Topic: Proactive fighting with spammers. Doing it the right way - page 5. (Read 7125 times)

Really-really. Just because it makes no particular sense banning them (I mean novice users). They will just register one more time and start posting crap all over again (likely even more aggressively), and we are essentially back to square one. But if you don't ban them, there is still a slight chance that they will try to join a decent signature campaign and start posting sense...

Or will have to start posting sense before they might have a chance to join such a campaign

Oh really? You have no idea how many users are constantly being banned. But users wearing sigs are more likely to be banned and are more noticed as more people tend to report them. Those not wearing sigs tend to get a little leeway because they are not reported as much. However the staff still bans them as we see them.

That's like the primary reason for which the campaigns are not completely banned. They let newbies earn a little, and provide bonuses to people that truly contribute. That said, whether a service is useful or not is irrelevant. Rules are rules and should be applied to all as equally as possible. That said, Bitmixer is a bad centralized service that will get replaced by Joinmarket anyway. They should be the first one to be completely blacklisted.

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Read the post from hilarious. Also: This spam causes a lot more damage than good. Quality members are either completely ignoring certain sections or jumping the ship.

Obviously, I was referring to forum rules and guidelines, or "laws" as you yourself call them. Did you really not get it?


Okay, but why we don't see users banned in massive amounts for shitposting who don't wear any signature at all? For example, a good part of new users are posting complete junk, but I don't see any of them banned for just that. As I see it, the mods are shrinking from banning users (and that's good in fact) and just trying to shift responsibility to a service which is not in any way affiliated with Bitcointalk. But why would the service care if the Bitcointalk moderators themselves are not following their own "laws" in respect to shit posters. This seems to be the primary reason why services such as Bitmixer are made into scapegoats...

Could I call that a sort of guilt sublimation?


But if the service is legit as it seems to be, allegedly does a lot of good to Bitcoin as well as attracts a lot of new users into it, would banning it do more harm than good in the long run even if the majority of their posters are posting pure crap?

In this way, punishing the service itself looks counterproductive, but I seem to repeat myself

We are not employees and the money staff get paid is not a salary but just a thanks for helping out, but with the amount of spam that is caused by sig spammers it is unmanageable and you would probably need ten full time and fully paid mods just to deal with it but we shouldn't have to be dealing with it if businesses would run their campaigns properly. The problem here is entirely down to greedy/lazy businesses who want to get the cheapest advertising possible with little to no effort on their part.


I've suggested we try an outright ban if not on this forum then with the launch of the new one. Probably wouldn't help much if people know it's only temporary but it would be an interesting experiment to see how much traffic dropped off.


Of course they're encouraging spammers by their ineptitude and inadequacy to properly run their campaign. They pay people to post shit. People wouldn't be posting streams of crap if they weren't going to get paid for it. If campaign operators did their job efficiently there would be no issue in the first place but what happens when there is no manager? What do we do then? Let's take bitmixer for example. As others have said they will pay anyone for any post as long as it's over 75 characters regardless of content. They would literally pay a user for posting I don't know what to write but as long as it's a minimum of 75 characters I'll get paid or aaaaaaasssssssddddddfffffffgggggghhhhhjjjjjkkkklllllppppoooiiiiuuuuyyyytttrreew wqqqaaassddffghhhjjjkkkll;;ppoiuyttrewqqasdgf in every thread if staff didn't intervene. This cannot be acceptable and this shouldn't be left up to staff to clean up. If you pay people for whatever crap they post with nobody checking it then it is going to be abused and you are paying for it to happen so they're liable and this needs to stop. It's rare that you see anyone on bitmixer write more than a sentence or two because why would they? And most campaigns don't really care about the content because one post is one advert of theirs being shown regardless if it's one word or a ten paragraphs.


Do you have an army of alts on bitmixer or something? How is it not bitmixers fault? Of course it is. They are paying people to do this. So what do we do? Just let bitmixer continue to pay people to shit all over the forum and we as staff are meant to waste our time day after day running around after them cleaning up their mess? Don't be silly. If you have a leaky toilet pipe squirting shit all over in the every direction do you just run around like a madman trying to put a bucket under every hole that appears to catch the waste and then say problem solved? No. You fix the source of the problem. Shit campaigns are the problem. Bitmixer do nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. And because of that 95% of their users post utter rubbish. It doesn't matter if they have a handful of posters who make good posts. That's irrelevant. They can find other campaigns. Staff are not here to babysit bitmixer and every other campaign who do nothing but pay people to post spam. We shouldn't have to clean up their mess because it shouldn't be happening in the first place. We ban dozens of spammers a day but it doesn't do anything when the campaigns do nothing but keep encouraging it by paying users for whatever crap they can be bothered to do and this is the solution. If they can't run a campaign properly then you can't advertise here in such a way any longer and if you want to continue advertising here in such a way then get your shit together and stop paying people to crap everywhere.

What does that have to do with anything?

Think of it this way. The participants in the sig campaign are like employees of the company who are hired in and work in a "foreign country" (bitcointalk). According to the doctrine of Respondeat superior, the employer (bitmixer.io) is responsible for any illegal actions of the employee as long as the actions were done within the scope of the employer-employee relationship. In this case, that relationship is that the employer wants the employee to post on Bitcointalk. The "laws" of Bitcointalk state that you are not allowed to shitpost, and that "law" falls under the scope of the employer-employee relationship for sig campaigns. Thus the service is responsible for their sig campaign participants and any "illegal" actions that the participants engage in while posting on this forum (i.e. shit posting).

If the service has been warned multiple times that their participants are shit posting but do nothing about it, then what are we supposed to do? If we leave them alone, more shit posters will continue to join. If we continue to ban the shit posters, more shit posters will still join. The only way to stop that endless cycle is to prevent shit posters from joining. The only way to do that is to outright ban their signature campaign, not necessarily ban them from the forum, but ban them from creating a sig campaign so that they are no longer paying people to shit post.


And what do you suggest is solving the problem "efficiently and effectively"? Banning a signature campaign outright solves the problem very efficiently and probably very effectively. It completely shuts down the incentives that those shit posters have to continue to post. It incentivises other campaigns to step up their game so that they themselves won't be banned too.

We are assigning personal responsibility to both the campaign managers and the service that they are hired by. The service is still responsible for the participants and for hiring a competent campaign manager. If both of them are warned about shit posters and nothing happens, then both should be punished as they are fail to properly manage their campaign.

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Keep in mind that banning the campaign is a last resort. That will only happen if the campaign manager and the service continuously ignores our warnings to clean up their campaign.

Unlike many others, I've actually read the forum rules. As they themselves say they are just guidelines, and the ultimate decision in respect to banning someone is still on the mod. Anyways, here's an example from another thread:


Could this post be considered as a shit post? I guess this is exactly what a shit post might look like. But I don't think that a sane mod would ban this poster. How come? Because judging what makes a shit post is totally subjective, and if the mod decided to ban users for making such useless posts, he would inadvertently end up heavily abusing his powers. Let's face the facts and cut the crap, had the rules been meticulously followed, most users would have soon been banned for just being off-topic here and there...

Because of the rule #2 (no off-topic posts)

We all agree that something has to be done about this whole spam thing. But the thing people don't seem to agree on is what the solution to this whole problem will be. Whether spammers get banned or not, there are always people who agree to this with much satisfaction, and another group of people who think it's a way too drastic solution. Either way, all these threads about spammers have not lead to anything yet.

No, it is not. Read the list of forum rules properly. People have been getting banned for years because of this.

Now we have a service which does something good to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem directly as well as indirectly by allowing a lot of users to earn bitcoins and thus letting them get involved with the Bitcoin community. We have users who are actively advertising this service in a constructive way. And then someone wants to ban it simply because some (well, a lot of) users promoting this service are posting shit...

Would that do any good to Bitcoin?


I would venture a guess and say that banning these users would be a shameless abuse of the ban-hammer. Yes, they are mostly posting total shit, but this is evidently not enough to start giving out bans

I understand your point. I am part of the Bitmixer campaign for the simple reason that I like the service that they offer since I use it very frequently, and I like the fact that it is an automated campaign with barely any issues.

Do I get bothered by other spammers from Bitmixer? Yes, of course, but these people should either get a heavy warning to up their quality to a level where people can understand what they are saying, and that their posts are at least related to the OP or the post that they quote, or they should simply have their signatures removed by an administrator or a global moderator (if it's at least within his power) including with a temp ban or a full ban depending on the intensity of the shitposts.

It's actually very simple, administrators have the power to hand out bans to spammers, let them do it.

Assigning personal responsibility to campaign managers in regard to what users enrolled in their campaigns post should work better. Kicking a spammy user from a signature campaign would most certainly make him stop posting altogether without banning him directly. Die-hard spammers who are spamming regardless of whether they are wearing a signature or not should be the mods' concern, of course. I'm curious if you understand that your own posts are considered as spammy simply because you post under the signature campaign which is claimed to encourage shit posting?

Personally, I'm free from such prejudices, but there are different opinions

I agree that the amount of spam and nonsensical useless posts has grown,the problem has to be curbed
I have several proposals:
1.punishment system: enable mods to check(random check several participants,for example) campaign members,"award" negative trust to users AND campaign managers who are blatantly ignoring  warnings
2.encourage mods to run the said checks,require every signature campaign make a deposit before their campaign start(could be a set sum or a percantage of the monthly expenditures,easily counted via sheets)
the deposit is refundable (50-100%) if no rules were broken during the campaigns' run ,if there are consistent transgressions-keep the deposit and redistribute it among moderators
3.introduce global "post quality" rating,along with "trust"
4.signature campaign must become a privelege and a sign of a quality poster,not like today ,where people are creating own "black lists" to put every commercial signature bearer on to it,regardless of how good their posts are
for that to happen campaign managers should run more stringent screening process and campaigns must be limited to,lets say,twice less people and 2-3 times less posts weekly/monthly as it is now
this should result in higher per-post price,less total spam and higher quality posts

Banning users only is not efficient. Banning an account or ten of someone who owns a e.g. a hundred secret other alts is not going to do much especially if the service and manager keeps letting their accounts in (shitposter quality). Obviously we won't ban managers on sight, you will be informed in the coming guidelines.

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Regarding the accounts: I've already reported both IIRC. If they are not banned, then you can blame either:
1) Global moderators.
2) Forum admins.
All other staff members are unable to ban (excluding nuking newbies).

Those already get nuked on sight/report. This argument is invalid.

End - broken - English spam - this makes me smile but I encounter several of this posts. All I cant tolerate is a newbie,posting an off-topic thread promoting products with their links. Usually health consumables,pills, and drinks.They should be eliminated.

Banning users should indeed be the top priority, and not the managers.

I am quite active here and stumble over all the broken English shitposters, account farmers (which mostly are not enrolled in a campaign) that are posting 3 or 4 times in a row in the same thread with their alts in just a matter of 10 minutes or so, and still I keep seeing them every day shitposting again.

It's too obvious that these people are active, and I'm not the only one that is able to spot them. But the fact that I see them everyday doing the same, just shows that the ban hammer isn't being used enough.

I pointed out a few accounts to you Lauda, but the person operating these accounts is still shitposting with his over-obvious way of writing and sentence line up.

As Fedor Dostoevsky said, better acquit ten guilty men than punish one innocent. I understand that forum administration has the right to do what they want, but would this be quite in line with their own Constitution and ten Commandments?

Or are laws carved in stone rewritten in blood?


I have to disagree, for the sake of justice. Bitmixer.io is not part of BTCT, so they cannot possibly be found guilty or faulty by the forum laws. But if we extended the forum rules on them, even in that case they cannot be convicted and sentenced. Why should they try to enforce their own anti-spam rule if this is exactly what mods should do? I don't like shit posters maybe even more than you, but you are evidently trying to first humanize and then villainize the service. Right now I can't come up with a decent solution in respect to how resolve such and similar issues, but outright banning services would be highly counterproductive...

Unless they do or offer something really nasty, of course


That's what I suggest myself. But banning services just doesn't cut it. Punishing whole campaigns themselves would essentially mean that you openly admit your failure to resolve the issue efficiently and effectively

There are always going to be ways to counter something. However, if you do this then you should be permanently blacklisted. It would also get detected quite quickly IMO.

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Anyhow, what I'm proposing is an "all-out attack" of the problem:
1) Stricter evaluation and bans.
2) Ban users.
3) Ban managers.
4) Ban services.
5) Negative ratings for all 3 groups.

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If you aren't willing to work towards a better environment for everyone, and you are actually making it worse, then why should anyone tolerate you?

Countermeasure 1: reroute links in their signatures somewhere else? That will for sure stop playing whack-a-manager with alts.

Most campaigns don't want users with red trust. A red trust label "spammer" from a Moderator could make the account worthless to farmers. It may also be possible to disable the signature for any account that has red trust on a certain DT level.

Yesterday I saw a good post from someone with a Yobit-signature. I checked his post history, and it really felt like such a waste to see him in that campaign. The image of the signature really makes his posts look bad, while they're not.

Clearly, they earn from it. And as long as there are no repercussions for them, they keep earning.
Devil's advocate: why do more work to earn less?

Go for it Usually I read topics filled with complaints about spam, I might have missed some topics, but this is the first time I read about plans to take action against it.

punishments for people who run the campaigns very poorly is needed

or this forum will be full of rubbish.