Topic: It's no wonder we are infested with bounty and airdrop spammers (Read 946 times)

Yes, I sent PM to Hillarious after 300 reports with all kind of forum abuse but mostly spam, off-topic, spambots with an accuracy of 99%. Never responded like to all other messages. Today I have already 810 with an accuracy of 100%.

I changed my neutral reputation to positive in The Pharmacist profile after he withdraws red trust given to me after reading an explanation in my reputation thread. I supported sooner The Pharmacist and wrote in my post that I agree with his judgments and I see him as an asset (I have my posts as a proof and I could use it for reference but if most known members don't leave it, I thought isn't needed or even better to left it empty). There are few positive ratings in his profile without reference from Vod, Lauda, Actmyname, Hhampuz and only one with reference from Yahoo62278. I don't see any problem here but maybe I am wrong (this will be not the first time) so please explain what you mean about that?

I traded few times with people using a Telegram chat group started on BTT. I had few trades in this group and few persons leave me positive reputation. I thought I should send back if the trade was successful but there was no reference because we chatted on Telegram and I don't save my Telegram chats. If this is again problem I already deleted mine from Polonez account but I can do nothing with positive trust in my account from other members.

Why wouldn't you remove the red tag if you were him? Why this reference is such a big problem if highest DT members don't leave it either?

I don't search for them for a purpose. Exactly, as you say, I just enjoy reading. I invest in ICO for almost 2 years. That is why 80% of my time I spent on Altcoin section reading ANN threads when researching interesting projects. 5 or 10 seconds is enough to report post but what to do if a thread is flooded by spammers and there are 60 "great project" and "good" posts in a row? How much time do you think I need to report this garbage?

How to report such a thread flooded with spam? How to report a spammer with 80% of 2 words posts in his account?Using report button?

Of course, on a wave of last year hype  a lot of new people appeared on the form. They are not here to develop the community and not even because they are interested in crypto, they just want to make money. On the one hand there is nothing wrong with this, on the other hand, the amount of spam and grieve. Most likely, developers will change the course for creating quality content.

Since your MO is to spread completely false, baseless accusations fueled entirely by your own confirmation bias I feel I should respond so that a normal user can have both sides of the story and make up there own mind.

Several topics that were about that general topic had been opened in a few days.  In actual fact iirc I think I locked or deleted another thread (or 2) with a similar theme.  Keeping the discussion on a similar topic in a single thread is done to keep the redundant spam mega threads to a minimum.  Of course you are so close to the topic that your confirmation bias couldn't possibly allow you to think there was another possibility other than my desire to censor.

There must be 15 threads (I did not actually count) about god, athiesm, religion, spirituality and every other synonym for those words already in the sub.  There are new ones created all the time.  The thread in question was already 42 pages long and had long before became a spam mega thread with the last several pages of "one line shitposts".  The other threads still open had some actual discussion between opposing view points so it was left open.  Matter of fact the thread you say are my own threads are not my threads I did not start it, so stop lying.

Again it's clear in the last case your confirmation bias won't allow you to see any possibility other than a godless cunt censoring a topic.

You are a butthurt troll with a confirmation bias a 100 miles long.  You make blanket statements that are provably false.  Readers should hear this opinion before making a decision on the validity of your claims.

Edit: Apologies for going off topic OP but I felt I needed to respond to this trolls accusations.
Edit 2: to fix quotes

I'm all for bringing back Newbie Jail at least until they've proven they're not spambots at least. I've brought up the Jr. Member signatures issue before. I'm sure when theymos removed links from them he wasn't expecting the spam sig campaigns to carry on paying them for using text URLs.

At some stage this forum is going to have to revert to restricting new and low value members to starter boards. I'll leave you guys to debate the escape criteria, but a minimum merit count should be one of them imho. Maybe signatures should also be blocked for starter members as well.

Faucets have a really hard time keeping cheaters away. It's very easy to go to the Off-topic or Altcoin board and report thousands of posts. It's just kinda pointless as those boards have millions more useless posts.
Just out of curiosity: how much would a report pay? It takes 5-10 seconds to report a bad post, and I love getting paid in a cleaner forum.
Lately, I've been reporting more posts than I make, and in a few months my total reports will overtake my post count.

Not admin, mod picking. and here is the result locking a thread stating there is another one similar to that but never providing a link to the same topic. or this one is providing a link but there are no similarities between the two topics.  how about this one? isn't this a discrimination? your own topic(as legendster's own topic started by legendster) is still open which ironically is about Godless cunts and their opinions. it is indeed no wonder we are infested with bounty garbage posters.


Would you like to get paid by reporting garbage posts with one of your alts which has no signature? you don't even want others to get anything even if it is just in your imagination. your suggestion is not going to favour everybody equally, just a select group. facking lol.


For now let us see what will happen to somebody who has reported more than 200 posts accurately in hopes of red tag removal for apparent merit trading, let us see if mods give a fuck or not.

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EDIT: in red above and the following:

@Flying Hellfish, I know that you are not going to be fired as a mod, I'm just trying to criticize you constructively. also you should know that I have no dignity, so calling me a lying troll is meaningless for me.

Last time I proposed to give some merits for reporting e.g. 20 copypasters, the answer was spammers would register new accounts to copypaste and they will report them just to gain the merit...
The same can apply if we give payment for reporting posts...
But this can work if there will be really only a selected group of people (or selected by a minimum merit count) who will be able to report for payment... and this will motivate members to earn merits, because it can lead them to another kind of payment job, the reporter...

The problem with all incentives is the possibility to be abused, but making it sort of sub-moderator job might be a good way to deal with that. I guess that really leaves the question of whether there is a budget to pay for it.

We used to have one. Lovingly called the Newbie jail.
I suggested an alternative Merit Jail as well.
I think there should be more mods but that's my pov. I am pretty sure the forum can afford it. It's a matter of will and consensus.



He recently did that with the Politics & Society admin picking thread.
What if it could be a paid gig? Each time you report something that is legitimately BS, you get paid a small amout of btc. Kinda like a faucet.
But not everyone can do this, maybe a select group of people who are not biased against signature renting but do not have paid signature spots themselves.

Makes sense?

theymos has previously released data about reporting, including a leaderboard of top reporters, but that was a long time ago and I haven't seen any recent numbers. It isn't possible to get any stats on that unless theymos makes it public.


Therein lies the root of what makes this forum so frustrating.

That could be because most of the members also don't care about reporting these kind of posts (as long as there's nothing they can gain when they report something e.g. some extra activity points or anything else....) I don't know how many members report spam posts, but I think it's less than a 100, but if someone has statistics about it, I'm really interested...
The other thing can be that most of the members (spammers, but not bots) don't really read back when they post something, (because it's so obvious to spot these bots(?) when they copy something from a few posts above...) so they don't realize that bots are copypasteing parts of other posts...

I think those ones might be bots. Copying from the same thread is their way of making it on-topic. They don't seem to realise that anyone who is following the thread and reading will spot it instantly.

Well let's be realistic, all those videos like "how to earn on this website", "How to rank up",etc... are a normal thing once the website get's popular enough. Nothing new at all.

That's why we have merit now.

Did you report at least 200 garbage and off topic posts on Bitcoin discussion section? did you PM hilariousandco to ask for a reconsideration on your negative trust? why did you leave positive trust for The Pharmacist without any reference? why do you have positive trust for a trade without any reference? I wouldn't remove the red tag from you if I were him.


Each report alone would take you 5-10 seconds to click on the report and write a word  and then click on send. what about the time you are spending on reading the posts?


Is prostitution one of those 1099 forms of income in the US? lol.

Maybe he means it's his income form...    Like a 1099 form for misc income in the US!!   
 

"bitcoin gold is very good cryptocurrencies i love it"
What a moron 

I've been talking about it for a long time. The wave of illiterate spammers from Indonesia and Pakistan is overwhelming. The merit system has made it harder for them, but it's nothing more than trench that is slowing them down, weeding out some of the spammers, but the more persistent ones remain. The idiot from the video can't even write bitcointalk right and calls it a "form"

That's really true, don't rush for the bad posts, they'll show up anyway...
My personal favourites are when newbies (or jr.members) copy 2 sentences from an earlier post from the same page of the topic... If they made the effort to search for a similar topics and copy something from the posts found there, it would be much difficult to spot them, but they simply don't care...

Yes you are right some members mostly the new ones don't care about policies or proper forum etiquette as all they care about is on what is making money for them inside the forum and like people who only care for themselves is they are exploiting it and they are even proud of it as discussed and shown in this thread (which you also replied), their thirst for earning is making the forum look bad overall.

Good luck with getting up votes in SteemIt although members can up vote once every article, it seemed like they are only up voting those who have high reputation as they are the ones maximizing your up vote power (as your up votes also give you Steem). Also a lot of factors come into play from your title construction to what topic are you putting your post at, but overall having a high reputation is one that gives you more up votes by default.

This highlights one of the problems. Different platforms have different perceptions and rules on the promotion of your posts and ranking, I posted an entry about the Bitcoin merit system on Steemit - https://steemit.com/bitcointalk/@upr8/clarification-of-the-bitcoin-talk-merit-system , but it has had few views as I'm pretty new, and I haven't got my head round their ranking system yet. I've had several suggestions that I need to pay $100 or so to get some upvotes so that I can earn $1,000, but that makes it sound like a ponzi. I've started a small group so that we can upvote each other on Steemit, and this seems to be the approved method. Obviously this is comletely the opposite of the policy here on Bitcoin Talk. I'm sure many new members don't understand the radical difference between the two platforms.

I've decided to use upr8.com to help members to understand the different policies, but so far I have only decided on the template, so I haven't created any content yet. I'll post a link when I have something meaningful on the site.

We cannot control these video tutorials flooding in Youtube, as they are either increasing their views/subscribers or they are benefiting from it the other way. Just like what bloggers are doing, having both a Youtube Channel and a Steemit account where they show tutorials on how to have more up votes and how to increase followers. So what Bitcointalk do is to either limit the bounty and signature campaign or limit and control the members flooding the site.

The Merit System will only affect members participating in Signature campaigns but Bounty Campaigns seems to be not affected with the Merit System as their campaigns run externally through social media sites. Either BCT should limit the bounty campaigns each month (through a bidding system) or limit their participants of the campaign, so that only a few members can participate.

I like this suggestion, but I can find 200 bad posts much faster than I can find 10 users guilty of plagiarism.

One piece of advice: don't search for them, just read threads you're interested in. You'll find them without searching for them.

Each report takes me about 5-10 seconds. If you don't just search for them, it's not much extra work to report them when you see them.

I got into trouble a few months ago and opened a reputation thread to clarify the situation. One of the users Digaran suggested to me to find 200 attempts of forum rules abuse and then again ask for the withdrawal of the red trust.

I thought this is a great advise so I started to report abuse. At first, I had problems and I was not sure if I was right because many spammers and others dealing with bending the system are very smart and know how to mask. For a few weeks, I found 14 attempts to break the rules with the accuracy of 85%. Over time, I've trained myself and started to notice rules violation much faster. Recently I reported over a dozen of such cases on a daily basis and my result is more as 300 reports with 99% accuracy. I found all kind of forum rules abuse spam, off-topic, merit trading, account farming, spam bots, not in English, ref links, only quotes, plagiarism, scam, etc.

Of course, it didn't help to undo the red trust but I wanted to share these story with you because now you know, more or less, how much time it can take to report 200 or more abusers to an ordinary member who has never done it before.

Let's set them a time limit for reporting those accounts, like 1 month or 1 activity period. Both of the time limits are long enough to let them search for the other copypasters and report them. If someone really wants to get back the original account, this time should be enough if they try it hard... But I also don't think that they will care about one lost account, because I think they have a few others...

This can be easily avoided by requiring that account to maintain at least half of maximum activity during that period.
Not going silent and after a year bum! 10 reports.

I wound't be concerned about them cheating as they would also have to compete with other members in spotting the posts and if somebody is reporting all his 10 catches just a few minutes after the post have been made it's clearly suspicious.

There is another problem, while this restricts them from reporting their own alts it also narrows their potential true reports, as most of the plagiarism here is done by members with low activity who just want to get a low level account for bounty purposes.
So I doubt anyone would take this offer...

I've only caught 2 doing that and they were both juniors (I think), this while I've checked more than a hundred texts, so from my point of view it will be next to impossible recovering my account in such a short time to actually be worth it if I were an account farmer with god knows how many alts.

Do you really think these spammers are going to spend a year to get one account back?

I just want to point that you can have Jr.Member with 250 activity and Senior Member also with 250 activity. (Due to Merits).
If somebody Sr.Member account get banned at 250 activity and we follow the logic proposed by LoyceV then it simply means that banned Sr.Member can now create 11 accounts and will lurk in all mega spam threads for an year ( to gather activity more than his Sr. member account.).

Afterwards he will report his 10 alt accounts with 11^th  account (I assume they will remain Jr.Member only due to their shit post and will have activity more than 250) and he will get back his senior member account (because he reported 10 accounts that has more activity than him.)

That's why I stressed on rank, if we take rank then he need to report 10 hero accounts to get his account back.

But do not know how the "Legendary" will get their account back, might be they need to report 10 Legendary.


Proposed  by LoyceV

I think you didn't understand what the subject of the conversation you quoted was. It had nothing to do with rank.

Activity is the only thing that initiates a rank update, and it is based on regular community participation over a period of time, and it has limits to avoid over-accelerated rank increases. Merit is a barrier to prevent spammers and other low value posters from increasing rank - it does not initiate a rank update in itself.

Then I think you mean Merits/Rank only, because Activity will be gained with time but it will not cause account to rank up.

What's the community opinion on discussing Steemit here? I did a quick search, and a couple of years ago threads with Steemit links were being deleted. I joined it recently to pick up a few dollars from my photography, and that was the original purpose of Steemit. However, it seems that the current focus is on promoting the Steem crypto-currencies, and blogging about bounty and other scams. I think honest rewards for content producers is worth discussing, especially if payment can be received in Bitcoin.

My bad. I missed that higher activity thing. Might work but I'm not sure that most of these people are really likely to put any work into something. There might be a few exceptions where someone just wasn't aware they need to link to the original source.

I thought of that, that's why the accounts they report need to have a higher activity than their own. It's not worth spamming with 10 new accounts, just to get one back.

The problem I can see is that they would just sign up another 10 alts, copy paste with them and then report their own alts. Thus gaining their main account that got banned back.

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Your mistake was using copy/paste, and you got busted.

I wouldn't be surprised if 80% is indeed guilty.

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Suggestion to earn an unban after plagiarism:
What if someone who is banned for plagiarism can earn an unban by redeeming themselves reporting others? If someone reports 10 accounts (with more activity than their own account) for plagiarism, I suggest to give him another chance. This could lead to a growing number of cheaters competing to find other cheaters, nicely cleaning up the forum.
Thoughts?

I have the solution to remove (I think about of) 90% of scammers on bounties, I will post it when I will have time to do so.

Plagiarism can be proven without finding the original source. Any older source is enough to prove you copied it.
The original source is what you should have linked to, to make clear it's a quote and not your own work.

How many forum signups a day are there? Newbie jail sounds cumbersome at this point.


I'm guessing it'll get neglected and not many people will escape newbie jail. The bigger problem there is the Beginners forum will probably become endless threads about being stuck on that board.

Some of the spammer's of this forum is from in the newbies they dont have enough information about bitcoin and that they can answer the question or in a topic correctly. So they have moderators they do there work to help newbies to stop spamming.

Did you just copy and paste this here??

BRB I'll go grab the source for you and then report you so you can be banned...

Bolded sections plagiarized from:  https://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp

Not only these, you will get lot of scam videos in which people will suggesting to buy a ponzi coin to others for their referral bonuses.

This is not the only video that shows how to earn money on bitcointalk. Here's another one : https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5-SaZWm88o
I happened to mention this like 2-3 months ago here, and then the thread got dissolved into a classic let's spam here thread.

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This doesn't end here, I just searched "bitcointalk" on YouTube and here were the first 5 results :

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Again, it doesn't end there. Here are articles on how to earn money on bitcointalk :
https://steemit.com/bitcointalk/@akhilesh10/how-to-make-money-on-bitcointalk
https://deeponion.org/community/threads/how-to-make-money-on-bitcointalk.8600/
https://99bitcoins.com/how-to-earn-bitcoins-fast-free/
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-earn-bitcoins-without-any-investments

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I am pretty sure I can find much more, but then again we have seen worse like making Facebook groups to remove The Pharmacist from DT .

Just look at the comments on the link The Pharmacist referenced. Comments like "How do I rank up on Bitcointalk" and these are the type of users who are the problem right now. They don't care about Bitcointalk, Bitcoin or even cryptocurrencies. They won't even look at the rules, yet they are earning a living by spamming the forum. Like if you are getting paid a decent rate at your job that normally motivates you to perform better at it but, it just seems to have the opposite effect here.

I didn't realize that people have gone so far to make tutorials on youtube though. I've seen a few steemit articles but, judging by the views on that youtube video it seems like this is a pretty in demand topic. 

And if the spammer newbies realize that they have to create quality posts to become normal members, they will stop registering thousands of users weekly, so after a little time, there will be less posts in the 'Newbie Jail' so there will be enough time and people to merit the posts which deserves it. Until then, maybe we can lose a few really promising newbie, but we can stop this spamming madness...

Ah, that video was just a basic tutorial for idiots.  I was expecting a tutorial on how to game the system, but this was obviously made by some illiterate teenager in some country far, far away. 

It was the next video in the playlist that had me more concerned, because it was about how to join signature campaigns.  The guy did a great job explaining it, I'll give him that, but the mere existence of it makes my skin crawl.  Part of what he says:  "This is your opportunity to get rich.  If you're a teenager with no money or no job, this is a way to start.  I mean all you have to do is give a little of your time and to be engaged.  And then you earn bitcoin guys, it's that simple."

Added LOL was the comments on the video.  Exactly the comments we see on bitcointalk.

I suspect most of them wouldn't post, but having read Bitarts post, I think it could be combined with a merit count. You need to earn at least 5 merits ( say) to be able to post on other boards. That would allow the community to choose new members to allow onto the main boards.

Now that's 4 minutes of my life wasted! Then again, if you need a video tutorial to make an account and start spamming, you shouldn't be here at all. I know many spammers are uneducated, but didn't expect something this bad to have 2000+ views.

The forum used to have a Newbie jail, but it was closed. With 464 registrations  per day, it's a lot of work to review posts.

This could actually work, assuming there are enough volunteers to go through countless numbers of shitposts in the Newbie Zone, to find the few posts that deserve merit.

The numbers make it nigh on impossible. With a million accounts signing up in the last year, the mods will have their hands full if they start evaluating all members. Newbie jail isn't bad, but asking moderators to evaluate all accounts would be asking too much.

I don't think so... there's nothing special with your post according to my understanding.

What happens if we only allow the newbies to post in specific threads, which threads won't count in the campaigns, so there will be no use to spam the forum, because they won't earn any money with their first posts?
After, they have received their 3rd merit for quality posts, they will be able to post in the whole forum.
Any cons?

What does that mean - have I broken some rule with this thread?

@theymos  [mob/mod-rule].


EDIT: read this to understand what I mean.

Here is just one of the YouTube spamming tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQH7B5lWFSE

The suggested post is the usual rubbish that we need to eradicate, and the YouTube viewer replying doesn't even appear to be competent enough to work through the signup process.

I believe that we need a startup board, so that the mods can evaluate new members. Without that it will not be possible to control the flood of several thousand hopeful spammers every day.