Topic: [Request] 1 Merit to become junior member and access to bounties sub (Read 2625 times)

Hilariousandco did a great job also pushing this suggestion forward. Thanks for him and for theymos too.
Locking the topic since the mission is accomplished 

I think your idea is great. It is favorable to all, your suggestion is a good idea such that if the meta update is like this, many jr.member that was demoted ti newbie would understand much.

Well said, did any noticed today that the amount shitpost on the altcoin discussion reduced by far today? this new system of having 1 merit to be Jr member is really a wonderful idea and i am in support of it.

I don't have anything to add in the suggestions above, consequently all are reasonable to not be implemented. I know Theymos has been reviewing this so let give him more time to this.


Of course, these red tag managers doesn't bother if their participants are spamming or not, as long as they earning from running a bounty then it will be all fine. Is there anything we can expect from these managers? Obviously, nothing.

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Undeniably, spam posts are beyond our control and if these things will implemented we can see this forum in its fresh and informative look.

No idea. Theymos didn't respond when I asked him both publicly and privately. All we can do is hope that he explains his reasoning at some point. My best guess is he doesn't think it will help much or is too restrictive or something, but I would disagree on all fronts. Hopefully he just thinks it needs some tweaking to be effective. Cyrus said this about the matter though:


Which my response to that was:


I didn't get a response back. If what he said was true then it would happen at all ranks begging for merit to move up which barely ever happens. Besides, I would rather deal with minimal amount of begging and merit abuse than not do anything about the thousands of bots and spammers that are getting paid to post nonsense or copy and paste which isn't magically going to sort itself out so we need to do something and making sure these bots and spammers can't get paid for shitposting and copy and pasting as Juniors is a big step in the right direction IMO.

Same feeling here. After looking a post from Theymos on how do he thinks about the suggestion, i am making a confused face. Why does he put 1 merit requirement in the label "Ok and might needed some fix/changes" and then disappear again. We cant win this war because we are just people facing the bots and other people, plus the number of people who care about this spam matters is minority in the forum.

hillariousetc, do you have any guess of the reason why Theymos said that to the suggestion ?

You, I and mostly everyone else seems to agree that this would be a good idea. Sadly theymos doesn't and he's the guy in charge that needs convincing to make these changes. I really hope he gives his reasons as to why he doesn't think it's a good idea because it's essential in my opinion and we're at a point now where you can make good money just by botting hundreds of Junior accounts. This can't be acceptable and needs to change because we can't win a war against bots especially when people are getting paid for them.  

ok, you do make a solid point that chasing bad posts is much more work than working with managers.
But what about the bounty platforms which are running signature campaigns outside bitcointalk?

Still I think that the fastest way to decrease the spam is to enable merit reqirements for Jr.Members and disable signatures for those Jr. who has no merit.

i like the option of signature but the spam in alt-coin and other sections is just so overwhelming so I do like this idea of 1 merit before having the option to use signature
At the start i just could not understand why there is many shitposts, then i learned about bounties.

We are not 'pushing' anyone to do anything. Besides, if this is the case then why would you not do this anyway to buy your way through Member-Hero ranks or just even buy an account? There isn't any logic to what you're saying and you're completely biased in that you're worried this is going to push your further behind in trying to reach a decent rank to earn more. I don't even care if these idiots did try buy merit whether successfully or not. That is still a huge hoop to jump through and it requires time, initiative and money. They're not going to be able to afford to buy x amount of merit for their 3/6/12/200/2000 alt accounts anyway and that's why there needs to be a merit requirement to become a Junior because anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts here for free. It doesn't matter if they never make it past Junior either because when you've got dozens or hundreds or even thousands of accounts copy and pasting other's responses and getting paid for it by ICOs as a Junior you don't need a higher rank and it's big business for doing nothing. Pure passive income that destroys the forum in the process. This needs to change and removing signatures or requiring merit is one of the only ways we'll stop this abuse.

Besides, you already got three merit so why are you complaining? Is it that maybe you're going to struggle to get the same on all your other accounts? Did you buy the merit or did you earn it legitimately? Either your argument/logic is wrong or you did actually just buy it and that's what you're annoyed about. You would already be a Junior under this proposal so I don't understand why you're against it unless there's something else going on here. Unsurprising you've received two merit from one user and sent him one back. I'm sure that's a simple merit trade.


How is requiring at least one merit strict? This forum is such a shitshow because it's so lax in policing users or enforcing rules. It's the opposite of strict. Users and even campaign managers can largely do whatever they want here and as such you get users farming their accounts in their hundreds just by writing a generic crap sentence that nobody cares to read and ICOs who will happily pay them for it.


How do you do that exactly? We're not here to teach children what to do and most won't be able to do it to a competent level anyway. Most people who come here these days are silly, naive kids who can't speak much English and don't know anything about bitcoin and have only come here to earn. This would be like trying to teach physics in Mandarin to English teenagers who couldn't care less about physics or Mandarin. No chance.


Oh great, let the moderators handle everything. Signature spam isn't the job of the staff here, but users do get banned, but tell me what is the point in banning one or a dozen alt accounts when the very same user has hundreds of even thousands more in their stockpile that they carry on doing the same with that we don't know about? It's utterly pointless and you need to tackle the issue at the source. It's the campaign managers job to police campaigns and they aren't doing their job at all and so they need to be forced to do it and one of those ways is to force them not to be able to accept Junior Members. How do we do that? Remove Juniors signatures or at the very least require a merit to become one. If you can't get a merit whether you earn it or buy it then you shouldn't be able to earn on that account. This is a very simple solution to a complex problem.

If this thing could lessen the spammer why not?  As a newbie,  I understand what your point is and I knew also that their so many people against with it even it is for the enhancement of our community.

1 merit is not that bad, if you can then we can do it also right?   

Well, right now they are cheating too, like, using bot in a campaign or using multiple accounts on a campaign or bounty, so i believe there will be less cheating like i have mentioned if they can not go to junior member easily. Merit selling? how do you know that? And you are accusing high ranked member far selling merit? I guess if you can say that then you have enough evidence so please make a thread and report about that. I would like to see the thread and will support you if you have the evidence.

Advocate them? You think how much thread and posts already made for the purpose of teaching people to get merit? Even a member here make a thread to guide people to use a good english, and some of them even made a contest/challenge that can increase the knowledge of members here and the reward for the challenge is merits.

There is a moderator for spamming, but have you ever done some report? Try to report some spam first and then you will know that the spam is way bigger than the human can even handle, that is why we need to change it from the system.

You are pushing them to cheat if you do that. We as a jr. member are having hard time how we are going to level up our reputations here through merit system. If that rule you want will be implemented, I won't wonder if most of the members here will cheat through buying merits, high rank will abuse too by selling too expensive merits.
Sometimes being so strict and dominant is not good. Instead of that why don't you advocate them how to write a new topic that can makes other give them a merit. I believe there is also a moderator for spamming so my opinion is when caught by spamming ban them permanently so others won't follow them.

@mazdafunsun
I think the same way like hilariousetc. Sources of the problem need to be controlled, and bad managers are one of them in my opinion. It does not need a lot of work and i guess that is the job risks of the managers, they must spend their time to check the posts of their participants, and maybe reporting the posts if they find the quality is too low. If the managers only grading work from post count which stated in profile page, then i can be a manager too, heck even a primary school kid can do this job too.

Making rules or standard to be a managers can be applied if there is an authority who manages the managers. Making a list like SMAS or DarkList is a great thing to do too which can help to control the problem from managers side.

It's not as much work as running around after them trying to clean up the spammers and bots they are paying to crap all over the forum. The problem needs to be tackled at the source. If you're paying kids to graffiti on walls all over a city then it's pointless just wasting time and energy running around on wild goose chases arresting the kids day after day as it will solve nothing. There are always hundreds of kids you can keep paying and they are willing to do your dirty work. Spend time catching the bad guys behind it all in the first place. Punishing them wouldn't be that difficult either. If they come here and do nothing about spam and pay bots to copy and paste then their threads are trashed, accounts banned and signatures blacklisted. If they can no longer advertise here then they're screwed. Once they start to realise that doing nothing is unacceptable the culture around here will change very fast and campaigns will do what they're supposed to.


This is a given. I hope theymos elaborates on why he put it in the No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified camp. It's a quick and simple fix for numerous things.

As I know in the past, rank of member are based on the person's activity on Bitcointalk, merit system start from January . I see the problem you mention a little unfair for newbie. when not easy to get merit.

It requires tremendous work from mods to force bounty manager to do or not to do something .
Also i dont think that scenario of bounty manager giving out merit to spammers is realistic, they dont want to get their reputation demaged.

I think that the solution would be to disable Jr. Member signature for everyone who has less than 1 merit, it would help tremendously.
And no, i dont think that merit abusers would easily bypass this rule because almost all of free merit was spent in the first months after merit system was introduced.

Well, the original function of a forum, including this one, is for people to gather and talk about particular things they have interest on and i guess even the founder of this forum itself did not expect for this forum to be able to provide the members the ability to make money from a scheme like bounty and signature. Now when its growing fast and making the forum have more spammer, it is hard already to control the situation. Forcing things to be happen maybe a good solution but i am afraid it will cost something to the forum itself.

Like hillariousetc said, 1 merit to be junior member solution would help a lot, and i believe this would help a lot too because it is a great idea, although i think it needs to be higher to be junior member. But any of this great idea would be good if it can be applied sooner, as I think this is the suitable solution for now, and it goes well with merit purposes itself.

Yeah, you're right. Therefore what I said before was 'forcing' them to do this, such as locking their thread if they did not apply the rules to the campaign, or even get them banned. I don't know whether this can be effective because as far as I know, there are any campaigns that are currently active and managed by managers who have red trust, but its still running!

While the suggestions are good, i must highlight the suggestion number 3. As i say, the suggestion is good but i think it will encourage more merit farming and abusing, no? Even the manager of the campaign can give the participants a merit if it means that the manager will run his/her job successfully without a quality control. What must be added to your suggestion is the managers need to make sure they are not hiring a spammer, but the works take a lot of time and not many managers want to do that and some doesnt even care because they think spamming/bad advertising is still an advertizing, it spreads.

Yeah, I have a same opinion with you.

So based on this I would like to suggest:

• I don't' think 1 Merit is not enough, at least 5 merits to become jr. member, and 20 to become member

• To make bounty board not accessible before reach jr. member rank would be a good idea!

• Force out the bounty managers to update the rules: no sig. campaign for jr. members + reject the application from member rank or above, who didn't receive at least 1 merit in last 30 days from moderators (local or global) or merit source, when applying for sig. campaign. In this way, I think the account farming will be worthless.

This isn't an excuse not to do anything. Going by this logic we should get rid of merit, activity and ranks because anyone can buy or farm an account. Even requiring one merit would help a lot. Good luck trying to get one merit on your dozens to hundreds of alt accounts you're farming to copy and paste on ICO campaigns. It puts a huge spanner in the works of abusers whilst not being that restrictive to everybody else and if you can't get one merit then you don't deserve to be a Junior Member or earn from signatures here.


This is just logical and needs to happen. Staff shouldn't have to be the defacto bounty managers for everybody who doesn't do their job. If a campaign is paying hundreds of bots and spammers then they should be the one to receive the ban as they're the direct cause of this.


It won't matter if there's still no merit requirement to become Junior. All they have to do is wait 2 weeks or so and make 30 spam posts then they're one and can spam away everywhere else and get paid for it by ICO campaigns. People will also just start registering via spreadsheets so they don't actually have to post in the Bounty board whilst still abusing everywhere else.


I'd prefer them being locked into the Bounty board. At least the disease is quarantined to that section then. It's when these bounty hunters join a sig campaign and start crapping all over the forum that is causing the most damage.

What is needed to partecipate in bounties, is the signature space, so no sig. space no spam( in principle).
Maybe could be put in place some system that activate the signature space when you reach a certain amount of merit or you have fulfilled some other requirement.
At the moment it could happen that user A farm 10 account to Jr. Member to join a signature campaign with all of them, with all the spam/posts required to be in it.

Keeping the current scenario in mind, it should be more than 1 merit to be eligible for bounties. Practically, it the bounty programs that decide minimum eligibility to participate. Some require just a user to post links about their projects everywhere (FB , Twitter or even this forum). Those programs do not care much about the knowledge or contribution of the members on this forum. Till the demand for such users is there, we will not see spam removed from bitcointalk completely.

I like this idea, it's nice and easy.

Just cut the forum (virtually) in two:
1) Bitcoin and Altcoin discussion (serious) (gaining activity and merit) and
2) ANN on Off-topic (no additional activity and no merit)

Make the users choose where they want to start to post. A user can only post in only one part, but can change this setting in every 30 days (or 60 days even better). (It's useless for bots and account farmers, they won't wait, they will register accounts for both sections).

So if newbies want, they can participate in any bounty and after if they have read a lot here and are interested in Bitcoin and serious things too, they can change their mind (and their settings too), but I'm afraid classic bounty hunters won't change at all...

This would cause that the serious section won't be spammed with bounty posts/signatures. I don't know if this would be OK for the companies running the bounties for their ICOs, because they will lose the serious part of the forum, their marketing won't reach the serious members of the crypto world (if they care about it at all, maybe they just need to present at the ICO rating websites that they have an active ANN thread in BTT and they have enough posts there daily...)

The serious section would still have the classic signature campaigns with reliable campaign managers, who will take care about the quality.

personally I believe that the bounty sub should be a reward and not a right. Members should be able to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge or commitment to be let into that area, and I think that 1 merit isn't enough - 10 or 20 should be the bar IMO..

If I had to guess, they probably fool themselves into thinking they're getting the right kind of attention.



I'm of the belief that the more dedicated spammers are the problem, it is no coincidence that LoyceV can pull up a list of 300+ newbies spamming the same phrase in multiple ICO/Bounty threads. This might be a good opportunity to allow the merit system to act as a gatekeeper for the "paths" (or these sections in general, and do away with paths). Consider having a threshold separate from those tied to ranking up, and that would be the criteria for entering the section(s) not allotted by your path.

Alternatively you could change the questions on timed/random intervals, potentially having members submit questions to be added into the next rotation, at least re-formatting the questions in such a way that an answer key would be obsolete or counter-productive.

With only 1% of the forum having received a single merit, I would say this is a rather impressive indicator that those with a merit are the users willing to operate and discuss in good faith (with a margin of error, of course). Allowing merit to be the litmus test for access to the bounties/altcoin/spam-hotbed/money-making sections almost certainly would do significant damage to our spam problem.

I think it is a fantastic idea. But it will not solve the problem. I noticed that there are two kinds of posts. Post for activity count and post for merit count. The forum allows for both. Most members are more concerned with post for activity than post for merit because the former guarantee you your being an active member, and in the event that you are running a signature campaign, your stakes. With that, they really don't care about the quality of their posts.

Not agree with 1 merit , many corrupted member's here 1 merit can be buy. So requirement of 1 merit will be merit abuse & opportunity for corrupted members for earning.

Agree with posting on Marketplace (Altcoins) &  disable signeture campaign for Jr. Members can prevent spam. This is the best way I guess to prevent spam.


Strongly disagree, it will encourage people to make multiples account. May be people will create one account for earn money and o other for discusses thing. That means who will choice make money he can't post any other section except bounty. It means he will not able to do signature campaign.

So why not just disable signature campaign instead of implement new members rank ?

I agree. I believe that most of newbies are only an alt account and spamming the forum to rank up to Jr member for signature bounties. It would be a nice idea if those bounties have minimum merit requirements to be eligible for participation. That way, they might try to ask their selves what are the best way to achieve merit.

They are spamming on other boards after all,  after they joined bounty campaigns.

Good for some? I think the number of people who will benefit to the quality over quantity of posts overweighs those who people who don't so it is better to force this idea and let's see what will happen

I am in favour of the request of 1 or 2 merit points to become a Junior because I have seen tens of alt-Juniors farming bounty campaigns - which means thousands of useless posts a day -  and it is going to continue since getting to Junior is just a question of just posting at the moment.

It would be hard for me to choose between money or knowledge, I want both, and probably a newbie would have an even bigger problem with that decision (or make an alt account since day 1).

Regarding the quiz, it is an excellent idea - upon registration the user could get a link to a thread with the very basics, like a 1 minute reading really, and be informed that he/she has to pass the test to become Junior. It is absolutely fine if the answers are eventually compiled because in any case the user will actually read the right answers and at least be aware of them.

I would avoid the English questions, there are local boards and non-English speakers can be active and be a good asset for their communities. Ideally, newbies should be pointed to rules in their own language.

Take a look here to get more informations :
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/merit-new-rank-requirements-2818350
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/forum-rankspositionsbadges-what-do-those-shiny-coins-under-my-name-mean-178608

It will be nice. Before now, I didn't even know a newbie don't need any merit to rank up to Jr member. It will even help to restrict multiple new accounts aiming to rank upto Jr member

Altough i started here on the forum with applying for bounties, upping my learning curve, i see the problems that come with these contests. I think that the only real solution is to disable the reply function on the Bounty pages. Only give room for the Announcement of a Bounty with links etc but let the actual Bounty tasks, reports and whatever outside this forum. There are already bountycampaign sites that take care of everything (Bountyhive as example). There are also projects that built there own bounty campaign site and run it succesfully (Bethereum or Aelf as example). That leaves the problem with the signature bounty, for that i suggest starting at member level. Let forum members proof themselves worthy by spending time here and making quality posts to reach member status. I think with these suggestions you filter out a lot of spammers, multiple accounts etc. Basically giving the problem back to the overheated ICO market, let them sort it out, but not in this forum. Keep going forward!

With regards   

Reset could be a possible solution.

By means of logging out every one and answer all the questions. These's could take an ample time to delete all the threads that are incorporated with the questions that will be present in the quiz.

I strongly agree to LoyceV's suggestion. All of them were already discuss on other topics here in meta. If none of these could implemented soon more and more spammers will be born.(devil's to be born  )

Yes, if i think the way you think then it is right but nowadays people buy merits so the thing that you are saying may not work . There are hundreds of spams that have been given 10+ merit .

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.32216177

If they didn't create a self-moderated topic then they can't delete it ofc but at least they should report the spammy posts in their topic.
And at this point, as stated, enforcing self-moderated topics for bounties isn't a bad idea. Let them assume their responsibility.


Ok, it may work, we need to generate many questions, same question could be asked in different manners, it needs to be shown one by one so it may confuse them a little bit.

I would suggest allowing them to still post in the Beginners section, and allow them to accumulate merit points. You could then increase the requirement above from Jr Member to Member as I feel it's still too easy to reach Jr Member. I think the quiz is a somewhat good idea, and randomizing the order of the questions/checkboxes would likely prevent certain automated bots from answering the questions. At least then it would require them to make a more sophisticated bot to actually bypass the system.

I'm sure Jetcash would be interested in helping with the English knowledge part.

Yes man, you right I find abusers in almost every bounty, some of reports are here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.31449020 (reported so far around 200 abusers/multi/scammers) and guess what? They still have stacks!
The sad part is that I find the cheats only posting my work without searching them, if I really start looking for them I could find hundreds of cheaters but I'm not paid to do the job of a manager
Many managers simply do not care and the reason it's clear, they works a couple of days a month and take a lot of money with a rough job.
(Some managers are really good on what they do)
I have cool ideas to improve the quality of bounties and one day I will post them.

My thoughts exactly. I've already noticed an increase in useless post and plagiarism on the serious (tech) boards.

I wouldn't call it "good PR". But if page hits are the goal, the bounty board could be totally separated from the rest of the forum. Don't require anything for posting there, but instead raise the requirements for the rest of the forum. And don't count bounty posts for activity and post count anymore.

I have partially managed a few campaigns, and if I'd run one on my own, I'd like it to be self-moderated with zero-tolerance for spam. But that would mean my campaign is gone from the first page in minutes, and 25 pages down the next day. The reduced exposure would make the campaign a failure, which means there is no market for running clean campaigns.
I'd love to reject all spammers, but it's currently not feasible to do.
Unless a clean campaign would be able to buy a sticky in the bounty thread, that could actually work to earn the forum some income from campaigns that actively fight spammers.
I do think a clean bounty campaign where people promote with real accounts instead of Facebook and Twitter accounts with 5000 other bounty spammers as friends and followers would be a better way to promote something.

It's been suggested before (reinstate Newbie jail), but I doubt many reputable members will be willing to waste their time shifting through thousands of spampost just to find one post worth meriting. I certainly won't do it, every time I try to find a Newbie to merit, I end up reporting them to be banned.

Most people will just click "yes I've read the rules" instantly. Barely anybody reads EULAs, partially caused by the fact that they're too long and there are too many of them.

It gives a perverse incentive to everybody involved: it's cheaper to run, less work, more exposure, and as a bonus: nobody complains! Unlike when you reject spammers and cheaters, which means you spend many hours running the campaign, and as a result you can expect people complaining.

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Another thought: charge amount X (say 100$) to open a thread on the bounty board. Use that money to pay moderators.
The thread owner will still be required to stop spam, and if Y (say 50) posts in his thread get deleted by moderators, his thread is closed.

How about just enforcing bounty managers to do their goddamn job. They literally just sit around doing nothing and get paid for that. Damn those lucky bastards. Isn't that something everybody wants? Everything is handled by bots,the post counting and calculation of stakes and all that stuff.

Theymos,would you actually consider making an Official set of rules,for literally every section,board and clear out the misunderstandings all at once? And force the quiz for both the possible paths. Rules need to be followed,be it for bounties,be it for discussion.

And force bounty managers and all the airdrop managers to fill out the application within google forms and avoid spamming the forum. 4000+ bots infested one airdrop thread and later on,the bots themselves made a own thread and started spamming.

If all of the Bounty Managers will grab this kind of rule, then it should be a great to decrease the number of spammers and bots that usually make this looks like a non moderated forum.  And if it will turn out to be like this, I smell more posts to be reported again when the time comes.


I once happened to be like this, someone thought me about this good earning forum but after being rejected so many times before I ended up getting more knowledge before making money into the bounties. I think some users will still be like me as the way I did before even if its wrong but still this will help them to eager to gain knowledge and experience through rejection.
Now, I spend my time on reading on many threads and this is kindly like my hobby now, especially if there is such an issue that makes me want to join the debate ^_^, I do loved hearing those millions of opinions ( I think I should take a BS on Psychology with this kind of perception )

I'm all for some sort of restrictions because at the moment anyone is free to create an unlimited amount of accounts and most people who sign up here just to claim bounties probably do so with more than one. As InvoKing mentioned, these can also be botted rather easily especially when often all that is required is posting your username or adding it to a spreadsheet. Requiring some sort of merit achievement would go a long way in curbing this behaviour. I'm also still in favour of removing signatures completely unless you pay for them through more donator ranks, though I doubt this is something theymos would do. I think at least we could experiment with another donator rank or two though alongside being able to rank up 'naturally'. People are going to continue to buy accounts anyway and most of them these days get scammed in the process so why not let them safely buy the benefits of ranks from the forum instead? It stops account farming, scammers, and people just spamming the forum for activity and/or begging for merit.



Well you are most likely the anomaly. The sad fact of the matter is that probably 99% of people who sign up here these days do so just to earn from bounties and even worse signature campaigns. A huge proportion of these users probably have little to no interest or knowledge of bitcoin either other than they just heard from their classmate/cousin/granny that you can make good money here hence why they're often completely clueless.


They probably don't care. All most of them care about is getting their ICO's name out there in whatever manner they can as quickly as they can. As long as people are bumping their thread and wearing their signature it's all promotion.


Can't hurt to try something like this. At the very least, upon sign-up users should be required to read the rules and linked to some helpful guides like the Activity FAQ and how to earn here etc so it'll stop the same old questions being asked time and time again (and usually in the wrong section).

Then the entire bounty section is against the rules as they require people to post their facebook shares and retweets.

The last invasion proved that the bounty section could easily be overcome by bots and if the guy(s) running them would have been less greedy and created only 10% of the accounts they would probably have gone undetected in that mess.

I really like the second tier as they will probably never get 10 Merits to rank up in the bounty/altcoin sections.  

The newbies are less problematic than the jr. members. Usually the minimum required rank (e.g. sig. campaign) is jr. member. Bounties often have Google forms, and this can get attacked/abused easily when applying. A recent case that I've reported to a moderator was ~50 jr. members applying within 30 minutes (all the classic spam accounts). Merit requirement needs to be added for this rank, and it should be a tad more than 1 merit.

I don't see reasons to take care too much attention on bounty topics/ threads. Personally, I only read OP of those ones, nothing more because as you all known, threads after OPs are dominantly by shit-shows.
Hate to say this, but bounties related to social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter are amongst the most spamming ones in the forum.

Another way is to use merit as a currency )
For example, somebody posted good relevant messages and got merit.
Now, each time the user posts in a few subforums (for example "Bounties") one merit is deducted.

That way, people who really contribute to the forum can use their merit to post ads.
It may be against the original forum idea, but when bitcointalk was created nobody imagined it would be hardly spammed by signature bounty hunters.

I hardly suggest to make it a 5 Merits Requirement.  

Only the non quality posters will do this kind of whining as I think.

Use the Merits as a requirement for Bounties? This should help but I think it still depends on the Bounty Managers.

I don't think so, even if they can't use bots on an early time, we can't be so sure that the bots will no longer be used if they actually have achieved the Merit Requirement.


This is what we need A path for users. Now, with this, we can determine if this forum is just being used for money making or not.

I  think everybody pick "I want to discuss things" because these spammer know they will require to become Jr. member before doing any signature bounty.
I do not want posting restrictions for newbies because sometime people just create account in this forum for the solution of their technical problem.
Best way is that we can ask everybody to clear the test within 7 days of joining to continue posting.

For controlling spam, temporary ban the user , disable the signature for a week  and award a black star  if 4 post of user is deleted by Moderators in a single week.
If user collect 5 black star in a calendar year , user will be permanently ban.

That's a great idea, but maybe it's a little bit too hard to be realized.
As an alternative, may I suggest to put every newbie (including me in a sandbox section of the forum?
Reputable members can enter that sandbox section and give merit to newbies who post reasonable things.
When newbies get enough merit and post enough messages, they will be able to gradually post more and more messages outside the sandbox.

I've noticed that a number of the bounties for 'better' (completely subjective assessment) ICOs/TGEs are now requiring full members in order to participate in the bounty for signatures on BCT. I would think that over time more campaigns would move to raise requirements as it (again in my opinion) shows the lesser campaigns by allowing anyone to enter. I wouldnt say this is a hard and fast rule and there are some really great bounties open to Jr members+.
While merit has had a bit impact on spam and user count, i cant remember where i saw it but there are some fantastic graphs posted recently that show this, the problem of bounty spam if tackled with the aid of bounty managers will be cleaned up quicker and smoother. The only thing that will be left are the posts asking how to get merit, asking for merit, and saying that merit is impossible to come by unless you are a hero or legend rank.

Mind-blanking 

They said 10 Merit to become Jr. Member, any advises for me?

What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion? Also, people should not be required to post in order to get paid; that's already against the rules.

An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
 - "I want to discuss things"
     = Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
 - "I want to make money"
     = Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
     = You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc. (Quizzes are pointless to stop dedicated spammers, since an answer key will quickly be compiled, but it may help in cases where clueless people are ending up here.)

Increase the difficulty a little bit and the number of spammers and especially bots will be reduced by half.
I post this topic before being fully aware of the amount of spam made in KanadeCoin topics (over 4000 posts in few hours).

Imo, trading merit is happening and may increase with this idea, but spotting the abuser isn't hard and may even lead to figure out some accounts promoting bots.
BTW, i don't think that they will spend a cent to enter to bounties.

This is a risky idea that can promote the sale of merit especially for accounts that already have redtrust. In my opinion it makes more sense to eliminate the newbie accounts from the bounties, I was newbie myself last year and for the first few weeks I did not even know what the bounties were. According to my experience, the newbie who sign up for the buonty are 99% alt abuser / ban evader. And if they learn what bounties are on the 1st week of their forum life, they can surly wait few more weeks to join bounties and wait the normal activity.
Sure this can be a problem for users that wants to open an ANN bounty but hey we have the Copper option and 20$ for a CEO of one ICO are nothing.

That is a question that only the signature campaign managers can answer.
Maybe it is some thing yo ro with inertia. Junior members were previously allowed to join campaigns because of links in their signature, and this has just continued.

Let days determine the success of the merit system or not.
I'm sure if this system managed to limit the spam to the whole forum, making such simple adjustments will not take long(theymos him self edit it many times).
The problem is that this rank "junior member " does not get linked signatures, Why they paid?

The forum gets a good PR for them, but if you stick to this system, then everyone who wants to participate in bounty projects on the forum, and not on other sites, must first study it and benefit, what you said. We sacrifice a quantity in favor of quality, which is good for some, but for others it's bad.

Isn't that good? I mean they're not adding to the community with anything.

Although, they are adding to the number of ad impressions on the site so...

I think that the number of bots will not decrease, they will spam in other topics. This can reduce the number of participants in bounty campaigns, which is good for us, but bad for the newcomers who signed up for the forum just because of this. You're right, 1 Merit earn is not so difficult, so the system has the right to life.

Maybe make everyone get 10 merits to post in the altcoin bounty sectionas altogether. It would be nice to see people actually putting an effort into the forum rather than just coming here with multiple throwaways to get bounties.

(the 1 merit could exist instead of 10 but it would be a better achievemnt).

Hi, i was looking at the patrol page lately and I was surprised by the amount of spam, it is worse than i though by far since I rarely visit it.

My request is to force newbies to obtain at least 1 Merit point to become junior member + you must be junior member or more to post in the bounties sub.

Some will say this will have a negative impact on new users, well 1 Merit point in 1 month shouldn't be that hard imo, no?
Else, I have an alternative solution, no need for that merit point to become a junior member but force everyone to have at least 1 Merit to post in bounties.
This will cut the amount of spam and will make bots useless.