just a typical shit-topic designed in a Filipino shitposting factory to allow a bunch of alt accounts to post something short and easy. 

Yep, you're right.  You probably just want to discuss something related to altcoins, but unfortunately for you that isn't going to happen anywhere in Altcoin Discussion.  That section is basically just for spammers now, much like Bitcoin Discussion. 

If you haven't read much in the Meta section, I'd suggest you do so.  There are some very good discussions about the state of bitcointalk there, and you might actually get responses to your posts.  That doesn't happen in many other sections.

Also, my advice to you is to put sections like Altcoin Discussion on ignore if you're not going to be posting there.  That way you won't have to see all the garbage threads pop up in your feed.  Saves a lot of time.

Most bitcoin-paying campaigns are limited to higher ranks, but ICO campaigns don't care and will accept almost anyone and often any Juniors that will sign up. The more users the better for them. Moire spam = more adverts of their ICO. In fact, they seem to thrive on exploiting lower ranks because they're often the only users they can get and the only campaigns those users can get on are ICO ones. Because of the limited payment this just leads them to create dozens of Juniors to maximise profits. The more accounts you have the more spam you make and the worse quality your posts become. This is why in my opinion it is essential to implement a merit requirement for Juniors. Without one ICOs will continue to pay farmers, bots and spammers to post whatever drivel they can be bothered to make. This really needs to change.

I’d say that theymos knows pretty well by now just how many of us here vouch for a minimum gained merit requirement for signature campaigns. Quite a lot of threads treat this topic, and he recently responded to @hilariousetc on his thread on "community generated suggestions to improve the forum", indicating that the idea to "Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted)" is a "No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified."(see re: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)).

I believe it is pretty clear it would improve the forum noticeably by reducing spam substantially, but this is one of those things that, rather than a butterfly effect, could have an "elephant effect" as I'll explain in the rest of this post.

Now what would happen if the 1 or 10 gained merit requirement were to be rolled-out ?
I looked at this some time ago, but I’ll redo the exercise with current data and a more optimistic value for average signatories per campaign.

This is the current merited user base on Bitcointalk:

Merit   nUsers   %MeritedUsers
1        6.137   32,45%
2        2.634   13,93%
3        1.253   6,62%
4           831   4,39%
5        1.040   5,50%
6          597   3,16%
7          439   2,32%
8          306   1,62%
9          204   1,08%
10     1.952   10,32%
>10   3.522   18,62%

Total      18.915 Merited users   

We also know that the merited user base increases at a slow pace. The Merit Dashboard tells us on the Global Summary tab, that each week we get, as of late, roughly around 215 newly merited users (never merited before). This is something like 1% weekly increment in the merited user base.

On the other hand, looking at the active threads on the Bounty section, there are something like 24 active pages with last date modified in the last 48 hours alone. That is roughly 960 minimum active campaigns give or take.
Now let’s say each campaign has a minimum average of 50 users bearing their signature (probably quite a lot more, but I want to be rather conservative this time of my hypothesis). That would mean that around 960*50 = 48.000 forum members are needed by the active campaign.
We also need to consider that, in practice, something around 75% of merited forum members are wearing a signature (see re: Is it easier to earn Merit without a signature? )

- Now if we delimit campaign signature to forum members with 1 earned merit, we would have 18.915*75%= 14.186 users for 48.000 slots (29,55% of campaign slots would be covered).
- If on the other hand we require 10 or more gained merits, then we have 5.474*75%=4.105 candidates for the 44.000 slots (8,55% covered slots máx).

The above goes to show the "elephant effect" that it would have from the numerical point of view, although it does not talk about the fact that merited people tend to be the best posters and therefore give more real visibility and even credibility to some extent to the campaign.
The exercise goes to show that the mesure, although highly desired, is also disruptive and could cause campaigns to have a low amount of signatories for their campaign, well below expectations. That could have an effect of campaigns willing to roll-out on this Forum, and therefore reduce traffic and income. Balancing it all out is not easy, but from a personal point of view I’d love to see restrictions of a kind implemented.

I do not blame you OP. You were exploring the wrong side of the planet. There are few boards which will make you think that this forum is full of spam. Among them Altcoin Discussion and Bitcoin Discussion are at the top.

Try to avoid those boards, you will be fine.

The best way is to avoid getting involved in such conversations which are very likely to get any constructive discussions at all. How can you possibly get something good out of a thread asking a question like, "Can I trust crypto to invest my savings?" or "Do you still believe in Bitcoin?" ?
These are mostly the starting points of SMTs (Spam Mega Threads) on this forum which later become the hub of scrapping post and activity counts for those spammers. All you have to do is to Report as many as you can without getting involved yourself in it.

A more strict rule would be to limit the signature campaign to members who earn >10 or more merit regardless of their ranks. Campaign manager can use the data from Bitcointalk Merit Dashboard or another merit database.

Alright, makes sense then. I was checking the campaigns lately and noticed only campaigns open to Members and above, hope we could restrict campaigns to Members or at least Jr with 4 or 5 merits, just this would make a massive difference. I don't understand campaigns managers either, as a restriction would still bring a lot of applicants anyway, and everyone would be satisfied.

You don't even need to rank up either as you can get paid as a Junior which requires no merit just 30 activity which a bot or spammer can achieve in under a month with any sort of spam. This is leading people to farm multiple accounts each and in some cases they're in the hundreds. The longer we allow this to happen the worse it becomes and people are even botting campaigns now with their legions of Junior accounts. Campaigns don't care because it's still advertisement for them. Doesn't matter if you ban half of their accounts because they have the rest still collecting payment. Juniors should have their signatures removed or at the very least they should need to gain at least one merit to become one. That would help tremendously. Crap campaigns who continue to pay spammers also need to face repercussions. 

I do report once in a while actually, thanks for pointing me this topic > https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.42624261 somehow missed it.

Looks like the very truth, the sad thing is many of them don't even know they'll never rank up because of the merit systems. If they knew they would stop posting I guess, or at least a fair amount of them.

The forum has become unfit for purpose a long time ago and it is now just a place for people to churn out their generic one/two liners for payment. People aren't interested in reading others comments or having a discussion. They just squeeze out a post as fast as they can then move on because time is money and it doesn't matter whether you spend one minute on a post or thirty minutes, but obviously time is money so the quicker the better. Those signature guidelines unfortunately aren't being enforced either and there's nothing anyone can do about it until theymos makes changes to what is and isn't acceptable here and that needs to start with punishing signature campaigns as they're the ones that are causing the mess in the first place. As long as campaigns keep paying people for making poor quality posts then it is only going to get worse very fast because more and more people sign up here just to earn by spamming and they do so in their droves and often with dozens of accounts.

Then you can simply use your "Report to moderator" button, on every spammy reply. It will knock down their post count. You can also report a thread as having run it's course to get it locked; here is a guide to Reporting effectively

Now to not join those ranks yourself there are a lot of posts about spam in this forum, you can find many of them here. There's even a club.So no need to create another thread, better to just join and contribute to the discussions already happening.

Hi folks,
I like this forum but I am getting tired of this kind of topics > https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-it-safe-to-invest-all-my-savings-in-cryptocurrencies-4948978
Alright I was the first one to reply! See post #2, and then see the next 6 pages of replies??!!!
I know we should just ignore this but this forum is full of topics like this, this is irritating, this kind of behavior should be avoided by one way or another. It's just a bunch of posters trying to boost their post count, not caring that what they reply has been said 100 times above their post.

I know many are in signature campaigns but this is what the actual rules say:




 I do like the forum but it needs to be said. Thoughts?