Topic: License for bounty managers (Read 593 times)

It has already become largely unfit for purpose. The vast majority of people posting here are just those churning out one/two liners for payment )or farming) and that much is obvious if you spend a few minutes reading a random thread in Bitcoin Discussion.


There are rules, but a lot of the most important ones aren't enforced efficiently (bans or ban evasion to name a couple). The list of rules is also mostly community generated and the rules theymos initially created were very few and consisted of mostly things like no off topic replies. I'm not sure whether he even cares about enforcing half of them, but if certain rules aren't going to be enforced we should just get rid of them and go back to having only a handful of rules and let people already do largely what they want because that's what most do anyway. I don't think we should do this or allow it but not much else we can do about it without theymos' help.


He's recently stated he's the only person working on coding it now so that's likely why it's taking so long and he also why he doesn't have much time to commit to admin duties here.


Blacklisting signatures requires theymos input unless he creates a tool for other staff or admins to use.

In coontunation..

Sir I have a veri bieg faamily and  mydoughter is seriously ill. Please give me job oatherwise I will kill me myself. Please , please Sir. Give me cartification. I really love this forum and raelly want to become bonty manager. I really poat good. I have 100 post tamplate ready that I can use and all are of more than 50 woards.

Thank you very much sir, i will not dissappoint you, please  help me.

______________________________________
PS: I do not understand why people are posting seriously in such a nonsense and hypothetical question.

I dont see this working out well. Licensing? It reminds me of BitLicense. Anyone remembers how that ended up like? not so good.

These things just don't work with the ethos of this forum and generally with Bitcoin stuff. It's like when some people were suggesting SMS verification to register an account in order to stop the spammers... what's next, KYC?

It's supposed to be a free market. If someone is a bad manager and is doing a shitty work, then he will just not get hired for the task. If he is doing a good job, he will continue getting hired, or that's how it should work.

If you start regulating that, we will have more drama than what we have now. If you are bothered by shitposters derived from these bounties just ignore them, they will eventually get banned or they will just get bored and stop posting. I wouldn't lose sleep over this to be honest.

Probably, the forum would more or less become "useless" and the whole point of it being a forum would be non-existing.

I honestly have no clue why theymos hasn't bothered to release the official rules for this forum, if there's no official rules, people will think of this as a decentralized forum.

I don't think money is the issue here. There's more to it,than what meets the eye. theymos, it'll take a few minutes, but its for you to address the community about the issues. And where's the new forum? Just give us the answers, and we'll shut our mouths(not really).

Don't remove everybody's signature, when people spam they are temp banned right? Don't do that, first blacklist their signatures, and if they continue to shitpost, then temp ban, then perma ban. That may or may not help. Global mods should have the ability to blacklist or whitelist signatures.

Even some high ranked members who contribute a lot ,think that the forum isn't "censored" and it isn't centralized. And they can do whatever they want, it'd make sense to anybody if people are *allowed* to scam, so they are allowed anything else they want. 

Random is really a bad method, moreover according to my point of view to lower the rank increases the possibility of being in front of a cheater for obvious reasons (although it is not a rule as you can find abusers even at high rank).
It would make more sense to rely on the trust even if you have to find people who are willing to do this and have no conflict of interests.

Thank you so much for your reactions on my idea, about the question how would those manager be screened I think we should set a certain criteria and let them judged by the randomly picked judges 20 Legendary members, 20 Hero members, 20 full members, 20 members, and 20 jr. members a total of 100 random members from each rank.

I believe forum moderators check the posts.
And bounty managers can't delete a post, even if the user is wearing their signature. They can only report it, like any other user.
And who do you propose handles the screening, and on what criteria?

maybe Theymos is already way too rich to give a shit about this shithole of a forum  which, obviously he is the responsible for becoming a shithole in the first place

Not agree. This is open discussion forum for crypto community. Who will responsible if scamed by ICO? People will claim to forum admin for that if give license for bounty managers.


To be honest I am strongly agree with you. In my opinion disable posting for Jr. Member & newbie to make post from Marketplace (Altcoins) . They can perticipate and submit bounty report through Google form. And required small merit for Jr. Members. It will help also prevent account framing.

Of course it will survive. I'm not sure survive is the right word you're using here. The forum isn't going to 'die' when the traffic continues to grow due to bounties and sig campaigns. The majority of traffic will be trash and the forum will become even worse than it already is and unfit for it's true purpose in the process, but it wont die.


The forum is badly understaffed in my opinion, but I honestly don't know whether theymos prefers it that way with minimal moderation and rules etc. It doesn't make for a very usable or user-friendly forum though and you can see that from the number of complaints about various issues.


Semantics. Either more admins need to be added or more people doing admin duties. Doesn't matter what title you give them. If theymos doesn't trust some of the current staff members with some of this then they probably shouldn't be mods in the first place. You could have people running the ad slots without them even having to hold any money if that was something he's worried about. Theymos could continue to hold the addresses and the staff member is just in charge of making sure the money gets paid there. Sure, a staff member might try divert funds to addresses owned by them but is that worth ruining their account over? They probably couldn't get away with that much for a monthly ad slot anyway and there are probably easier ways a staff member could make money or even scam someone here.


He also isn't happy with the spam just like everyone else, so a compromise needs to be found here. You don't have to remove signatures either but the culture needs to change and only those making quality contributions should be getting paid here. If this forum is going to continue as it is then it is no longer fit for anything other than being a welfare system for those who will just continue to find ways to cheat and abuse it.



Well that's a misconception they're going to need to get over or actually think about what they're complaining about. Just because something is decentralised doesn't mean there are no rules. Bitcoin has rules. You can't complain that there should be more bitcoins in existence or bitcoin should be the run the way you want it because decentralisation.


ICOs tend to not bother because they don't really care. They're not business that are here for the longrun; they want to take in as much money as fast as possible then disappear and paying someone to run their campaign properly is both needless, counter-productive and an unnecessary expense to them. Bitcoin paying campaigns tend to have proper business behind them that care about their reputation and actually want to build something. That's the difference. There needs to be some standards here. Imagine a society without rules or regulations. There's a reason why a civilised society has things like building regulations because people would just cut corners and do a shitty job as cheap as possible and and put lives at risk in the process.


I don't think it'd be easy to enforce who can and can't run them, but it's easy to police when they're doing a shitty job. There's new campaign managers who do a great job, but there's plenty more who don't and those are the ones who we should go after.

I WONT to be a compaign manahger. please sir I am the best, I have lots of "friends and family" taht know the mission of this forum. We are all bowing down to sir Theymos and our God on this forum Vod. We promiese to post 450 posts each account member of this prostigious forumn.

SIR please give me job so I can feed family, my wife has just had her big toe eaten by a snake, I am worryed about here verrry mutchness.

I will work for free - b ut give me merits and trust.

thank ytou siur

/s

I believe you have good intentions by coming up with this suggestions but the practicability is way more difficult than the theory and from the way I see it, we tend to bring in another round of controversy on the forum and several questions need to be answered and the onus is now on you to go beyond suggestion to coming up with a model by answering questions like

1. What will be qualification to even apply for the licence?

2. What will be the category of licences that will be issued we know there are different levels of campaign participants while some would be 50 participants, others might be as much as 200 participants.

2. Who are those that will issue the licence? This is the key part and we should be ready for round of name calling, attacks, allegations of favoritism and abuse of power.

The current situation is not the best but we are better of and I think campaign managers especially in the bounty section of the forum should be made accountable for the attitude of their participants.

We already know who the good campaign managers are. That's not the problem here. The problem is that anyone can be a campaign manager, and the people behind the funding of the advertising don't care who the bounty manager is, and whether there's spam or not. Okay, not entirely true. Some projects do tend to hire more trustworthy, and ethical managers, but the majority won't.

How can a forum survive if all good knowledgeable members leave and its only shitposters and bots that are left(with a few members here and there)? theymos himself said it, managing this forum is more than just a headache. Like it or not, the forum is getting worse by the day. And we are sitting here with our hands tied and not able to do anything about it.

It surprises me that there are only 26 staff members. In other forums(like reddit), there are like 8-10 moderators per board(subreddit). We need like 2 mods per sub-board, and one Global mod for entire board,if that makes any sense. It doesn't have to be a Global Mod, but a new type of mod just to handle an entire board, and helping other mods of that specific board.

We don't need more admins, but the admin power certainly could be little delegated. I don't think theymos will ever delegate things like running ad slots or responding to emails or restoring accounts. He'd be potentially putting a lot at risk.

theymos doesn't want to remove signatures, because he encourages people to earn from this forum, but he also said that people shouldn't shitpost to earn. I am starting to wonder if theymos gets pissed everytime someone says "theymos said this." "theymos said that."

It could be really annoying sometimes.

People think this forum is decentralized because one, it has bitcoin in its name, and two, it was created by satoshi. theymos, increase your standards, lighten things up a notch.

How can you expect decent users to rank up especially when they make posts in the spamfest discussion boards. People come here to "talk" about bitcoin and that itself stops them from ranking up, and that is got to be a shocking but not so shocking truth.

While reading stuffs here in meta, there are so many ideas and suggestions to avoid shitposting. Each topics is quite interesting and I know it can help the community and delete those spammers.

There are alternative ways to check if the bounty manager is good or not. First, check his/her recent projects, if he/she has a good success rate then he can be qualified as one of the best bounty managers. Why would you make another system about campaign if you can personally check his/her background on bounty managing.

I don't get it, do you really want to avoid spamming in threads or check if the bounty managers are qualified to handle a good campaign and gain a sure profit to them because they have the license?

Well, it would have to be theymos that decides on who can post, and who can't. I think just implementing restrictions on who can create threads in the bounty section should be more than enough. That way we aren't selecting a few to license, and only restricting it by rank. Then we should actually punish the campaign managers that aren't looking after their campaigns, and quite honestly promoting spam.

If we will ever have one thing like this, we will have over 50% of managers here without licence.
I don't think it will never happen, I hope it will happen but I can't see who decide the licences.
I'm seeing some managers with red trust account(s) but they post new campaings with no problems, so clearly the red trust does not limit them, perhaps other measures are needed.

In the deep of my laziness, i show you my bounty manager license!


Should i write "Verified Awesomeness ✔" so its looks like Mitchell personal text? Lol.
/s

Reddit and web-forums are different beasts altogether but both have positives and negatives. I don't really like reddit and don't use it, but they don't have the issue of sig spam and if they did then it would just be the same as it is here.


I don't think this place is struggling to survive at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The board continues to grow, but the majority of traffic and new users coming here are just shitposters looking to earn and it's certainly struggling to be a place that is actually useful for anything other than earning by spamming.


Delegating workload would have a huge impact, and I'm not sure why things haven't been done already. I'm not just talking about making new admins either. Most sub boards need their own dedicated mod and this is something I've been requesting for years. More staff should be added as well to help with the clean up. If some users can spend hours upon hours reporting tens of thousands of posts then they'll probably make a pretty good staff member and they can then handle these things themselves without having to waste time reporting them which in turn just puts more pressure and stress on the current staff. New staff members and sub-board mods could be made/assigned with the click of a few buttons for theymos and this can be done today. If theymos doesn't have time to run things like the forum ad slots of respond to emails and restore accounts etc then this business should all be delegated.


What annoyed me the most about that is he didn't even put them into simple 'yes' or 'no' categories. He's smart and careful what he says so nobody can hold it against him and say, well you said yes to this or you would do that, or you said you would never do this etc, and at the same time he didn't commit to anything either so he doesn't have to do any of them at any point. My only solace is that he didn't actually outright slam them all with an exclusive 'no'. I'd really like to get his reasoning for why he is against some suggestions though, especially things like requiring at least one merit to become a Junior Member etc. That is essential in my opinion if we're not going to remove their signatures altogether and nobody else has really made a workable suggestion on how to stop or at least limit how we can prevent spammers and bots getting paid to post or copy and paste here. Hopefully he just thinks it needs tweaking etc rather than outright never doing it in some capacity.  


This forum isn't decentralised. There needs to be some minimal rules and they need to be enforced otherwise it is just chaos and disorder and the greedy and nefarious dominate over everything ruining it for everyone else. The forum can't continue on as it is or we might as well just rename/rebrand it shitcointalk or getpaidtopost.org because that's all this place has become. A forum for people just to post generic crap to get paid. 95% of people here don't care about contributing to a discussion, just churning out a mindless sentence of drivel then moving on to the next thread. Rinse and repeat all day over however many accounts you have. This can't be acceptable and is why there needs to be rules and regulations to make sure it doesn't happen and ruin the board in the first place making it unfit for its true purpose.  


It is huge, and I'm glad it's here, but it needs tweaking. It stops people from ranking up by shitpositng but it does nothing about bots and spammers being able to get paid as Juniors. Requiring merit or removing their signatures would help with this. People also need to start giving out merit more and more merit sources need to be added. There's quite a lot of people making decent or even great posts that just go unmerited a lot of time and I think even decent posters will take a very long time to get to Hero or Legendary if they start from scratch.

I don't think he meant a license as the literal sense. Probably, just whitelisting certain members to be able to run campaigns rather than allowing everyone, and anyone like it is right now. theymos would be perfectly in his rights to limit who can, and can't run campaigns on the forum. Although, I doubt that it will happen.

Bitcointalk has no authority to license anyone for anything, and I'm sure if the government found out about anything like that happening, they'd take a very keen interest in it.

Theymos can run the forum how he wants to, though, and I think that should include some consequences for being a shitty campaign manager.  The managers of bitcoin-paying campaigns are pretty good, but those bounty managers totally suck.  They'll take anyone and I think some of them have even been caught abusing their own bounties with alt accounts.  A lot of them are a bunch of greedy, unethical cretins who are also irresponsible and couldn't care less if the forum gets wrecked because of all the spam.  Theymos could do something about them, but he's into letting people basically do what they want.  

He did make the merit system, which was huge, but I do think he needs to crack down on the managers--but it's not going to be in the form of licensing.

Well, I'm just going by his words.  In the real world, the word "license" means a very specific thing.

My eyes are burning! someone has already nailed it.


The one that gives the idea , and the ones who's fraud.

Rules doesn't mean centralization though. So I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here. Licensing managers would be centralization. But maybe its exactly what we need.

You can consider this topic[1] to be a license for campaign managers.
If advertisers are committed to selecting trusted members, most of the problems will end, but their goal is to get the ad to the most significant number with the lowest possible cost.[pay for shits  ]


[1] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/overview-of-bitcointalk-signature-anti-spam-campaign-managers-4412712

Somehow i don't like the idea. In the first moment it seems to be a good thought, but if i think about it for a while i come to the conclusion that the idea is not very good. It certainly wouldn't change anything in the current situation here in the forum. Besides, it would certainly cause even more problems if some people decide who can work as a bounty manager and who can't. That alone has a lot of potential for a lot of trouble. So i don't think and hope that something like that comes into the forum.   

More rules. Absolutely what people want when they ask for decentralization.

Honestly when people say r/btc is better than bitcointalk, I don't agree with them because there's a lot of FUD and other shit, but now I really think r/btc is better than bitcointalk,maybe I am being delusional at the moment, but bitcointalk is struggling to survive. People have to beg, and go to much lower levels to get tiniest of things done here. I don't want to blame the admins here, but they aren't doing so very well in delegating work.

This forum is also turning into a Battle Royal, to see who survives till the end. It would actually help if theymos can explain why some of the more important suggestions can't be implemented. Just saying 'no' gives us a blank feeling. It would be a long post, but at least then people will get why it can't implemented. People are living here in the dark.

Hello darkness,my old friend.

"What if?" What if we didn't allow ICOs to shit up the forum without repercussions? What if Junior Members couldn't even have a signature without earning some merit first? What if we didn't allow people to shitpost on 200 accounts? What if theymos actually started delegating workload between staff instead of ignoring the multitude of problems we have here? What if theymos actually implements just one of the hundreds of suggestions that have been made to improve the forum over the years? What if, what if, what if? Anything that requires any sort of effort by the admins or staff likely won't get implemented anytime soon if at all and we'll just continue to hide behind "freedom" and a laissez faire attitude. Well, when you let people do whatever they want this is what you get. Anarchy and mass abuse by people cutting corners to maximise profits for themselves whilst not caring about the damage they do in the process. The closest you'll likely get to your suggestion is enforcing the signature campaign guidelines we created. If a campaign comes here and is either lazy and/or incompetent then they should be given warnings and then punishments if nothing changes. If this happened then the culture would quickly change around here and campaigns would start doing their job because they can't afford to not be able to advertise here. As long as we let them get away with doing nothing then they will continue to do so. Nobody is going to do work that they don't need to, especially when running even a small campaign of 50 users likely amounts to the hours of a part time job. Some of these ICO campaigns accept anyone and have thousands of users on them and yet do nothing to police them and as such they are exploited by hundreds of bots and farmers that just exacerbates the problems. They don't care about that either because anyone who is wearing their signature is another person advertising for them whether they're shitposting, botting, or not. Until that changes then nothing else will change.

If members start to avoid spammy bounties then these bounty managers will not get the job to manage shit bounties. They will have to restructure their rules or they will have to disappear.  

Besides, it's not forums job to recommend bounty managers, it's the project team's job to pick a good manager for the success of their projects. If they feel happy with a shit bounty manager then let it be. Let them waste their money (actually they do not waste much money, those tokens are their money which are useless most of the times IMO).

As a community we need to focus on reporting more then creating this kind of suggestion types post. These are useless because theymos does not have much time to look on these issues.

I wonder if theymos is really helping the forum by making this forum a one man army team or making it worse as we are going. I also wonder why does not he still found anyone who he can trust where there are a lot of DTs around us. Does he not trust his own DTs, to help him out with sensitive issues?

---

Sorry, I had to spell it. I am with those people who really want the forum to perform better than it is now. One man against hundreds of thousands members seems impossible to me. We are growing in number rapidly but seems like if anything happens (I wish him live long) to theymos then everything will shut down from that very moment. Their will be no bitcoinTalk.org and the community surrounding it (I guess?).

Who's going to screen them? This forum gives users a lot of freedom to say and do as they please. As much as I hate spam, what you're saying could easily be abused to give more power and money to a few users.

What if there's a license for bounty managers? Bounty managers would be screened before giving them the bounty manager license. I think this would help with our problems about shitposting, because bounty managers will surely check the posts of their participants if they failed to do it and reaches the tolerable limit they're licensed will be removed.