Topic: Ideas for improving post quality? - page 9. (Read 4887 times)

- lock off-topic/low-quality  Discussion.


- remove Other languages/locations Board.


- make post quality trust (like normal trust).

yeah like to cure a desease you have to kill the body XD
in my opinion : the sig is a part of body of this forum.

I respect your idea. We need quality articles to build a clear forum, knowledge. Any meaningless posts, meaningless conversation topics will be deleted. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you. My English is not good

Yes the senior members critique low quality posts of the more junior members of the forums due to their lack of knowledge. If you want to actually participate in the forums and learn/grow as a member you need to participate in the discussions. In order to do that you need to gain the knowledge to talk competently. To do that you need to do research and learn by reading the forum discussions that have substance. Yes it will take time, but that way you can actually contribute to the discussions. Ranks help with that. Though lately there has been a plethora of people that spam just to get their ranks up. So to answer your question, look to what I have suggested. If you want to rank up fast, then you're only doing it to get higher sig campaigns instead of legitimately trying to join in any discussion. As a noob you should be in the Beginners & Help boards learning, as I was.

I've already explained why this is a fatal idea if you apply game theory. Just imagine what would happen if the niche of the signature campaigns service in exchange of BTC payments was removed here. If you know who Roger Ver is, think of what he wants to do with his forum: Exactly, rank it above bitcointalk, same thing as ranking his /r/btc subreddit above /r/bitcoin. He has already managed to rank his website above bitcoin.org in some countries.

The massive influx of people in here would go to his forum (and he has the resources to advertise it to capitalize on all of that traffic), ranking it up better than this forum, because Google doesn't care what the traffic is as long as it's legit traffic of real people, and that influx of third worlders registering in your forum is literally a goldmine when it comes to SEO. And a lot of these third worlders actually stick to their local forums which is ok, the ones that spam broken english 100 times a day... just ban them as usual, but overall, all things considered, a global removal of the sig campaign niche could be fatal for the SEO of the site. It also ruins it for the people that actually post like a normal person and get some side money on BTC. These campaigns stimulate the Bitcoin economy redistributing coins. Just keep the obvious 100-post-a-day shitposters away and the forum is pretty tolerable. Also you can do like me and bookmark who you want to follow and just ignore the rest (for example I have gmaxwell bookmarked and check his posts... etc)

My proposition is the "experts only" section. We have here a ton of Core devs and other smart people. A special section, similar to the Bitcoin mailing list, with no sig campaigns allowed there, would give more prestige to the forum while still retaining all the huge SEO points thanks to the organic traffic of normal non expert people/newbies trying to learn that find this forum due said SEO.

As a newbee, I try to understand what to do here. It seems to me that there is a structural problem that senior member seem to not understand: they critic low quality posts, but if the only way to grow is to make posts, of corse will be a lot of garbage!
Actually, it's difficult to understand why I "need" to write something just to reach a rank even if I've nothing to say.
Just about me: I'd like to grow, but I don't have fhe competence to write something interesting for big members. This doesn't mean I'm a bad person or a spammer.

Just a sincere question for Heros and Legendaries: if you had zero money and zero rank, what would you do?

I mostly like idea that hilariousandco propoed. Let's make something similar like Copper Membership. If you want to wear signature - you have to buy membership. Without paid membership users will be able to wear only basic Jr. Member signature. I don't know what price would good for each rank - it have to be affordable, but not to cheap.
Merit points? It sounds a bit complicated, especially for such big forum like bitcointalk. Who will be able to vote for these posts if we want to avoid abuse?
Sections without signatures. I totally agree. It's sad to see when serious topics get minimal attention and get lost between spammy threads. Maybe this board wont be very active, but at least we would have real discussions.
Don't count posts in some certain boards like Politics and Society or Games and Rounds. Now these boards are perfect for account farming.
Ban ICO bounty campaigns! We all know how much these campaigns make. People joining these campaigns with dozens of alt accounts and making zero quality posts. And many managers of these campaigns are incompenent to do they job.

Sounds like a really good idea.

Though I think probably the best approach is to completely remove signatures for good. The main purpose of the Bitcoin Forum should be to foster the best quality Bitcoin discussion. A lot of serious discussion takes place on Reddit and Twitter now, even though these platforms are not ideal for in depth unbiased discussion. Reddit is very easy to manipulate and can get circlejerky, and on Twitter people just stick to following people that reinforce their view and rarely expose themselves to contrarian ideas. The forum has the opportunity to be the place for the best discussions to take place, but right now because of these signature campaigns, the majority of the people aren't here for discussion but to make a quick buck.

I guess tolerating the garbage does give the site a lot of traffic, but I'd rather we had a really good quality and clean forum, even if it means ads don't sell as well and activity is reduced somewhat. I remember this place used to have the most interesting people on it, but the quality of the people posting has declined severely. It undermines the collective intelligence of the Bitcoin community too. New users will come on here, and instead of being enlightened, they'll just read through a bunch of senseless drivel, and end up getting involved in some stupid ICO or altcoin that they've seen promoted.

Fastest solution, but i'm sure the traffic would decrease a lot. And that also means lower bids. Maybe less spaces for all member or hide all signature by default is better idea.


I don't mind as long as it's part of copper membership or cheaper than copper membership price.


Only reduce spammer a bit since people simply can do it at another forum/group


Totally agree, i want see people's opinion without being "forced" to post something to they could get paid. Even though only few actually will discuss in this section.


That could create another problem such as users whose ISP use dynamic IP and few ISP offer cheap package where multiple users assigned with one IP.

I like the merit points idea very much.

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My suggestion:

I would say fixing a minimum char limits in some of the sections of forum will lower down huge no.of spammy posts that altcoin discussion bumpers or spammers make like:


However I think it should be implemented on only in some of the sections where we often find these kind of posts as spammy.

Flashy signatures are really annoying, and on some forums, I've had to disable them. Obviously this kills the impact of the sig campaign. One way to make sig moderation self-policing would be to give members the ability to restrict sigs to ( say ) two lines of standard sized alpha-numeric text.

Are campaign managers aware of the number of signatures that are blocked on these boards?

It's been brought up multiple times and I bump the suggestion every so often in the staff board. Theymos even created a thread about what boards to discount a year or two ago in Meta but no further action was taken. Boards like Games and Rounds and Bounties/Tokens need to be removed from counting towards posts/activity because posts in there contribute absolutely nothing and they're being massively abused by farmers farming accounts and shitposters trying to rank up. I've even seen people use bots in Games and Rounds to copy someone else's posts from earlier in the thread so they obviously don't even care about claiming the bounty but they care about easily getting that precious activity and post count by doing nothing.


Yes, this is something I've been thinking about also. I was going to propose that all new users are forced to read the rules upon sign-up and everyone else are mass PMed about the rules or we create a handful of 'golden rules' that must be obeyed or permabans are issued on sight (no ref links, do not copy and paste content, do not ask about activity etc). There will be no excuses theat "I didn't know it was against the rules to copy and paste or post ref links" etc. Translations of the Golden Rules will also be included.


There will be several two factor options on the new forum so I get why he hasn't bothered coding them for this one, but if the new forum is still 1+ years away I think it would be worthwhile implementing asap. Requiring email verification would be another step in limiting or slowing down account farming as it's just another hoop to jump through.


I don't think we should continue with the logic of 'people will sell them elsewhere so we might as well just allow them'. People will continue to sell child porn and malware elsewhere but we don't and shouldn't allow them to be sold here using the same logic. Disallowing account sales is easily enforceable and I think this is something the majority of people would support other than those financially benefiting from their sale. 


This is something I've also been thinking about. Maybe we should only allow one account to be created per IP. Too many people are abusing the 'you can have as many accounts as you want' rule to literally farm dozens-hundreds of accounts. There's only so many proxies in the world and the most popular ones would soon get used up. We could maybe include as one of the perks in the donator ranks to 'whitelist' your IP so you can create an additional account or multiple ones. We're also getting hit by hundreds of bot accounts mass spam PMing people and offering bumping services to bot peoples threads disguised as fake questions and interest in their ICO etc. If there's only one account per IP this would seriously limit this sort of shady business as I suspect they're using only a few IPs or proxies.


Off topic, yeah, as it's just abused by farmers en masse but I fear these shitposters would just move elsewhere like they have into Politics and Economics/Speculation. Politics can have some decent discussions in there but throwing some extra man power at that board by giving it a couple of dedicated mods would help clean up the mess. I'm going to put a sticky in Politics soon warning that users will be banned if they continue to treat it like Off Topic v2.0 with unsubstantial threads because some of the topics created in there are ludicrous (do you prefer beaches or mountains, do you love your parents etc. It's just kids who have absolutely no knowledge about bitcoin or probably anything else for that matter just trying to earn money and/or rank up their accounts).


I think payment from sig campaigns is probably a sufficient enough reward, but maybe some prizes for the best posters or contributors could be a good thing. Maybe a select group of trusted users or staff that could vote for the best posters deserving of rewards or maybe only rewards are given to users who don't even have a signature but post worthwhile contributions anyway (people like DannyHamilton etc (who I'm surprised is even still here to be honest)).


I don't think this is something you have to worry about as theymos has said this is something he's unlikely to do multiple times now including this thread. I agree that it would be a shame to lose them completely but I also think signature campaigns cannot continue on as they are as the only people who are going to be posting are third world shitposters abusing lazy campaigns and this has pretty much happened already as more and more shitposters sign up daily and good/great contributors are leaving on a weekly basis.


Not if the only way to get a signature is to buy it from the forum. This would kill account sales 99%.


They could still do that. Just not in the spam free board. If they don't want their political statements to be 'silenced' then they can choose just to not post in that board.


I've suggested that if a campaign has x amount of users banned in a month that their signatures are removed/blacklisted and/or their threads trashed and accounts banned. It really shouldn't be acceptable for people to come here and do absolutely nothing other than pay people to make spam in the hundreds. If we let people get away with this then why would they ever change their habits when they get a shitload of advertising for free which damages the forum quality in the process? If ICO campaigns quickly have their accounts banned and threads trashed they'll soon get the message that they need to get on top of the spam if they want the privilege of advertising here for free.


I don't see any issue in at least offering these ranks alongside being able to rank up naturally. If I was a new user to this forum I would gladly donate $100 or more to get a Full Member or Hero rank-sized signature and I'm sure hundreds will too (the money would be made back within a week or two anyhow). It will put a stop to people just lazily spamming over 6 months just to hit Full Member rank or whatever or even just buying an account which many people still do so it benefits the forum in multiple ways.


Making people pay the forum per post isn't a good idea and would be too messy to even implement not to mention most people just wouldn't bother with it. It would be better and easier just to police low paying or badly run signature campaigns instead, and/or make people pay for their signature so they at least have to financially invest in something here.


It's not fair to everyone else who has to put up with the spam from badly run campaigns and the staff who are left to de facto run them and clean up their mess for free. The point here is that these campaigns then wouldn't pay for posts in those boards with no signature.


Yeah, there's a massive black market that we've created by linking signature size to account level and hence why there is such a market for hacked accounts. I'm not really sure why theymos is so dead set against this. Accounts would become next to worthless if signatures are removed from them and the only way to get one is to donate so next to nobody will be selling them either on this site or any others. 99% of their value is in their signature sizes and if we take that away then they become next to worthless and instead of money going to shitty account farmers and scummy account hackers that money then goes to the forum instead. Win win.


It doesn't stop the issue of spam on the rest of the forum (but that can be tackled by giving more powers to other mods and getting tough on crap campaigns and spammers), but at least it provides a safe heaven for those that are only interested in quality discussion  and not just financially motivated by pay to post campaigns. I and I'm sure many others would still gladly contribute to discussions in there even though I know I wouldn't be paid for them and it would really show just what sort of poster you are if you never even bothered making posts in there at all.

How about instead of requiring a payment for all signatures, you only require a payment for Member/Full time member and above. That way people may still have their basic signatures for what ever they want, but to have a more advanced and flashy signature they would have to pay. This could also be incorporated into the lesser donation ranks that have been discussed before.
Mods have mentioned that they have a huge workload right now, and having to whitelist members manually for alternate accounts is just going to add more work, as everyone and their mother who has alt accounts now will be requesting and they would have to look at each case individually. I'm not against someone having alternative accounts, for example a few people have a business account, and then a personal account because they don't their personal opinions to be mixed in with their business which I think should be allowed. A lot of gambling websites do this.

All  this really does is prevent the spam reaching the public, but the mods still have to deal with the spam. Maybe, that's partly dealing with the issue. But, is isn't just the newbies contributing to the spam. It's all types of ranks that spam. Especially in the alternative coin section.

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On a unrelated note, I see that "technical support" has been renamed "Bitcoin technical support" due to the amount of off topic posts it got there.  

The two ideas that you've proposed are useless in comparison to the two ideas that you've ruled out. The merit points idea is interesting, but not what we need right now.

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Banning account sales and hacked accounts && farming on sight -> turns from low risk/high reward to high risk/high reward business -> massive wipe-out of spammers and underground industry -> reduction in scams via throwaway bought accounts -> win for everyone. However, you are really not listening to the people bothered by this issue. Meanwhile, another very valuable DT2 member has announced their departure just a few days ago. Sigh..

Voting system for merit points? It doesn't work as everyone has their own opinion about post quality and hence only mods should vote in the poll.

1) Restricting one account per IP is still being considered as an option? There are other methods to create alt accounts but restriction one account per IP may atleast reduce them to some extent.

2) Newbies having to get their threads/posts moderated before they are visible. It increases the work of mods but it can prevent them from spamming to some extent.

To Rule out these 3 you are skirting the Main problem on the forum. Paid sig ad campaigns will still be more desirable to spammers with a guaranteed payment  over your ideas Based on a "Chance" to win some BTC.

I see what you are trying to do with your ideas but it's just not going to work.

This sounds like a good starting point but the gaming issue could be very difficult to address.


The no signatures part I don't really like as that doesn't seem fair to advertisers. They, in theory, pay for quality posts in serious discussions that are far more likely to be read. Allowing topic-creators to set restrictions is a good idea and maybe making selfmod the default so people take responsibility for keeping their own threads clean.

I agree with hilariousetc/co's suggestion to offer upgrade memberships that give higher member level signatures. This would go a long way to reducing account farming and people spamming their way up the ranks.

Here is my opinion as a quite new member. Keeping the forum free of spammers is important but it's not an easy task as it requires more manpower or smart optimization. Here are some issues I've faced myself.
* Big part of the new users are not following/ reading the rules.  But there are also not so well organized rules and it's not easy to find them. Newbies keep asking the same questions over and over again. Maybe this is the way to improve other members Activity points.

* The search engine is poor in search options and it's not easy to find what actually you are looking for. I couldn't sort by date the results and I had to scroll quite a lot.

*Why there is no 2FA on the login? If you have sms authentication and long process for changing your initially registered mobile number it will be difficult for people to register 100 account and reduce the account selling.

Some body like me would still post on sections with no sig allowed, (I've lost my dignity here). trolls will post anywhere. to our esteemed poster talking about Chipmixer quality, they are from a big educated family, no body would pay a beggar like me $3000 in a month no matter how good I am.
Why do you allow people to sell cryptocurrencies by ICO? ban every ICO selling coins, they are holding the total supply of a coin and sell them on ICO and promise to provide better features than BTC.
Charge every body $0.5 per post if wearing a signature, when they see they can't earn anything from posting for campaigns with low payments, they wouldn't join them, and campaigns would have to raise their payments, when they pay more money, they would expect higher quality posters.
If people keep on participating regardless of paying $0.5 per post, you'd at least have some money to pay for more staff and moderators.
Take 5% of the funds raised in every ICO, make these beggars pay tax instead of offering a paid membership rank.

Number two sounds like a good idea. Signatures should probably auto disable on such section.


Also wish members can have the ability to disable signature on some of their posts like youtube does with self demonetisation. It is discomforting to have people think promoting signatures is ones only reason for being on the forum...  I have always wished some of my post didn't carry signatures though, like questions, very important posts or ones that involve deaths/violence.