Topic: Proposal: Rename the "Press" board to "Spammer of the Month" board - page 4. (Read 1398 times)

I'm starting to think the problem runs deeper.  Why are we struggling to generate stimulating discussion on topical events?  I feel like it's something that should come naturally.  But lately it isn't.  How can we better facilitate engagement?

Is it purely because the topics in the press board are largely low quality copypasta which links to utter dross masquerading as news?  I think it would help to clarify what actually qualifies when it comes to "notability" and to mandate that topic starters in that sub include their own thoughts an opinions to accompany the quoted segments they're posting.  But I still don't know if that will actually fix the problem.

Is there a chance it just boils down to apathy?  Imagine if there were plenty of good quality topics with in-depth analysis.  The kind of thing we all say we want to see.  Those would naturally drown out the low-effort, low-quality topics we're seeing.  And yet there's no reason I can see why we don't have topics like that.  Aside from just the obvious fact, which is that not many people are making them.  Is it possible we're simply leaving the door wide open for shit topics because we're not making enough good ones?

Not all publicity is good publicity in my opinion.
Most of the traffic generated in those boards (press and altcoin) are from spammers and bounty hunters who do not care about the forum, but are only interested in reaching a certain post quota inorder to get a couple of tokens, this is net negative to the forum as it does not improve the quality of discussions, it makes the forum unappealing to older members and puts lots of work on the mods.

I doubt that this helps the forum. It gives backlinks and therefore possibly some search engine boost to those "news" sites but seems unlikely to work the other way. I tried googling some of the titles from the Press board and in many cases Bitcointalk is not in the results and sure as shit none of those sites will link to Bitcointalk.

I don't understand the connection between free speech and bombarding the forum with low-effort posts. A copy-pasted article is a low-effort post, especially one that doesn't include a personal opinion or additional analysis of any kind. Spam and low-effort posts are against the rules and should be deleted.

But there is another reason why admins might be looking the other way.
The forum culture is generally dying out. People don't want to write on online forums as much as they did before. The press board (spammy as it is) still generates traffic in the same way that the altcoin boards do. The admins might not be willing to put another nail in the coffin by deleting a massive amount of threads in the altcoin and press boards and start banning more people. After all, "all publicity is good publicity".     

Maybe an update to Mitchell's bot that reports threads with OPs that use hashtags or links to the same page (not domain) - eg. A bunch of posts that all link to https:// cointelegraph .com

It's not easy (nor practical) to enforce the current rules. As long as someone incentivizes Joe to earn few bucks by copy-pasting articles to the Press board, it's pointless to continue reporting. Even if both sides, you as a member and the moderators, report and delete frequently, this mess isn't going to be tackled. It's like squashing the water.

What we do need is a radical change which will retain free speech, but will, alongside, discourage those users from shitposting.

I'm all for free speech and freedom to post anything you like, and have defended both on multiple occasions on these forums, but I draw a line when your posts start affecting other users' ability to actually use the forum for discussion. We don't need any new rules or restrictions to clean up this mess, but rather we just need to enforce the ones we already have.

Interesting you should reference this post:

Is that not the situation we find ourselves in more and more? The barrier to participation at the moment is wading through pages and pages of spam to find a topic worth reading or an interesting discussion. Many of the best people aren't going to go to the trouble of doing this, they'll just find a less spammy community. The people who are willing to wade through pages and pages of spam are the spammers themselves who are only here to try to make a quick buck.

The thing is, in a balanced world, you (and other users) shouldn't feel like that. How many users have "gave up" on either reporting spamming users, stop visiting some board due to its spam/"robot" posting and even stop interacting with the forum itself due to their efforts/call of attention "apparently" being unanswered? I totally understand the forum mission to be "as free as possible" but there is a fine balance between "free as possible" and pass the feeling to the community that something is always being done to prevent this escalate of douple-triple post users and spammer one line posts (while keeping the forum motto true to its roots).

Don't take me wrong here - I'm sure that there are a lot of things that go by "in the background" of the forum structure that most of us don't even know that it exists - after all the forum already has a considerable hierarchy and I'm sure there are some kind of meetings/reunions that take place to evaluate everything : from the current workload of the mods to the state of specific boards. If this indeed does happen, one question that I totally believe some of us would make is : "If they are fully aware of the current status - in this case of the Press board for example - why aren't they doing anything about it?". I can't really give you the answer that we're looking for but I do believe that we are able to keep the forum mission alive and still manage to bring back the trust of our users regarding some subs that should be in their radar (such as Bitcoin discussion). What about having yearly, or bi-yearly meetings to really evaluate the moderation of each board and see if it's either enough / the mod is inactive / it needs another mod? We've already reached a dimension that we truly need a balanced level of help running in the background making sure that we are still captivating to new users (that is easy at the moment but mostly for the bad reasons (bounty campagins cough cough)) but also still encourage long time users to continue with us.

I believe that our staff members truly do an impeccable job of running the forum - I can't imagine what it would look like without them. I just think that it's bad to know that for some users some parts of the forum are being put on the ignore list simply due to how "spammy" they have become isn't something really healthy for any of us. I do know that finding moderators or, even better, users that could be trusted in order to run things in here is something that should be carefully assessed, but from what I see there are some reputable members that have shown solidarity and that are willing to help the forum , being in the role of a moderator or just like a "helper" of the moderation team.

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[1]https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.40849533

Maybe they are paying him, but somehow I doubt they need such type of marketing here. He is wearing a signature, so that's where the motivation for spam might come from. Copy-pasting existing articles, adding maybe a sentence or two, and you are done. On to the next post. It's an easy way to up your post count.

That would just cause the spam to spill over to other subs.

At one point in time, we had better moderation in the Bitcoin Discussion board, but I don't think the admins view the Press sub as an important board of this forum anymore to want to do anything to change it. You can get your daily crypto news anywhere you want now. The press board is of minor importance nowadays.   

I gave up hoping to see some major changes some time back, I now only just read through and try to use a filter to choose what to interact with and what not to (I personally do not like the idea of ignoring a user or a board).
It's sort of ironic that as Bitcoin (the network) rises and gets more popular, bitcointalk (the chat forum), gradually declines, or at least a part of it does.

Yeah. It's a real shame, because the usual one line sig spammers tend to avoid the Press board for whatever reason, presumably because it is easier to churn out nonsense in Bitcoin Discussion or Altcoin Discussion. On the odd occasion someone like DaveF posts a good topic, then you get a good discussion with minimal spam. The spammers who have taken over the Press board are a different breed as I highlighted in the first post in this thread.

And so goes on the downward spiral. Spam isn't addressed, non-spamming users put it on ignore, the spam worsens even further, more users ignore it, and so on, until we reach where we are now where it is pretty much an unusable board.

I've been saying this for literally years (see my post below from 3 years ago), but for some reason we have done absolutely nothing to address it and Bitcoin Discussion is still a spamfest:

jgarzik is not currently a mod, the same way that MiningBuddy is not a mod or the newbie section. If you look at each of their profiles, you will see they do not have a staff title. Listing someone as a mod of a section is different than someone actually having mod authority over the section. For whatever reason, Theymos has not removed their names from the header of the sub.

No, or you have to remove signatures everywhere. Besides, I remember seeing spammers without signatures, just spamming their blogs and websites.
The solution for this problem is easy, warning then temporarily ban, not sure if we can disable posting there for spammers.

It is a honorary title for jgarzik rather than a position. That is what I told by a mod or an admin in the past. I can't remember anymore.
The problem with the press sub is having duplicated topics with the bitcoin discussion section. People prefer to post there because most signatures campaign accept it rather than the press sub. At the end, we have few members posting and having few spammers there will look exaggerated.
I blame partially the staff for the current situation. I should say that I reported so many infractions in the past when I was more active and they dealt with it in few hours but what I was frustrated about is that they don't ban them when they repeat several times their intentional mistakes like coinidol.
I don't want to see the press sub closing because the quality of the dozen posts there is better than the hundreds spam I see in the bitcoin discussion topics.
Good luck for everyone trying to fix it.

This I do not understand.
Updates usually take an awful long time to be implemented on the forum and within that time period, the forum would likely have already lost a lot of members who for one reason or the other didn't find the forum welcoming or they couldn't cope with the tons of garbage posts. Lots of boards have become spam fests and the only solution is to put them on ignore;

Bitcoin discussion which should be the top board on s forum like this (and indeed is the top board by arrangement) has become almost impossible to read through, Economics board which was also one of my favorites had also been run over.

These are urgent issues, but the response to them is not so urgent or non existent.

I don't think I've looked at Press in well over 4 years, and honestly I forgot that section even existed until just now.  Lol.  And to think that I get 99.9% of my crypto news from this forum.  You'd think I'd leave a section like that un-ignored, but nope.  It ought to be one of the best ones, but just like Bitcoin Discussion it's turned into a travesty of what it's supposed to be.

Not having seen what's going on in Press, I can't attest to how spammy it's become as of late, but I tend to believe Leo when he says it's pretty bad. 

That's unfortunate, and why is it that this forum, with all the money it has at its disposal, can't afford to pay a sufficient number of moderators to keep boards like Press and all of the other spam pits clean and shiny?  If a mod has gone inactive, I'm pretty sure there are at least 3-5 members who'd jump at the chance to be a mod--and I'd imagine that Theymos has a mental list of members he'd consider, so why are sections allowed to go unmoderated?  I just don't get it.

I'm one of the persons tired to report posts on the Pressboard and less and less interested to read it over the months. It looks more like my RSS than a place to discuss the latest news. I complained several times, and probably once on a topic I created but nothing change.

Look at the guys posting useless stuff, sometimes not even related to Bitcoin. "Not related to Bitcoin" is probably the most used reason I gave while reporting (and I reported so many). I don't believe (for a reason) they're rewarded by a website to post their blog posts, but guess who should we blame again ??.? 
This section is easy to 'spam': just copy past a TLTR AND and a link and voila!

The board isn't active as some others but at least it's one of the few where we can get a discussion without seeing shitpots all over the thread
I prefer to read a thread with just 4-5 replies than a thread with 10 pages full of parrots

Well, let's start with the fact that you have to be a person who is difficult to surprise, since keeping the section clean you will have to delete 95% of the content. Frankly, I myself would have published VERY interesting content in the first person in this section, if this section were put in order. Because I often see uninteresting superficial crypto news that becomes fascinating if you get to the source.

For example, the McAfee archive ... has it already been decrypted? Not so long ago, I added a bookmark a post with links, but I feel it would be much more interesting if this information was in the news section, (analyzing the details together is much more fun). In addition, Theymos does not pay a fixed salary (this is probably the main thing), and for sure he will not agree to give authority to a person who is primarily interested in money ... although in vain.

Having a "press" website myself, I could moderate the board (not for free though - don't have time for most nonprofit endeavors these days) since I can tell if a page (source) is up to journalistic standards or not.

I get the sense the positions are more ceremonial or honorary these days.  A 'preserved for posterity' kinda deal.  This place likes its history.



Yep.  I've been calling for this for a while now.

Like I said, it used to be a big deal when any news article was written about bitcoin. That is no longer true. I want to talk about the news, not the news article.