In order for a thread to maintain a position on the first page of the altcoins/announcements subforum it needs a post every 10 minutes or less, something that seems unlikely for all but the most followed projects and/or ones undergoing some controversy. For a project too small to show up on CMC, however, the more likely explanation is the use of paid bumping. Previously I found plagiarism or duplicate posting (ie - when someone writes the exact same response in several thread) to be most common, but the last few days I have noticed a new technique which appears to be a fake conversation. That is to say, two or more people seem to be having a conversation because they are asking/answering a series of questions between them, but this conversation does not seem to be authentic as it is strictly about generalities and often times doesn't even make sense.
Unfortunately, this behavior (absent plagiarism or duplicate posting) does not seem to be excluded by the (un)official rules hence I thought I'd present my evidence here and get a discussion going on how to address this going forward. Below are a few threads whose conversations seem fake and the users who appear to be involved based on posting more than two generic questions or answers to the thread:
The first two examples -
EvenCoin and
SafeInsure - seem to be employing the same group of people: BTCFaucets, CoinNextE, amanai, bitokman, guarino, 12coins, SamuelN, peetah, Tiny_Prism, boomertoo, kk777, Klacik.
The 3rd example -
ATLANTICO - is run a little differently as it is less of a conversation and more just random postings (mostly from people on the sig campaigns for GigTricks and EraSwap): Justenjoy1903, Anya Doreen, Maryqueen Finez, HappyCaptain, imopogicute, 25espia1994, larry1994, clarise123, pogicute1234, 123pogi123, jackielim
I have already reported some of the users above for plagiarism or duplicate posting (though the latter is less clearly an infraction*) but if they haven't plagiarized or posted the same post to multiple threads I'm not sure what to do. A few months ago a similar situation occurred with the RoomDao ANN - discussed here
Bumping RoomDao ICO ANN - and that thread was nuked by mprep, but some people argued that bad actors or competitors could report threads for paid bumping to get them nuked for their own benefit. I dunno about that - "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" springs to mind.
EDIT - got clarification that duplicating one's own posts is treated the same as plagiarism by hilariousandco:
I don't know about perma ban, but temp ban should be for sure. Threads for these types of posts aren't really required. One or two reports should be enough(ask the mod to check post history and explain it clearly what the guy is doing in the report paragraph).
It's a permaban. This is no different than copying someone else's post and if you do this then you have absolutely no intention of contributing here and you're 100% only doing it to farm your account and/or bleed bounties whilst putting in no effort at all. It's scumbags like these that are destroying the forum. If they're too lazy to actually make posts then don't bother.
