Topic: How about locking some ANN threads that are from proven scammers? (Read 434 times)

I think the merit system has most affected the altcoin subs. There are few (no?) merit sources that are active in the altcoin subs, so if you mostly post in those sections, you probably won't get much merit, even if you make good posts.

I also suspect that many altcoins, and token projects were using farmed accounts to generate fake interest in their projects, and the merit system makes this more difficult. For the reasons stated above, the merit system also makes it difficult for actual interest to be generated for projects because it looks like everyone posting has (near) zero merit.

Whenever I come across any scummy threads, I report them and they get locked or deleted most of times. Did you experience otherwise?

I started a thread about posting while wearing a sig:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53586174

But paid signatures are not new, I was wearing one on a Suzuki Bandit board before satoshi even thought of BTC
As of now I only know of 1 other place that still has one, and it's all about gambling / casinos so it's probably pulling from the same bunch.
They went invite only late 2019 due to some.....lets put it this way....legal issues due to promoting gambling... but I just looked in and the sigs are still there.
Not sure of the pay rate vs here.

-Dave

You could be correct, you might be wrong--time will tell. 

Hate to say this, but I think even some of the best members here are motivated to post (or at least post more) because of signature campaigns.  That's a feature that's unique to bitcointalk as far as I know and it's a major driver of traffic here. 

In that link you sent me, you can see that forum traffic has dropped significantly in the past couple of years.  I happen to think that's at least partially the result of the merit system.  It used to be that someone could create his own farm of accounts and rank them up to Legendary status simply by posting enough and the passage of time--and then they could either sell the account(s) or earn the max in sig campaigns with the highest rank. 

Nowadays that isn't possible, and I think a lot of people have given up trying to make a living on bitcointalk.  Notice that you don't see many threads in Meta anymore bitching about how hard it is to earn merits.  Meta used to be full of them.  Part of me says good riddance, but I'd hate to see signature campaigns disappear entirely.  That would almost certainly happen if traffic to bitcointalk dropped so low that it no longer made sense for anyone to use members' signature space for advertising.

I think over the years many of us have come to Meta to complain about the scams and other obvious things going on, including virus / malware posting, obvious fake shilling, and other things. theymos / the mods have always refused to do anything about it. They don't really seem to care how badly it hurts the reputation of the forum or BTC / Crypros in general.

This is their house, we are just guests here so to speak. There are many other places on the internet where I spend time that are much better regulated, have better conversations and little to no scams. But, it's a top down situation and new users have to prove themselves. Some people feel that it makes entering the boards to do anything other then read much more difficult. On the other hand, if I needed help or advice as a newbie on something you would not have to deal with the fact that there are dozens of people sitting there waiting to rip me off. If you are in the support / help section you are there to help others.

With all that being said, and this is my opinion only, I think sooner or later there is going to be a mass exodus of people here because of it. Not that 100 people leave here and go to another board. But 10 people leave and go to board "A", another 25 leave and go to board "B", another 25 just leave the discussion board world entirely, some others spend more time on reddit, some of the more tech people just help others on github and so on.
They might come back and post here and there but for the most part it's going to change a lot.

As I said, just my opinion, I could be wrong. Showing my age a bit here but I have seen it happen since dial up BBS use during the early 1980's. Some of them with 10000+ users which was an INSANE amount back then died in a year, not because of any other reason then people got fed up with some section or thing and left, and then a few other people noticed that those people were gone and went and spent more time elsewhere too, and then poof ghost town.

-Dave

Perhaps, but if newbies and junior members access to some sections of the Forum were restricted until they had proved themselves with merits and ranked up a couple of levels, it might slow down the brand new users registering and heading straight to the Currency Exchange section in their first post.

You are correct in saying that bitcointalk is more tolerant of bad behavior than many other forums are. This is largely due to the libertarian values theymos has.

It is very difficult to moderate scammers. There are many instances in which projects appear to be a scam, but it is difficult to know if this is actually the case due to varying definitions of "scam" when it comes to projects, and because many projects will end up failing (and getting hacked) even if they are run legitimately. I also don't think the forum administration wants to impose rules on people to force them to conduct business a certain way.

It is rare to see a scammer get away with large sums of money in this forum. Most scammers are only able to get fairly small amounts. On other forums, when scamming is moderated, it is more common for a scammer to trick many people, and to get away with a lot of money because of the false sense of security.

@PrimeNumber7 I think you'll find that other Forums are a lot less tolerant of bad behaviour when compared to this one which is probably why there is such a proliferation of scammers here that aren't as apparent elsewhere.

Censorship of any objectivity bad thing is only going to lead to that bad thing causing more harm. The only solution to some kind of “bad” speech (such as someone trying to scam) is more speech.

Hypothetically speaking, if the admins were able to moderate scams, scammers would go elsewhere in which victims would have more difficulty warning others about scammers, and would have less of an ability to pressure scammers to return stolen money.

Self moderated threads and persistent trolls both make the above concept more complex, and there is no good solution to either problem.

So long  as ALL proven scammers threads are locked. Yes.

I would love to one day wake up and see an announcement on Bitcointalk that the forum will start battling scams starting immediately. But since that is not the case, any admin intervention, like locking scam threads, would mean that the admins are breaking their own rule that says scams are not moderated. They either are or aren't. Locking 2 out of X number of scam threads wouldn't make much sense. That equals to scam moderating.

I would support if all scams were moderated, deleted, and scammers told to close the door on their way out, but doing it partially is just interfering. 

I can't recall the thread but I am sure I had raised the same question previously. We know the problem is where? it's scam moderation. At least I am not expecting the admin will implement it although all forum DT members against 1xbit. Have you remembered a few days back forum ran banner ads for 1xbit? Their official account was tagged by multiple DT members. But it was quite surprising to me how their banner ads were approved.

However, if a few threads lock by a moderator due to a scam issue, then peoples will simply raise a question when they will scam from some other unlocked scam thread. Most probably that's the issue why the admin doesn't want to bother scam moderation. Besides that, for those that are avoiding multiple warnings of negative feedbacks then how will you save them from getting scam? I don't think just locking thread would help since they are able to create new threads and accounts on the forum.

It was probably for incentivizing/encouraging their signature campaigners to post on their ANN thread. I can't remember exactly; was it BitDice?

If you are talking about the users who are very unknown to this website, would it bring any benefit? I guess no.
However, a decentralized voting system from DT members to unlock such a thread would be great; the forum won't directly be involved with moderating scams but a voting system would automatically lock the thread. That can be manipulated too but I doubt such DT members would remain DT for long.

IMO, it's a good proposal but I think this censorship will take too long for the MODs to investigate before they will take an action and lock the thread, it's better to report to them and delete the shills or shilling posts that we suspected so that they will never continue doing bumping their thread.

DT negative feedbacks and warning flags were introduced to this forum to combat the fraud activities that showed on the profile's scammer and even guest can see a warning on the thread and it's clear to avoid before they will dive in into such a project.  IMO, that's enough for now.

There's can be instances if MOD's can moderate scam will become biased by judgment.

And 1xBit, guilty to bring the examples.

Yes, there are rules but I do not see anything bad on locking this kind of scammers ANN topic too. I am can recall correctly one of the tread of BitDice were locked for some reason, not the reason we are talking here obviously.

Few users are talking about the red warning. I get it - but I am pretty much sure from my experience that when you are in an unknown forum, never heard of it before then you will not realize how much weight those warnings will have in your mind.

With constant talking about Adkinsbet you are giving them more advertisement then they are doing themselves,
and if we know that scam is not moderated in forum and that locking of topic is not going to happen, than I see no real reason for creating this topic.

The best way to stop all this is that we do not bump the thread and avoid posting on such threads. Sooner or later, these threads will move down when no one will reply on them. Actually we keep on posting on such threads which keeps their business running.

Eliminating online fraud is an absolute utopia. There are and will be scammers, if we close one of their ANN, a new one will appear soon. This is the Lernaean hydra.
At the same time, we cannot protect everyone from deception if the people themselves are not ready for this. If there are warnings not to go into the fire, and someone goes there on their own, what can you say in this case? Only that this person must go through everything on his own mistakes. After investing their money, any person is obliged to think and think many times. And if this person does not have the ability to think, then sooner or later he will still be deceived.

If that is the only way to eradicate scams and make them not come back from the dead then I think that it is worth the shot to try it out as an experiment first, just because you are censoring does not mean that you are restricting a free speech, everyone has a right to their opinion yes but others have the right to not hear it if they deem it unfit in ethical standard.
Scambusters are there to do the job, they just need to be sure that it is a proven scammer before presenting it to a higher level.
Locking the topic doesn't mean that people will not be aware, reports of other scams are happening in the board so the newbies that will check it won't miss out so much as most scams are almost the same.
The only ones that will be censored are the ones that are proven scammers so it does not matter that they are complaining.
Free does not mean that you are also free to do harm when it is blatantly obvious you are doing so, if it is free then that means that shutting them down is a free thing to do too.
It does work in a certain degree but if we were to put an iron grip on regulating and eradicating this scams will be more effective.

Interesting to hear the censorship drum being banged when discussing cleaning up the forum.

The pro to that argument is that scammers have a chance to redeem themselves while the con is the scammer will continue scamming and will become emboldened into more and more elaborate scams as time goes by hurting more people in the process.

I'd like to propose if a user has actually been banned, then ALL of their threads are automatically locked regardless of the topic or contents.

Can we start with that - please?

The 'censorship road' is one I highly doubt the admins would want to take, even for proven scams. Scams are everywhere on the internet and is a big issue for forums, but limiting certain proven scammers and locking their threads would likely do more harm than good;

• The admins and moderators would be policing scams and would have to employ lots of resources to try and prove these scams which is not always possible to do,
• It would give users the impression that the forum checks scams and as such it's safe to interact with users who have not been caught, this could cause them to let down their guard,
• It could lead to lots of posts complaining about selective censoring,
• Bitcoin is considered a free network, and the forum is expected to reflect that quality as well.

The current system seems to be the most ideal and has been effective in warning members who actually pay attention.

Aside from the forums policy on moderating scams, if users aren't taking the warning signs above the thread, which are quite hard to miss, then they aren't likely going to benefit from a locked thread. Unless, they tried to post in the discussion, but judging by the examples provided there hasn't been much discussion from newbies within the threads recently. Instead, the discussion of both examples seem to be centered around the legitimacy of the project which in combination with the red banner probably is much better than locking a thread, and not giving them a chance to ask questions, and determine whether the banner above the thread holds any weight.

I hate to use the cliche statement, but I believe prevention (via the warning), is better than the cure (outright censoring a thread, which could prove detrimental, since a user cannot ask questions).

Forum doesn't moderate scam. If the threads are locked by the forum, indirectly it will be moderating scam which I guess would be against the regular practice of the forum. If I'm correct, the OP has been tagged and user trying to join a site should do their homework; otherwise, learn a lesson. If they don't do the homework before joining an unknown site, they must be the people who search on google for best sites and join them; you can never prevent them from getting trapped.

Reserved!

The forum do not moderate scam, we all get that. But what if a proven scam service have an ANN thread which have shameless shills and shilling the thread continuously. Also all the clients are posting their sufferings and those shills are shilling high again in the same thread.

The thread is getting search engine exposure and people who do not have knowledge (do not understand the meaning of the red mark above the topic) how this forum works may find it in google search and join the scam site and lose the money.

Example ANNs:
🏆⚽ Adkinsbet.com | Sports | In-Play | ESports | Racebook | Virtual Sports | ⚽🏆
1XBIT.COM ᐉ Bet online ᐉ BTC Betting ᐉ Online betting odds
There could be more fake services. Please feel free to post them in you replies.

There are no doubt that these guys are proven scammers but if you look at their ANNs then you will see they are using it as a tool for their traffic source.

For example, I was reading user AdkinsBET's post history to see what updates they have about the recent scam accusations and discovered in their ANN that still there are users who are defending them and making nonsense posts like followings.


Problem is, his nonsense post may mislead a new inexperience user to join this type of scam sites.

What if mods lock these kinds of topics?
And any other advertising active topics that will come from proven scammers.