Topic: Require a small amount of merit to become a Junior Member (Read 1756 times)

What about disabling signature for junior members so that they need to get 10 merits (become a member) to enable it?
In my opinion, one merit is just too little to have an impact.
Also, this method will affect current juniors, not only the new one and no need to airdropped 1 merit.

Friendly bump for pay attention of admin & for fair discussion. I think it's a useful suggestion to prevent spam.

I think it will be a huge restriction. At the moment, spam bots can rank up thousands of Jr. Members, and thousands of Newbies are registered each day.  A Merit requirement will reduce those numbers: even if they buy Merit, eventually the sellers will run out of it. It reduces a potentially unlimited problem to maybe a few thousand new Jr. Members.

In the past few days, I got many more than 50 Newbies nuked. I'm currently experimenting on scraping user histories instead of just patrol. If that works out, I can filter out higher level spam accounts too.

99.9% of suggestions are never implemented, whether they're good or bad ideas and theymos is slow to act on most things. It's good in the respect that drastic changes aren't rushed into, but on the other hand basic issues just don't ever get sorted and the forum continues to circle the drain in the meantime. I've been making numerous suggestion for improvements to the forum for years and even simple things like locking/archiving the Press forum (or at the least sticking some guidelines in there) or assigning dedicated mods to big subs that have no moderator don't happen nor rarely get commented on by the admins so we never know where theymos stands or whether he thinks it's a good or bad idea. Spreading out the workload by assigning mods to subs that don't have them is logical and would take minutes to apply by theymos. Changes to the merit system and signatures etc are a bit more work and require further thought about how it will effect the forum, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't happen or at least be discussed and the longer we leave it the worse things get.


Well we have no control over that. If there's space there to be advertised then ICOs will pay for it because all they care about is getting as many people as possible regardless of quality, so that's why we need to force their hand and remove it completely so they don't have this option.

Well, it could be even simpler. Simply don't accept newbies or Jr. members into campaigns of any sort, and they'll have no choice but to either step up and level up, or gtfo.

You need to see the bigger picture. One merit is better then nothing which it currently is, but most people who come here don't have any bitcoin nor likely the money to buy merit or an account. Even if they have to go to the trouble of buying it then it's one more hoop to jump through for them. One merit isn't a lot and I wouldn't be against it being more or just making it so only Members can have a signature at ten merit, but it's more about just stopping the completely clueless kids who come here with the sole intention or making generic one/two liners or copy and pasting content. Those people will get nowhere and will never be able to join a signature campaign unless they get the merit in whatever way possible.

I personally think a single merit is not sufficient, as it's very easy to buy merit from a hero member with 50 merit, producing 50 new Jr. member accounts. Sure, it's definitely a roadblock, but it's probably not enough to adequately curb the bot accounts.

There could be a sliding scale of how much merit is needed based on the age of the account, e.g:

< 1 month old = 5 merit
1-6 months old = 3 merit
> 6 months old = 2 merit

Obviously, this would just delay the more persistent multi-accounters, but it should do something to stop the novices.

We have been discussing this topic from 21 days. Lots of suggestion have been come by the members.
 
Is there any final out come of this discussion    how much time it will take to implement ??

I have six total posts in the Off-Topic section, last one being from March 9th, and four posts from Politics and Society, the last one being on January 18. Back when I was new and I was getting my feet wet in here, and you want to make it seem as though I post there. Remember, I said that the majority of Bitcointalk posts are spam and forced. And as I read my history I saw a comment from myself complaining about the spam and forced comments.

The reason why I'm commenting about merits is because it's an interesting game theory kind of concept, and how it's a disadvantage for new, normal legit users, versus bots and spammers who don't even read the OP and post one liners. I couldn't care one iota about merits. You're never going to see me begging for merits.

But I'm done discussing this with you, because you really don't seem capable of understanding my very, very, very simple point. I decided to use Bitcoin as an example for this point, but instead of acknowledging the point that I tried to make, you deflect by saying that I'm only here to make money.

I think it's bad idea. I'm not sure that it would kill account sales market, but it would definitely stop legitimate newbies from cresting account here when they will see that payment is needed to join forum.
Maybe it would be better to make signatures as paid privillege - users would have to pay some BTC to enable signatures in their profiles.

I’ve checked through your posting history briefly and your posts tend to be one-liners that lack deeper content to be meritable.
I believe you mentioned you’re Philippine.  If so, I would suggest looking through the posts from theyoungmillionaire, who posts both in the English boards and in the local Philippine section. He is I believe one of the best examples I can provide from your local board.  Check through his posts to get a glimpse of the idea as to why he is an example.

honestly. merits make me a hard time to rank up. i have a lot of good quality post and ended up no merit gain, but its ok because i think that the merit givers also think that my post is not that good enough to be rewarded by a merit and still i am doing all my hard works so that one day i will be rewarded by a lot of merits.

and for the jr member out there that experiencing the same kind of struggle. level up of knowledge and gain experiencing for those who are knowledgeable in this kind of work.

Also, it would be nice to require some payment (very small) to start an account here. Currently, many create accounts and let is age to sell later.

No, I didn't say that. But you can't expect to rank up if you're not willing to learn and just keep posting generic useless posts.


You're right on one thing: this is something I see a lot, just not how you imagined it. Whenever a user with zero Merit complains about it, I check their post history. I checked yours yesterday, and saw nothing worth meriting.
You're not the first one to pull the "you're at the top so you don't care"-card, and all it does is prove you didn't check my post history.
I care a lot about new users who make decent posts, and I have given 566 merit 532 times, to 291 profiles.
But I've gotten thousands of posts deleted and accounts banned too. I don't merit you because I care about the forum, not the other way around.

There's your problem, you're here only to make money. That's why you spammed your way into being a Jr. Member.

As you've discussed this before, I agreed to this too that Jr.members and newbies should stay first at the stated boards until they got reviewed and got merited. That will prevent them from spamming different boards with useless threads and replies and for members that are already ranked up to Jr before more restrictions will be implemented, bounty managers should be strict in accepting participants in their campaign.

This would be too easy:


Newbies would begin to target merit sources and begin their holocaust campaign for merits. 1 merit to Jr. Member is not a bad idea at all. Only if there was a way to gather all the spambot accounts and nuke them, then dealing with the real accounts who have a poor understanding on how BTT works should be an entirely different yet simple problem.

Even a funny joke can award you a merit. Actually, it probably will award you a merit.

If you read all comments before posting you are half way to receive a merit.
If you read and research, you will get one very soon.

And why do you need to rank up? To join a signature/bounty campaign.
Well, if you have nothing to contribute to the forum why do you want to get paid to post?


I think 1 merit to Jr. Member would be nice.
Or maybe, what if 1 merit is needed to have a signature?

No. Its not like that. Anybody can rank up if they want to. I am no expert when it comes to bitcoin, I am far worse than a newb, but that is not the point to be focused on. Expert or no expert, you can still rank up, how? Use proper language, be a little unique and be relevant to the topic and make your post make sense. You have made good points on how legendary or other high ranked members don't care much on newbies ranking up. Its good that they don't, for, rank has nothing to do with you. I mean, I get that ranking up boosts your morale, but if you make good posts, you can rank up. At least normal understandable posts with some new information.

You can't expect to get merit for like agreeing with someone on some topic, or repeating what has been said before. I would have merited you for this post, but this has already been discussed in the past.

So people new to crypto should never rank up? Or wait for years until they become experts? Regular, average, normal people should rank up, not spammers. That's the point.

It's something that I see so much, how when people are on the top, they're basically like, "Who cares, I'm on top." Without even noticing that they're doing that. You're a Legendary member for no other reason that you've been here for many,many, many years. So your attitude is more of "Oh they can't rank up, oh well." Since you don't have to deal with it.

And I've also seen in so many other situations. "I have 15,000 Bitcoins because I mined it in 2009. How dare these people want to make money off of crypto instead of use it as a currency because the banking system is evil."

Very easy for a person with 15,000 Bitcoins to say when they don't have to worry about money. Not realizing that if they didn't have those 15,000 Bitcoins, they wouldn't be complaining that others are more concerned with making money than the a Utopian future without banks.

I think it has to do with their large numbers. Many get banned, but many more get created. And real users shouldn't be banned as collateral damage, which means Mods can't just ban 99% of the users.

You make it sound as if it is a bad thing that people who don't have knowledge on the subject they're "discussing" can't rank up.