Topic: Ideas for topic ordering in altcoin announcements? (Read 18942 times)

@theymos any chance of this to be implemented anytime soon?

Many good suggestions have already been made.
Let me just weigh in, going through posts on the altcoin ANN board, there is no much merit distribution, so I do not think that should be considered when deciding which stays in top.

To reduce bumping posts should only be highlighted once it gets a unique comment. Otherwise it slips down the page.

To be honest, I rarely get there something worthy. I remember recently LoyceV and Suchmoon have merited two different post which also not too interesting to me, but those were at least real discussion, not something by the sig spammers. Although I have never participated in altcoin discussion, I check some of the time when I get enough time. I am looking for investing couple of bucks in altcoins.
If we think about moderating the board with more dedicated mods, in that case, we need at least 3 mods who will be only do this tasks. I doubt 3 can cover. You know you will not find your thread after 1 minute of posting, jk.

Most yes, but not all. I don't think an auto-lock is the way to go, as you will end up killing some threads that will still have interesting discussion going on. Hopefully the proportion of interesting threads will increase with some of these new measure being put in place, and so the number of "false positives" that an automatic system would lock would increase. Better instead to just have a couple of dedicated mods for these boards who can increase spam removal, which will stop many threads reaching this point in the first place, and manually check and lock the ones which still become spamfests.

I agreed to the idea for ordering the topic as suggested ,but there will be repercussions of it that the  topics of the most influential members who are having certainly a good intellect and knowledge will dominate the whole forum and the space for understanding and experiencing for the lower grade members will be shrunk and the attachment to the forum and new membership may jeoparadise.

It would never be a solution. Can you imagine someone needs to be a member just to post in altcoin discussion will look how much shady? Newbie will just leave the forum while theymos is planning to attract newbie (people who care about decentralization and crypto) here through youtube promotion.

Most of the altcoins board threads are flooded with 20 pages or more with the same shit. I think an auto-lock after a certain page would probably work.

There are a lot of Legendary with a lot of shits. And there are a lot of newbies who are more experienced than those so called Legendaries.

Hello, I think you should read this thread- What makes a post a HQ post. What makes a post a LQ post. ? merit - lets see??

I like the idea of putting some fees to those poster that will make an ANN with rules to be followed.

let them manage their own thread so that they are oblige to maintain the spammers or else they will be locked for a specific amount of time or even pay for a penalty.

Voting Up and Down a thread would be great too but a minimum of Sr. Member and up must be eligible as they are the most experience here in the forum, not all but mostly. It needs to be transparent so people can see who up or down voted.

That's far too easy to abuse and manipulate. It would quickly result in a market for entire armies of newbie alts and bots to upvote your thread and downvote your competitors' threads for a price.

Adding UP/DOWN button for each post and then sorting posts with that filter would be great idea, however I think less people will use this option and possibly we will see some good posts filtered out. Merit is implemented for some months, not short period... I think currently that, your second vertion is good idea. People like you, gmaxwell, achow101 and very helpful users have much merits, it will be great to see their posts because there is very high chance it won't contain spam.

I disagree completely with the proposal of trust effecting anything forum related. Trust should only be tied to trading and then it should be down to the person interested in doing business with them who ultimately decides whether its worth the risk or not. We should not be looking to put restrictions on those who have bad ratings. Just look at the amount of complaints the trust system has its a broken system which never turned out the way it was suppose too. Instead its been neglected and abused by the so called "DeafultTrust". There are several knee jerk feedback left on several accounts and some very highly trusted members have been involved in sending reactionary feedback.

In my opinion, the idea of theymos is perfect. The current trust rating of a user should also be taken in consideration. The only problem is a posting warnings in ANN threads. My solution is to use verified alt accounts for posting warnings.

To verify an alt account, a DT member who earned a lot of merits needs to create a new account named as, for example, "Username_warner" and to leave him a positive feedback, for example, "This is my alt account for posting warnings". If a scam is exposed, the DT member red tags the bounty manager and uses own verified alt account (Newbie or Jr. Member) to post a warning. In this case, the ANN thread will not be significantly bumped.

The idea of theymos is easy enough to implement. There is no need to modify the source code of the forum interface.

Someone will have to place that mark on account and once account(usually newbie) get it they will move to new account.

400(500,600...) characters + 10(20,30...) earned merits + OP is allowed to do daily bump.

You can enter "anti bump rating" for each account. When an account is seen in the shitposting and in bumping the topics, it receives a mark, an analogy of the red trust,
and in the future posts of such accounts do not buimp topics, permanently or temporarily.

Also it would be possible to introduce a system in which pamp topics are possible only from accounts that have a positive bump rating or a certain amount of merit.

Great idea. Just do not limit it to several sections. Many of the sections already have the problem of clogging of the first pages of messages of bots. A recent example - it looks like 1 page of the section Beginners in Russian local board:



Bots write one-line posts to increase activity from 6 accounts registered May 26, 2018 in the time range of 30 minutes:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/tuomillitlisgibdi-2156337
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/exsucuieratgul-2156362
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/irinimdigsabo-2156369
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/trepincelfavedi-2156377
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/suppguiriaagcludri-2156393
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/crudcentesracelcau-2156399

Just a note, whatever solution is chosen, it have to applied also for the biggest Local Ann sections.
We only see the problem here, but there are big local communities which are affected from the paid bumping too.

The fact that we don't see it, doesn't mean that it not exist.

Many of the ideas proposed are just to reduce the number of bumps a topic may have in a given period of time. This will create an almost static order of topics of little use. The ideal would be to have an algorithm that privileges the ranking of topics where some discussion is taking place.

Imagine that a project is suffering a 51% attack. It is important that ANN and the top topics where developers discuss the project are among the first topics in the section. At least I think that way.

I believe that the ideal would be to create a score. Organize the topics in a ranking, but without limiting the period. A certain topic could remain for a few days among the first. Where each comment of a user would receive a certain weight according to the past of this user. That is, the ranking and amount of merits that a user has would determine the weight of that comment. This would be in addition to the number of positive reports of spam and the number of views.

Maybe use the Wilson score interval. Where positive and negative would be the profiles that comment on the topic

Since majority of my good reports came from Altcoin Ann and they are from ICO topics, why don't you just restrict posters from creating an ICO topic? Only established altcoins/tokens should have their own announcement thread in that section.

Just completely remove ICO topics and I do believe there will be less spam, less bot talking to each other, and there will be less report too.

This brings me to an even easier suggestion: get rid of bumping on those boards entirely, and show threads that were bumped in the last 24 hours in a random order.

We already see trash like this, especially when people try force something out to look constructive. That's why we have the classic two liner junk posts that people make en mass. I've even seen people telling others to make sure they write two sentences so it's not spam like that's some magic number). It's just enough to look like they've made an effort but when you read it they're not actually saying anything of substance and have just stretched what is essentially a few word post out to two sentences. We even saw in the past people cheating character requirements on signature campaigns by adding invisible junk to the end of their posts in order to dupe the bot that was checking they were making 100 character posts or whatever.

How about you run a test with  1 or 2 hours bumping time and let it run for a week or so?
It renders an attack almost useless and I don't think it will to much damage if it's somehow exploited for this short time.
And then the stats will tell how effective is or how effective a longer bumping interval would be.




I think this project is such a wonderful idea because till now I haven't seen a project that addresses the issues raised by this project as such I would love to see this project succeed with such amazing project an amazing team, so I will make sure I will follow this project and I will advise anyone to invest in this project. Great project and congratulations on the team for this great project!!!!!

^

401 characters
And a real pain in the ass to both read it and maybe search for plagiarism.
I would prefer two liners, at least with those you read them in a blink.

Maybe make it so only the OP can do it then so he could choose the time it is bumped. At least they have to log in and post once a day for it to be effective (or use a bump button if that's ever implemented (which would be a good feature for the Marketplace as well and save people and staff having to remove the bumps which is always very tedious)). I think this would be a minor issue though as the middle of the night is going to be different all over the world. I think making it so only the op can bump the thread once a day would actually make the system work because they can't pass it off to someone else and they have to be active if they want the thread active.

Then you can attack a competitor's topic by bumping it in the middle of the night, etc.

Another idea : Only Jr.Member (of course copper members too) and above can open an ANN thread. +
From Member rank and above can bump the thread.
+ restrict newbies with less then 10 posts to post in ANN section at all.

All these Brand New with a single "GOOD PROJECT" post will be gone.

Why don't you make it so the thread can only be bumped to the top once per day max? That seems like fair compromise and would certainly defeat the purpose of the paid bumping whilst still allowing active threads to be bumped.


This wouldn't work either. The bumpers would then just start writing posts that contain 300 characters. They'd probably be more of an eyesore than the generic good project ones etc.

What if last post can only bump a thread once every X hours?

For example, if someone writes "Good Project" every 10 minutes, it doesn't matter . The topic will only go to top every 12 hours.

Edit: Maybe you can add some merit requirement for this bump to occur.

I have idea.
Whoever writes less than 300 characters can't bump thread. Quotes are excluded from this.

Meaning: more time to write post == less posts == less spam. If that doesn't work (and I think it should), increase minimum character limit to 400. Or 500. This rule should be applied to every rank including thread starter. Show them who is boss here 

Everything else will be easily abused.

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I think you should block yourself from using this forum.

I won't do pay-to-bump or similar because it removes any sense of fairness or community participation, and basically just makes a page of most-money-wins paid advertisements. (Paying a fixed fee to create a topic there is possible, though not high on my list, since that'd at least be fair.)

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I'm currently still leaning toward some per-topic metric based on merit, though probably not exactly what I originally stated. Limiting who can bump would be easier to implement, but the roughness/immediacy of it makes it more easy-to-manipulate IMO.

Underhand tactics in business who would of thought? Yeah, this could be abused by opening several threads, but maybe there could be restrictions to who can open threads in that section. Any of the higher ranked members caught doing this could be temp banned, and maybe permanently if they continue to do so. Its spam after all. I hate restrictions usually, but most of the solutions without any sort of restrictions will be abused, and unfortunately we haven't got enough manpower to actually recognize every single one. If someone is opening several threads, and bumping it then its definitely clear what their intentions are though.

We have to weigh up the options of imposing restrictions, and allowing spam. A restriction such as certain rank+ only able to open threads to prevent users not caring about registering hundreds of newbie accounts, and being hard to identify who is behind it. Maybe, copper membership. Yeah, its putting something behind a paywall which I'm also usually against, but there has got to be compromises somewhere for the betterment of the forum, because quite frankly in its current state the altcoin section is very hard to view.

0.01 BTC per bump and no free bumps. Aside from buying theymos another yacht this also has the benefit of sheer simplicity. No matter who creates how many threads etc - anyone can bump it for a fee.


There are some other issues with this. E.g. the OP going on a vacation or just disappearing outright would mean the thread can't be bumped anymore.


It's already happening, what with all the bot farms etc. Making it "official" would reduce spam bumps, which is one of the goals here.

Although I would still prefer a merit-based approach.

Any paid option will just mean money is leading the forum.  Instead of restricting newbie account from posting ANN thread we can just remove the bump that is currently caused by newbie and Jr.Member.

A bump button , powered by Merit is good idea but that also need to be restricted for number of thread the user will be able to bump in a day (like max. 2 or 3 in a calendar day) because I suspect somebody start buying Merit and start providing bump facility to the ANN threads so even with Merit , you cannot bump all the threads on your wish.

Edit:  Once we have taken out the bump power of newbies and Jr. member , then punishing the spam will also become easier, because you are now risking a temp bans on a higher ranked account if you caught spamming.

The only downside to this is that you can almost guarantee that if the Announcement board becomes "pay to post a new topic", they will just start spamming their new topics in every other board instead. Obviously these threads will get trashed, but since we have so few moderators, the threads will likely be up for several hours and be spammed to high heaven before they are.

I like the idea of the owner having a "bump" button, and therefore completely eliminating paid bumping by any means. As an add on to this, I would suggest that each user can only bump a maximum of 1/3/5/whatever-number-you-like thread(s) they own per 24 hours, to stop the creation and bumping of mass dummy threads. Might be worth having a caveat that the owner has to at least be a member or have at least 10 earned merit or something similar to stop newbies from creating mass threads.

Add a fee to post Ann thread. Restrct Newbie accounts from posting Ann thread.

Make a paid bumping button, + free bump for every earned merit.

Make a newbie ANN jail, and the only way get out of it is earning enough Merit.

We can create a formula to use for bumping threads with a cooldown with some rules.

1 - If OP posting bump cooldown every x hours can be 1-24-x, your call
2 - If total posts of user < 20 don't bump
3 - If total posts of user >= 20 & merit earned/activity=0 don't bump
4 - If total posts of user >= 20 & merit earned/activity>0 bump with a cooldown= activity/(1+merit earned)/ Trust (based on DT rating), result in minutes
5 - If a normal poster is posting bump the thread with a cooldown = Activity/(1+merit earned)/ Trust (based on DT rating), result in minutes
6 - If the normal poster is posting on the same thread, increase the cooldown of bumping x 2 every time

This can work, I can't find How to abuse it in a long-term, merit will run out.

This will count, activity, merit earned (not airdropped) and trust.

Good posters and trusted people will have a short cooldown for bumping the thread, shitposter will almost never bump the thread.

I posted this in a somewhat entertaining way I suppose because I think the irony of making them, who suck the money out of BTC and destroy the public image of crypto as a whole, PAY for some positive PR of Bitcoin would be sweet justice.

If the problem we are discussing is spam then yes this would solve that problem because they are using spam to get to the top. If they could get to the top without spam then they wouldn't need spam anymore and as a matter of fact I think they would start to make efforts to keep spam out of their own threads because spam in their threads makes them look like shit scams and hurts their image.
Anyone that is serious about "investing" or serious about the technicalities and merits of the coins code is going to be turned off having to wade through spam.

We know that they are willing to spend money right. Instead of that money going to bad actors (spammers) that money could go toward the advancement of Bitcoin.

If it solved the paid bumping issue once and for all then their would be less manpower needed to clean stuff up. They can self-mod their own threads and keep them clean if they want to look professional. Spam in their threads looks very unprofessional to me.

I also like this idea where say only member and above accounts bump threads. Sure they would build high ranked bumping services but they would eventually run out of easily available high ranked accounts in the same way we expect them to run out of airdropped smerits. It will not be easy fr them to farm up a bunch more member accounts with the merit system in place as it is now.

Their are a lot of good ideas in this thread relating merits to bumping but it is tricky.
If it comes to a system where you have to "spend" merit to bump threads I guess I won't be bumping anything until I'm over 1000 and have some to spare, like in another 1.5-2 years...

Absolutely correct. I do not think that Bitcointalk should get itself into endorsing ANY altcoin or project other than the one and only true Bitcoin.


One last thing is all of these "tokens" that don't even have their own blockchain. They are not pioneering the advancment of cryptocurrency technology but rather just sucking what they can out of it just using "crypto" as a marketing ploy and an easy convenient way of sucking in money.
I'm not sure they should even be under "Alternate cryptocurrencies" but why are their so many of them still under "Announcements (Altcoins)"? Not enough manpower to move their threads to "Tokens (Altcoins)"?
Myself I wouldn't even move them but delete them with a little note to the OP "Try again in the right section".

I wonder if those "ICO managers" or whatever they're called (the ones who create ANN threads on behalf of various shitcoins) could abuse this.

E.g. wait for your competitor to bump their thread and then bump 50 of your threads immediately, knowing that the competitor can't do anything about it for the next 24h.

Come to think of it, just create 500 dummy ICOs and bump anyone you don't like off the front page. Much harder to do that when there is a more tangible cost, like a merit.

This seems like the best solution til now. Most of the "good project" posts will disappear and there will be no need for further control as there is no mote room for abuse.

What about bumping the thread only when OP posts a reply and his reply should receive at least one merit (the next reply should be merited by another user to bump the thread again).
This way we ensure OP is active and interacts with other users.

It is impossible to detect 100% of scams. Bitconnect traded for months and fooled thousands of people. EOS is a scam yet peaked at number 4 in marketcap and had the most successful ICO ever. It still has a daily volume of $800 million. The obvious scams are easy to pick out. The elaborate scams which will fool the most people are the ones that are the most difficult to detect.

By having a group that screens every project, you inadvertently present the idea that any project that makes it past the group and is posted on the forum is legit, when in fact, it could be one of the biggest and most elaborate scams yet. For the same reason that the forum doesn't moderate scams, I don't think it would be a good idea to try to moderate which ICOs can be posted. I can already picture hundreds of threads in Meta saying "I invested in a project approved by this forum and I got scammed - I want my money back".

Alternatively, we give the owner of the thread a bump button which they can do at any point allowing them to bump their threads strategically or when they are online. Don't allow posts to bump threads anymore. Only allow the button to appear every 24 hours. 

The only person I know of that was doing free design analysis of these complex new designs (ones that had strong technical whitepapers) and publishing his findings was anonymint. I was often bookmarking his posts and reading regularly because although I could not fully understand what he was saying in all cases I then used to compare what other devs would say in reply to him. By matching up whether they agreed, were still debating or disagreed one could get an idea themselves and make a best guess on if it was a good idea to get involved or wait and watch. Most of what he said about designs and future issues were very accurate from what I could tell.

This would be the IDEAL situation.

However there are only a handful of persons that can screen a projects design and make useful analysis.  Also with ico distributional processes having capped limits reached in seconds it is impossible to tell if that was just a very popular project or just a 100% instamine by colluding whales.

The paid group would also be under huge temptation to push forward projects brimming with ico bitcoins for back handers so this is quite a risky thing too.

Better to use age of account + merit (capped at 200 earned) for cumulative value of topic. The opt out button mentioned by suchmoon would be good idea too to avoid contributing to perceived value when posting to inform people it is a scam or questioning the dev team to get much needed answeres.

Glad you like it, this is the best I could come with that would not let to serious abuse. Of course, merit can be bought but is going to cost them a lot and they would be far easier to identify.

Still, I wouldn't go as far as saying that suddenly people will want to make meritable posts in the altcoin section.


But from what theymos proposed I'm really concerned with the point you've raised:


So if an ICO is discovered to be a scam with a  fake team or anything else and you, loycev or marlboroza post in it warning people about the issue that topic would probably be on the first page forever although your warning posts will be buried under a ton of one-liners.

So the system would backfire seriously in this case, turning scam warnings in the most generous promoters ever.

In my case, for example, I posted only once in the last month on an ANN, congratulating BCH for the flippening.  
Pretty obvious that with the new system I would have stayed away, so this might have some weird consequences.


LE:
@cryptohunter

I see you've edited your reply but the first time you've mentioned: "a person" that was doing the scanning and is now banned from the board. Who are you talking about?

They would still be able to post but their posts wouldn't bump the thread to the front page. And requiring to post in the ANN thread is already against the rules.

Although I still prefer stompix's idea of having to spend merits to bump a thread. This would cost abusers a lot more than just getting a merited account and using it for unlimited bumps.

My Idea is to screen each projects in that section and let them pay for it for  you to enable to form a group that will screen every project. This will avoid creating scam projects which likely will reduce the percentage of accused scam projects from 90% scam projects probably down to 5% or below will be good. There is no problem with how the topic was being arranged but the problem is that people are likely to scam because of anonymity feature of cryptocurrency. If we can limit this feature for the team who composes in a project and should have made a registration for the project for a good results even if it will fail for there is still a refund to be conducted.

Agree with this idea. Bump once every 24 hours seems nice. For example, if 10 posts were made in the last 24 hours, then the thread only bump one time.

This idea wouldn't work on the bounty section because of "#proof of authentication" post, and because of some bounty that requires the participant to post on the ANN thread. Therefore, it gives unfair advantages to merited members and easily abused.

Again, this would be easily abused by campaigns hiring bots to spam competitors' threads with identical posts and therefore get them locked.



I would make the criteria somewhat stricter, say 5 merits in the last 30 or 90 days, but I like this idea a lot. However, it does still run the risk of creating a marketplace for certain users to sell their "bumping ability".

I prefer models where everyone has the same opportunity to be heard according to fair analysis of their real value.

Since that is impossible to implement short of having AI review every post and mark it against strict complex criteria (same for everyone) then we can try to filter the merit scores as we have them now.

I would cap merit weight at 150-200 earned merits (*nobody to me has fairly earned more than this these numbers are not purely guess work and come from light analysis of the merit system ) this can be increased gradually and sensibly over time so that merit scores have semblance of useful representation of the value of the member. This although does not take into account all those good posts drown out by the spammers on their fav parts of the forum it does a good job balancing things for a quick fix.

If we really want to start attributing weight to merit though there would need really to be a complete overhaul to make it a fairer system that is far more objective and gave a similar chance of review for all posts. Either that or work out some good filters and caps.

I actually believe a safer way is to weight  both merit (capped or overhauled) and activity.

* by fair i mean that given from where we started with merit it was impossible to give the same opportunity to all posters regardless of which board they post on due to dilution by spam. I also do believe a few do not treat the merit system exactly as it was intended to be used.

This could be interesting. However, the bot would need to be able to filter out quotes if this was to be implemented. However, I already know what they'll do to work around it. They are likely to lazy to think of new phrases, but will just post random letters at the end of the reply or something annoying like that. The thing is the users behind the bumping are well aware of how the forum works, and any system which is implemented will likely be abused. The objective is to introduce something that as the least impact on the users, and the least impact if abused.

A system that automatically gives you something for nothing will likely get abused by alts.

Using the existing merits sounds like a better approach.

Any change that uses algorithms to determine an order may eventually be gamified by the users. And since the speed of changes in anything that involves the forum code is very slow, I do not believe that it will be the best solution if there is not a planning to constantly update the algorithm.

I suggest bump of topic only happen when somebody who had earned 5 merits in last six month reply on it. It will take power of bumping from those people who got mass chunk in one go and are suspected merit abuser.

If feasible, I will like anti bump button for the users so that they can reply on topic without bumping it.
Anti bump button will be useful when you like to post warnings in thread (so user who are tracking it will read it) but it will not be bumped because bumping might attract lot of shitposter and warning you put in thread will be lost between in that shitposts.


Edit: Another Approach.
Just like source merit, we can have bump merits. Whoever has rank greater than member will get 5 bump merits in a day (if user do not use them then it will expire, so next day its total will be 5 , not more than 5). User will use their bump merit to bump the thread (by default , 1 bump merit is used in each reply unless user decline to use bump merit or already ran out of his bump merits.

If a Thread has more then 2 or 4 exactly the same messages like copy and paste (plagiarism)  the thread get locked by the system !

Or if the Thread last 5 posts only "Good Projekt"  the thread gets automatically sorted out and reported to the Mods !

But guess this is a way to much to implement this !

I don't know what's worse, mentioning KYC three times for the third time or having this in your signature:



 

A lot less work in the long run as it removes a huge incentive to spam. The mod just moves any duplicates to the original thread or trashes them.

we cant solve problem about newbie registrations, becouse i think forum is for newcomers to.

and i know KYC is not popular and best way. but KYC is way for broke this problems.

without kyc - i think about  new way.

now on bounty threads, bounty and airdrop managers want Quote, becous if some person make new quote - (reply) post will go in TOP, and can find new people for bounty and airdrop. if new reply couldnot UP thread, i think it will be better.

This sounds lovely.


This might encourage creating new threads so more work for mods trying to weed out duplicates.

Some users have 1000+ accounts.



This will transform merit in a thing used by spammers to bumping threads and used on not valuable posts, but will have a good side, those spammers will lose the airdropped merit.

"Announcements" are traditionally a piece of news about a time sensitive event;

Just list them in date order of the original post, not by popularity or most recent addition. Bumping becomes irrelevant.
Anyone seriously interested in a particular scheme can watch it or find it thru search.

Nice that you're finally talking seriously about this problem and you intend to act but I think it's simply to complicated. And when things get complicated there are more ways in which the system gets abused and cheaters bypass it.

Rather than implementing all this, why not try simpler solutions as hilariousetc, suchmoon or Loycev have said.

- make the topics bumpable once in an interval, not once a day, this sounds too much, but maybe 8/6/4 hours?
- make so that only users who have earned 1 merit (in the last 30 days!!, to deny merit farmers) can bump a topic

Or we could go to an extreme solution!
- bump the topic only when a merit has been awarded in that topic

Spammers would just create hundreds of non-KYC accounts like they already do with the newbies shitbumping the threads.

no. if you will reply with your profile - 10 more. you will be offline next 24 hours.

So if I post 10 posts on your thread with one shitalt your ANN will be locked for 24 hours?

if problem is Huge number of posts + replys  in Altcoin / bounty

i think you can make new sistem, for example :

1 - max reply in day will 10 (10 post is normal for share and resive information)
2 - make different with verified users, for example with KYC.

here is a lot of connected users, i think if forum will be with KYC, many spamer and fake users will be blocked.

and this problem will be solved.

You could easily get past this by setting a cap per user - e.g. max of 50 points (or any other number) added to the score per user. A user with 511 earned merit adds 50 points, a user with 1000 earned merit adds 50 points. I think it would be worth setting a lower cap too - anything below 10 earned merits doesn't count, which would have a similar effect to stopping posts from anyone below Member rank from bumping the thread.

Any system involving the average score will simply result in botnets being paid to spam competitors' threads and therefore decrease their average score. Similarly, anything involving reports will result in either mass reporting of competitors' threads, or even spamming of competitors' threads with trash for the sole reason of reporting these posts. Either way, far too much additional work for the mods.

Hello,,
Why don't you randomly choose to your own score sources for the ANN Altcoins board. You can choose from some DT members, merit sources, members who often carry out investigations / reports against scam ICOs or whoever you think is appropriate. Of course you have to choose them in secret and (optional)do that together with your trust team/members. So they(score sources) were chosen without their knowing it.

And to make it more perfect, the score will be obtained automatically when the score source makes a post (only the first post is worth the highest score for each source score, for next the score is smaller than previously) and the score should be counted every 24 hours or weekly(if not possible to collect more scores fastly) according to when the post was made.

I think this is a joke. However the annoying part about this which hits home is that there are actually forums that do this sort of shit. Including several other crypto forums. Its ridiculous and wouldn't solve any problem at all. We already know that these projects are willing to spend money on spamming their threads up to the top because there are many services which offer bumping services. If the forum did this it would just be giving them permission to do it as long as they pay.

Sell the top spots to them like parking meters or youtube superchats. Send so much BTC and then the time ticks down for their positions. Bounties too.
Spend it on a superbowl add for BTC  

They can play bumping games for the unpaid spots after that.

So it would be essentially a random list of threads that were posted in at least once in the last 24h. I kinda like the idea of it being less random and more merit-based.


And this too:

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This sounds interesting and is probably less prone to abuse. Someone would have to spend merits to keep the thread on top and not just buy/farm a few accounts.

By doing this we won't just be solving a problem which has been needed to be solved for a long time but we will also be catching members that merit abuse just so they can bump topics again. We will likely be able to identify the people behind merit selling and the restrictions implemented aren't that big of a deal. We don't owe anything to newbies and they shouldn't expect to have the same permissions as the rest of the forum for the sake of spam issues sometimes restrictions have to be put in place. I know the community is generally against the idea of implementing restrictions to deal with our issues but that is exactly what this would do. It would solve the problem completely and if it didn't and I'm wrong it would at least be having a great impact on those who can't string sentences together and can't earn enough merit so they go and buy it. The way I see it if you haven't contributed to the forum then you shouldn't have the same privileges as others who have.

It's probably not about being soft but rather having the time, energy and resources. There's only a few staff members that can ban people for a start and it's incredibly time-consuming to do so not to mention never-ending, and that's why things need to change with the culture here. Also, those specific reports you're talking about may have been handled by someone who doesn't have the ability to ban them, but it's also something staff shouldn't have to be doing and is just seen as a waste of time by most of us at this point without changing the culture of paid bumping which is at least being addressed now with this thread.

If we will have a system where threads will be pumped on 1st page by merit, someone will find the way to cheat gifting merit to random accounts or paying high users members to post on their thread.


This is a terrible idea, They will spam on the good threads and report only to get their thread in a better spot.


Same, they will pay high ranks to bump treads, also a lot of Ico bumping service has high ranks members

Bumping ico-bounty service allowed? 69 accounts involved so far. Need DT or MOD

I think this will give a terrible incentive to spammers to use more accounts to spam. I've created many lists, checking how many distinct users have posted in a thread. Typically, there are 2 kinds:
a. threads with hundreds to thousands of Newbies posting once
b. threads with a few dozen Newbies (or higher ranks) posting tens to hundreds of posts each
I expect b. to switch to a., making them more work to nuke.
It took me a while to figure out these 3 points aren't meant to be separate ideas, but implemented together. That makes much more sense, and makes my initial reponse irrelevant.

I think Mods are too soft on spammers, especially compared to the number of spam bots that go around. I've reported many bump bots that just got a post deleted instead of a ban. Not only does that not matter to them, it's not even a punishment as the bump has had it's effect already.

That can be abused to kill a competitor's thread.

I like this idea. The only problem as you mentioned is that some users would have too much influence.
To reduce this a simple formula could be applied to reduce the weight of individual users, for example getting the sume of the square root of each user's total earned merit (or log or similar), or there can be a table of merit range correlated with a specific amount of awarded points, so newbies with no merit aren't counted but no one counts too much.

Why don't you make it so the thread can only be bumped once per day regardless of how many people post in it? I think if we make it merit or rank-based then they'll just find a way around it by paying the relevant users to post in there. That would at least the defeat the purpose of paid bumping and it'll probably stop whilst still allowing active threads to be bumped daily (but just once a day. The time could also even be randomised so people can't just choose a certain time of day to bump it).

Have you thought any more about this that you put in the Maybe category:



I think that would once and for all solve the paid bumping issue and it's about time ICOs started contributing financially to the mess they're causing here and the extra manpower that is needed from staff to clean it up.


I think a better solution (and as I have suggested before) would be that lower ranked member's posts in there just don't bump the thread at all. I think they'll just get around it though by using higher-ranked accounts which could easily be purchased (if they don't even have them already or some high ranked bumping service will then pop up to meet demand).

A couple of months ago I suggested something similar, but for the Bounty section (see Where to run a spam free bounty campaign? [new board?]). The idea was to use the earned merit in a 48 hour period to establish the sort order, but I did complicate the idea by allowing the screen to have a section ordered by the merit criteria, and a section of the screen ordered by the conventional last post criteria (in order to allow both criterias to coexist and not give full power to merits).

In general, I like the idea. Maybe creating more sub-boards. Spammy boards tend to encourage to spam more.

I doubt that's a good idea, many (legit) Newbies are only coming to ask a few questions there and if they can't do this it would reduce the benefit to make an announcement for every project. I agree, there are lots of paid spammers, but we can't restrict every Newbie to catch the spammers.

Agreed 100%. Copper membership is just another option to buy a member account. Since 1 merit is required for Jr. Member most spammers decided to buy a copper membership instead. It seems to be more profitable obviously. 

Maybe the average of the users (from past24h) total earned merit.?

If thousands of newbies start spamming" good project", the average user merit will go down, reducing the score.

Those Airdrops with proof of authentication could disappear, as they will reduce score. Or maybe create an especific session for them, if you believe they are useful for the forum...


I have noticed also that usually when a project is better than the others, its announcement is usually highly merited. Community support usually rewards merit to the project. This could also be considered in the score, however it would probably lead to merit selling...

Probably every method will be abused. But you can make it so expensive that few people will abuse it.

Thank you Theymos. I see results now so our time is not wasted

The reports and deleted messages should also be taken in consideration, because this is how the whole section is monitored at the moment.

For example, If I report 10 posts in one thread and they are marked as good, then the thread should taken down from the first page.

Maybe for every 10 good reports the Ann should be taken 10 positions down.

Maybe this rule can apply only for those ANNs who have posts reported and marked as good.

BTW, if you go through my report history from today, you'll find an Ann thread full of posts of members with with a single post count.
I have no proof that those are bots but I'm sure they are.
It is very difficult situation for sure.

That's the problem with this suggestion. We all know that the newbies are the most influential users in that sub forum currently because they can keep on making accounts and bumping the the threads up even if they are banned. Therefore as suggested previously in this thread newbies should have read only privileges. If they want to contact the thread owner they can do so through their social media, website or by personal message. 

The solution proposed means that certain threads would just have more exposure and it doesn't mean that they are quality threads either. Its sort of free advertisement for those threads and unfair to the new and up and coming projects. I think by restricting posting privileges for newbie accounts and working in conjunction with the jr member merit requirement we will see a lot less spam.

We could even implement a system where posts from newbies have to be whitelisted before they are posted. This is more work for the moderator of the sub forum and globals but I think is a good way to go about it. This way we aren't totally restricting users but at the same time preventing bumping of topics and creation of hundreds of newbie accounts to purposely bump the topic.

Sounds interesting but perhaps this can be implemented initially as an option to try it out?

It seems to me that this could prevent some (most) threads from ever showing up the front page. Some others would be likely permanently parked there.

Also if I want to comment on some scam I would likely bump it to the front page (which happens now too but the front page bump in the new system would be far more valuable). An opt-out from the score would be nice.

It will be best especially for altcoin announcements  board. Its good to see that you are thinking about it.

The main problem is now altcoin announcements  board. I have some suggestion and its no need much technical work.
1. Disable posting on  altcoin announcements below Jr. member rank. Keep only read mode for newbie rank.
2. For reduce spam from others board just disable signature below member rank include copper membership. Peoples are skipping merit system and buying copper membership. Let them(newbie) earn from other campaign. So they are continue spamming.


That's the problem, just be deleted. Why should not punished them ? Even temporary punishment. Like if a newbie 10 post reported and deleted by moderator, then he should get ban for 3 days. For each rank there will be different deleted post count. Something like that will help reduce more spam.

You may try both and see which one works better. Though, merit spammers will try to game this as well. But with active policing like trust system, they can be identified and punished.

As a starter, here is the technical suggestion I made in the other thread...

Do you mean total merit across all posts in the topic, or just for the OP?

This - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/can-we-please-have-a-way-to-sort-threads-in-a-sub-forum-as-per-merit-5038566

There's a strong incentive to spam replies to topics in altcoin announcements and a few other sections because there's a lot of activity and competition for eyeballs there. This spam should just be deleted, but I'd also like to remove the incentive by changing the default ordering of topics in those sections from "last post" to something new. (You'll still be able to click/bookmark something to get the old ordering.)

What are your ideas for new ordering methods? My current idea is:
 1. For each topic, get a list of the distinct users who posted there in the last 24 hours.
 2. Give the topic a score equal to the sum of each such user's total earned merit.
 3. Sort by topic score descending, and secondarily by the usual last post time.

With that, you still have topics with recent conversation listed first, but it requires more resources to manipulate, at least, and newbies have no influence. Maybe it'd give certain users overwhelming influence, though.

I want to think about it quite a bit more, so I probably won't do it soon.