Topic: Idea: a merit after reporting 10 or 20 copypasters? (Read 236 times)

I think you should lock the topic because I see no need to discuss more about the OP suggestion (sorry for saying those words, my friend).
Or you can let the topic opened several days to see what will happen before locking it.
Take the topic as your trial and get experience.
 

People already report them without the promise of merit, but sometimes people already do give them merit for those finding them. I don't think it should be given out automatically or as standard practice, but I have no issue with people dishing it out for finding them. People would likely just exploit your idea by just using the bots that copy and pasted themselves so that they could report them just to get the merit credit as well.

OK, understood.
I'm thinking about locking this thread in order to prevent shitposters/spammers starting to post their one liners here too (I don't know if they like the Meta section or not...)

Nobody will support this idea, believe me. The main reason is Merit system was made to award quality posters, to stay away shitposters and spammers from ranking up. Your idea may look helpful, but it is not what for merit system was created.

That's a serious objection, you're right.
The problem is, I cannot think the way like a spammer/shitposter do, so I haven't even thought that my idea can cause a bigger problem instead of helping the system.

I don't agree. Should ban all of them, both main and alt accounts because they all abuse merit system and the forum rules.

That's it. That is what I forgot to mention in my thread. Thank you.

This would result in a lot of spammers creating fake accounts to copy-paste and report them with their main accounts.

We would have a increase in the number of copy-pasted posts and reports. Mods wouldn't be able to ban everyone and we would have even more shitposts (and spammers would be rewarded with underserved merit points).

Of course you can - just ban the alts, and tag the merit abuser

Fine for me, it was just an idea...
Just a thought: the new generation of un-knowledgeable but merited users already exist (the merit abusers) and we cannot prevent people meriting their alts, only if it's a real abuse (giving like 5-10 merits to a e.g. newbie for an average post)
I think my idea is not the kind of merit giveaway that would ruin the whole merit system...
But OK, it seems it was not a good idea...

Hello,
I totally agree that spammers and account farmers, alt-accounts should be controled, prevented to rank up, and should be banned if seriously abused/ violated the forum rules.
However, I don't agree that we should have merit give-away contests for reporting merit abusers officially like your suggestion.
Why?
Those sort of contests will contribute to create a new generation of un-knowledgeable users, who mainly or simply focus on screening to find abusers. Instead, they should do both: screening abusers and learning knowledge.
I don't deny the fact that screening abusers are good stuffs, but it is not good if they only focus on this tasks (I use the word 'task' because they might do this due to there are available merit-give-away contests for finding merit-abusers. Users like this are merit beggars, nothing more.

Just my opinion, so let's take it easy if you don't agree with my stance!

Someone like this guy:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/1993jochico-1807652
His main tasks in the forum is reporting merit abusers  

Edited:
One more case study:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/xal0lex-1068464
This guy posted most of his threads in Russian board. I don't know Russian, so I can not verify his thread quality but maybe low quality. Small part of his threads written in English mostly focus on reporting merit abusers (in fact, he did almost the same in Russian local board).

This is surely a bad idea , currently all those who report to moderators have some sense that this deserves to be reported with implementation of this rule all newbies or merit beggars will start spamming the report system in order to gain merit , with this eventually the report system will also die and reports which actually needs to be  reviewed will start getting ignored

I can't think of any solution to counter the above problem

First of all, I don't want to get merit for reporting copypasters.
Also, I don't hunt for copypasters, I only find them accidentally as I read thru the topics.
I usually report them in the appropirate thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/report-plagiarism-copypaste-here-mods-please-give-temp-or-permban-as-needed-1926895
It takes time and it's not my favorite task anyway...

So why not offer a merit to the users after successfully reporting 10 or 20 (or 25 or even more) copypasters? (not spammers, because it's much harder to prove and to decide) they will get the merit after the copypasters are banned, not automatically.
The users at lower ranks will fight for the merit and it will help to clear the forum from the copypasters (at least).
Just an idea, why not to let the forum to clear itself, it will reduce the tasks of the admin staff