Topic: New guidelines are needed for the Press board (Read 1192 times)

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I wanted to report it as well but didn't.  At the same time, there is a discussion between people, I didn't want to kill it either, so I let it go.
I usually stick with
- anything not related to Bitcoin (Alts news, etc)
- anything related to an enterprise, no matter which one. I consider it like a press release, an announcement about a company and its product, not directly about Bitcoin
- anything with an article totally copy-pasted from well-know sources (Forbes & co)
- from time to time seo spams, etc


And while I'm on it, there is something I really hate but I know nothing can be done. When they post their big pictures so useless to the discussion. You never see a sexy lady naked on a sofa

Good point, and thanks to LeGaulois for updating the title.

Most recent update, I have an unhandled report for the last 48 hours on this thread: [2019-11-05] Bitcoin Price Hits $11.6K on Argentinian Crypto Exchange

Usual spam from bitcoinist by the usual bitcoinist spammer (likely employee). The article is barely even about bitcoin - it is about Argentina, with a single paragraph stating that the price of bitcoin is at a premium. Hardly what I would call "notable". The OP has provided no original comments or thoughts. The thread is just Cryptotalk spammers spamming their spam back and forth at each other.

Not a notable source, not really about bitcoin, the single paragraph that is about bitcoin isn't newsworthy and certainly isn't notable, no original thoughts, no good discussion. A complete spam topic and thread, yet the report goes "unhandled".

I really don't even know anymore. It seems like there is no desire to clean this mess up.

I can't tell if the lack of impetus behind this thread is due to only a small number of people being unhappy with the content being posted in the Press board, or if it is simply being overlooked because of the undescriptive topic title.  Does anyone else think new guidelines are needed?

It's a slightly less terrible article than many of others, but it is still simply describing price movements, which anyone can see for themselves at coinmarketcap. Hardly some ground breaking news. It should be trashed in my opinion.

Agreed, but we don't need a consensus here. All we need is theymos or a global mod to state "Here is the line. Cross it and your post will be trashed." If after a month or two we need to relax or tighten the rules, that's fine, but the current status of "anything goes", from price speculation to articles about exchanges (i.e. not about bitcoin), is untenable. There are other boards (Speculation, Exchanges) where these articles which are categorically not "notable press hits" could still be posted.

I don't think that's feasible, since you don't know the quality of discussion that might be generated until after the article is posted, or how long it might take. You would then have to accept pretty much any article and leave the thread open for a few days to see if any good discussion is started. That would clutter the board up and be a nightmare to try to moderate.

I guess it becomes a question of where the line should be drawn.  The most recent topic is now [2019-11-03] Bitcoin YTD Performance Exceeds 140%, Outperforms Most Traditional.  Again from a cryptomedia site, again primarily regarding price, but I suppose at least this time it's more about measurable statistics than unfounded predictions.  Does it qualify as "newsworthy"?  What should the criteria of "newsworthy" be?  Is that price topic more worthy of discussion than McAfee's prognostications?  It feels like a bar needs to be set somewhere, but no one knows where that somewhere is.

Or instead of focusing on what's considered newsworthy, should the focus instead be on what generates the most compelling discussions?  It is, after all, a discussion forum and not a news archival site.  But again, what guidelines could we possibly set out to encourage that?

In many cases it is even easier to write a couple of lines of spam when you post an article, as you can just lift a couple of sentences from the article and reword them. No original thought required.

That is the only thing holding me back from advocating for an outright ban on all crypto-only "news" sites. As I mentioned above, sometimes a trash article about an interesting subject spawns a good discussion, although it must be said more often than not the good discussion stems from the first couple of posters to reply, and less often from the OP, who is usually guilty of all the things we've just discussed.

Exactly this. The most recent thread in the Press Board is this: [2019-10-26] John McAfee Doubles His Bitcoin Price Prediction. The source is "cryptoglobe.com". The article is poor quality, and about a complete non-event: McAfee's price predictions are not newsworthy by any stretch of the imagination. Now, if that had popped up a month ago, I would have reported it without a second thought and would have bet bitcoin on that report being marked "good". Now, I honestly have no idea, since that article and content are not any more complete trash than the ones I've linked to above which have gone "unhandled".

Not exactly.  The point was that reported posts weren't being deleted because a mod reviewed the post and then marked the report 'bad'.  This indicates that there are differing views to what guidelines should be enforced, so some clarity on that is needed.

People certainly suggested that the crypto-media sites should be excluded from the Press board, or that price speculation isn't newsworthy, but I don't know if any of this is official forum policy yet.  And if it is, it needs to be stated in the guidelines.

I don't think it would be fair to write that sub off until we've actually made an attempt to enforce some new guidelines, and we can't do that if no one actually knows what they are.

The difference between posting just an article and posting the article along with a few lines of vague generalizations is very little and if there aren't any semi-insightful points beyond surface-level nonsense, then it is no different from a one to three-liner in any other section.

We should never be looking at posts that host any quotations as the holistic product of the accumulation but rather as a discussion using the quote as a launchpad. That is: the post should be able to create its own foundation separate of the quote as well as build upon it rather than only the latter.

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For example:

If you have a post like this, we should only be concentrating on the last line to gauge for spam/not-spam.

this article talks about the price increasing, what do you think about the analysis regarding the bitcoin price?

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Addendum: question-based replies are some of the most rancid forms of spam because they "kind-of" pass as substantial but you could ask any vague bullshit question about a general premise, like "why price go up". Not sure about the moderation policy.

I also notice that CryptoBry is trying to increase number of its posts by posting in Press, but also in Economic and Altcoin boards on the same principle by posting some news with the addition of his personal opinion. I write my opinion about his posting in his last thread, and so far there are no new entries from him.

That board only needs one moderator who will check it every day and delete anything that does not meet the criteria for that board. Closing that board would not solve the problem of bad news posting, some users are posting the same content in Bitcoin Discussion, Economics, Altcoin Discussion. In other words, the problem would only be moved to other parts of the forum.

Back on topic. Since my original post, I noticed the 'Press' board is cleaner, I believe there were more members reporting the topics. There are still a few examples like CryptoBry's threads, so I would say there is still a change needed. Perhaps to disable the signatures to be displayed would be the best, even if some will think it's too radical


When you're used to reading the board you know which topic to not open.
If they don't know what to spam, the news is the perfect shortcut. You post the title, a paragraph, a link and voila! You can twist a sentence or 2 to look like you are adding your opinion to appear less a spammer. so pathetic.


True but some users don't really want to see the Press mixed with Bitcoin discussion.

I think it would be a shame to see it go, as for the most part the spammers seem to avoid it (even with the ongoing Cryptotalk spam) and, particularly over the last few months, the quality of discussion is generally much higher than you get in Bitcoin Discussion.*

There's an argument to be made to simply ban all crypto-only "news" sites, but I think that would be a step too far. Although the articles they write are poor-quality, and the majority are click-bait nonsense (see the links in my post above) occasionally they touch on an actually newsworthy topic. When those articles are posted, they generate a discussion which is much more interesting and worthwhile than the article itself.

Perhaps something along the lines of to be "notable", the article either has to come from a notable source (i.e. mainstream media - CNN, Fox, BBC, Reuters, etc.) OR has to be about notable events (e.g. the economy of an entire county or the future of bitcoin itself, not "Winklevoss tweets bitcoin good, banks bad").

I don't think my recent unhandled reports mean no one is looking at them, especially considering I've had others dealt with in the same time period. I think more likely is the moderator(s) who is looking at them doesn't think they warrant deletion, which is kind of my point. I've had dozens of threads exactly like these ones deleted over the last two months, and the board is better off for it. I'm wondering what's changed?

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*The quality of discussion in Bitcoin Discussion is a whole 'nother topic.

A new guideline won't change much if there is nobody to enforce it, what the unhandled reports from o_e_l_e_o seem to indicate.

In the current state you could actually just close the whole section without losing any added value to the forum.

But yeah, deleting all of it, and starting fresh with a dedicated mod could work out, I guess.

Is it perhaps time to lock and archive the (now 7 years old) Guidelines for Press board and make a new one specifically stating what the revised 'notability criteria' is?  I don't know if the spammers will actually read it or not, but, to play devil's advocate, it might be asking a little much to request they follow guidelines we can't even be bothered to formally publish in that sub.    

We need to make it abundantly clear which sources and subjects are not welcome if that's the road we're going down.

Bumping this since the Press section has taken a nosedive again recently.

Since this thread a few months ago, I've been reporting lots of threads in press section with good success for various reasons:
- Not being a notable source (i.e. CoinIdol, CoinTelegraph, CoinDesk, any other crypto "news" sites which just constantly churn out terrible quality click bait)
- Not being about bitcoin (Lots of threads about Libra, altcoins, fiat banking, etc.)
- Not being newsworthy (Mostly articles which are purely price speculation)

If you go to the Press Board and sort by time/date of thread creation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=77.0;sort=first_post;desc), you can see the first page goes back 2 months, and threads generally have around 20 replies. Skip back a few pages and you will see an entire page taken up by a single week worth of topics, most with 0-3 replies. I think it's fair to say the quality of article and discussion in the Press board has gone up with all this extraneous nonsense being filtered out. A couple of the old spammers being employed by the "news" sites I've listed above have also been banned.

However, I am now having several reports against threads going "unhandled" and even a few marked "bad", where I am sure they should have been trashed along with the dozens others I've reported. For example:

[2019-10-17] Luxury Car Manufacturer Begins Accepting Bitcoin - A poor quality article from one of the usual suspect spamming sites, about a single retailer starting to accept bitcoin at a single outlet. How is this in any way a "notable press hit"?
[2019-10-11] Bitcoin Fails at Key Price Hurdle, Risks Return to $8,000 - Another poor quality article from another one of the usual suspects, which simply describes 24 hours of price movements. There is no news in this article; it is purely speculation, and if this is the quality of article which passes as "newsworthy", then we might as well shut the Press board down.

Many of these unhandled reports are against the same user - CryptoBry - who is signature spamming for YoBit. He currently has made 8 out of the last 13 newly created threads, and I have a bunch of good reports against this user (15 in the last month, all from new topics in the Press board), in addition to my now mounting unhandled ones. I've appealed in my report comments for a ban, but none seems forthcoming.

I'm loath to spend my time continuing to reporting these threads to just accumulate unhandled reports. Are we just giving up on the Press section again?

Mostly all the post in press board are been gotten from information shared on telegram forums. They copy and paste it there for information reaching out. Some of the information in press board are informative and enlighten about the happenings in cryptocurrency. I enjoy reading them all

Well as I was saying, I don't think it's going to suddenly make them interested to participate in discussions. They're going to force themselves to write something, and from that moment on if someone feels forced to write something he shouldn't post at all.
(That's why I said they'd just add their shitposts)

This member is another example I was thinking about. When I checked 2 random articles, one was a piece of news 2 years old and the second a copy of an article from Cointelegraph.

There is also ambiguity (or rather confusion) sometimes.

For example, we could read news about coinbase (because of this and that with Bitcoin)
But if Coinbase buys a chips potatoes factory, people think the board is a good place to post

@DooMAD
Smart idea. A bot auto-posting news would be great (if the sources are considered reliable)


Initially, it could be merged with the Bitcoin Discussion board with no problem, but Jesus Christ this board is ill. :/

Yeah, already in 2014. It wouldn't be a great waste to see that section archived, if someone wants to share a piece of interesting news or a news article to spur a discussion, the Bitcoin Discussion board can still be used.

That user could probably be replaced with a few lines of code, heh.  On that note, why not have a bot to scrape news sites and generate the topics, so that people interested in an actual discussion can then talk about them?  All the abuse is taking place in the first post, so that's the part we need to tackle.

As some others he is paid to post for that site, or he is directly connected with that site. In my opinion any topic not related to Bitcoin should be deleted, and this info should be pinned so members finally understand at least that rule.

We have members who abuse that board, there is no doubt with that - look at this one, complete post history in Press board from 2016.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/jgilpulg-914598   user Jgilpulg

Seems like it would be a faff to enforce. Noticed this user today who's posts are 100% in the Press section posting articles to www.visionary-finance.com without any further comment

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/goozij20-2648997     goozij20

Many of the articles are also just about blockchain and not bitcoin-related.