Topic: Require a small amount of merit to become a Junior Member - page 4. (Read 1829 times)

There is a solution to everything, but there is no solution that everyone will agree with.

Topic bumping could be stopped if bumps for members under x activity or y merit or both won't be considered as LoyceV and others have proposed a hundred times
Topic spamming could be done with a system that once a topic hits 5 (or whatever in x time from the post date) reports it gets invisible for the normal users until a moderator takes action and either sends it to the garbage bin or reinstates it.


There are two problems with that idea
a) that is was posted in May and it's July and nothing came out of it
b) it only splits the users till Jr Member which as discussed in this thread is an easy thing to achieve.

Not a bad idea, especially when the hot-selling new autoreplybot has arrived.
Dude. Let the merit requirements be as is. There are still loopholes to ranking up, like account sales,merit sales, merit abuse et al. The merit requirement is the basics of an hierarchy. Higher the rank,higher the amount of merit required.

I'm not sure what you mean? But, higher requirements absolutely make sense. Higher ranked accounts have certain benefits such as higher PM limits, cooldowns on actions are reduced, and their signature is larger. It makes sense to have some sort of progression. Lowering the requirements would just mean they would need to get x amount, and then freely spam from there onward.

Most of the times I noticed these bot/spammer accounts are not caring about ranking up. They are posting to bump a topic or creating same topic to advertise whatever they are trying to promote here. So I do not think adding x amount of merit for whatever rank you don't want them to rank up is going to work. I hope you did not miss to read this reply.

Well I have never really understood why the amount of Merit needed to level up, increases along the way. Maybe I am missing something but I'd say that in a way it's more logical to decrease the Merit requirements along the way up, as I'd assume that people who are here, stay here and - as a consequence of quality posting - level up, have proven their "qualities" to the forum.

At the same time, bots, spammers and scammers will give up if they need to have for example 75 Merits to move from Junior to Member (while Activity and Time also remain taken in account).

If you set the bar high from the beginning, you will have guaranteed high-quality members on this forum, starting already as low as from Junior or Member ranking.

This can be applied only on the problematic sections - the ones we already have the 12 hours rule.

This is a completely new idea and seems like it WILL be a good one to experiment. Since these Newbies and Jr's can't make the bump happen eventually they will stop however this is not going to stop them creating the same topic from different accounts. They do very good job, just look at their timing...


Allowing x amount (1 like hilariousetc is thinking or 5 like seoincorporation is thinking or whatever) to become a Jr - could also work but again since the number will be very less (<10), the farmers can easily manage it.

Déjà vu, but it deserves it's own thread indeed. Please implement this!

Earlier today, I was listing spam accounts that post similar patterns. It think it's mainly bump bots that randomly select some phrases, and turn them into a sentence. Some of them could be humans who don't speak English and just copy text.
The worst bots include synonyms and homograph attacks in their posts, and I've seen similar spambots quickly adjust their spam when they get caught. They'll just become harder to find in an automated process.

While just banning "a few" of the Newbie spammers I listed, BitRentX ran out of nukes:
I didn't know there is such a limit for Mods. That means I can entertain more than one Mod, just nuking Newbies.
It doesn't feel right that a spammer can create more accounts than a Mod can ban. That means it's a lost cause.

I think 3 things are needed
1. A minimum of even 1 Merit for Jr. Members. There will be some Merit trading, but at least it puts a limit on the current unlimited number of accounts that can reach this level. 5 Merit would probably be more effective in restricting their numbers.
2. No more signature for Newbies, so they can't just spam for some ICO tokens.
3. Newbies and probably Jr. Members too should no longer be able to bump threads. They can post, but the thread won't move to the top.
I think #3 is the most important one, as the bump bots are the worst spammers.

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I just checked only a few phrases from the OP. These phrases were posted by the following Newbies in the past 4 days (note that it includes quotes and they shouldn't all be nuked without manual checking):
nice and nice
     1. Green Brandon
     2. FunkKeith
     3. Kelly Niwa
     4. Ward Bechma
     5. Enzfesmiddtim
     6. David-Powell
     7. Jerry Aguilera

Waiting for something more amusing
     1. Kazhama-Sinrie
     2. TsacSonjea
     3. Keyprovynsea
     4. Cysgicessscor
     5. JoannFen
     6. Lingrigeto
     7. StephensKatie
     8. JerardoSh
     9. Schorfheide-Terry
    10. Restringprollu

I wish you success
     1. dhon19
     2. lexx8217
     3. Hacivat
     4. Xanaxer
     5. kalamiotis
     6. Pirani93T
     7. vidy
     8. smiletoken
     9. polok1234
    10. goga69
    11. ClanPartisan
    12. buicong1996
    13. aboali2020
    14. polat M
    15. jamee03
    16. mnusdoh
    17. Djon64
    18. zzmb61
    19. khrishh74
    20. thomasdra
    21. PhillipTh
    22. ShashiMil
    23. Collins Jessica
    24. Songz Muri
    25. NickRo
    26. Luiporpieper
    27. NygelGoto
    28. paydifi
    29. StephanieAsh
    30. yazanyazoon
    31. taymen
    32. Marta Steczkowska
    33. JohnnyLeGrand
    34. CryptoJuan08
    35. evgenij69302
    36. canibor
    37. bluebkdn
    38. Mr.Shahab
    39. wenxue1988
    40. icosbull
    41. ntinakarras

remarkable trading fees
     1. arrado
     2. Songz Muri
     3. Anlachinald

I would fully support that, things are really out of hand.

No such luck I’m afraid. The core information included in practically every analysis on this forum has Merit as the driver. This is due both to interest, and to practical reasons (limited scope): the official data files provided by the forum are the merit.txt file and the trust.txt files. Anything else has to be scraped from the forum webpages themselves.

In order to analyse accounts heavily related to bounties and airdrops, we would need to study the whole set of forum active accounts (not just the merited subset), and then for each account go through their posts. Scraping all this data is an immense task and non-trivial. Recently @mazdafunsun has scraped 2M profiles and vod does too in his BPIP project, but I don’t know anyone who downloads all the messages for all active users (I did download once all merited message content, but that is obviously non coincidental with bounties and airdrops, and was rather a pain with the software I’m using).

Some sites that clone Bitcointalk have managed to download a lot of our messages to give them a solid appearance, so it’s not impossible.

Note: Once upon a time (not too long ago) theymos opened a thread on other raw files that we would like to have ( Additional data dumps? ). That is really the key for moving further and being able to concentrate on providing information and not scraping data from the website (at least from the outside).

I think everything is comparative and there is no such a ideal system. If we look into few months back, we all know how much spamming and how much of new accounts have been created only for Bounties and Airdrops( actually I don't have that data at the moment  but hoping "DdmrDdmr" have those numbers). So instead of all banning things which everyone talked, what "Theymos" suggested was introduction of "Merit system". I think now most of the members are getting agreed with this new system and what impact it has been done to the forum when it comes to the spamming and shitposting. But that system also need few tweaks too like getting strong actions regarding Merit abuse scenarios.

The thing I didn't get is why admins allowing to create Alt accounts which I believed one of the major reason for spammers and shitposters to allowing to spam-fest with  numbers game(most of the time bots) So I think time has came to review that decision again.

Finally we can't create a ideal system for even Bitcointalk. But it's about how much and how far we can go for controlling the spam issue. It is better if admins can do some periodical review regarding spam statistics of forum posts, accounts and introducing new regulations or amedments accordingly.

I already opened a topic in meta 2 months ago https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/request-1-merit-to-become-junior-member-and-access-to-bounties-sub-3775593 and theymos made a comment in it https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/request-1-merit-to-become-junior-member-and-access-to-bounties-sub-3775593.msg37201114#msg37201114

I don't know how much of a barrier it'll throw up in practical terms, but getting even a single merit for a lot of these shitposters has proven to be extremely difficult and it would at least be some sort of barrier.  For that reason, I support hilariousandco's suggestion.  He suggested it in another thread and I found it to be a decent idea, since Theymos has ruled out bringing back the newbie jail. 

If it was 5 merits, that'd be damn near impossible for most noobs, but then again ranking up shouldn't be easy anymore, nor should people be obsessing about it.  But they are, and we all know the reason why.

It would be very difficult to bot this given the nature of the scarceness of merit, not to mention not worth it for them.


I don't necessarily disagree with some restrictions being put in place on where and what newbies can post, but theymos seems dead against this, and I understand his reasoning. 


I agree with this. It seems some people are even deleting their posts once they've been merited. This could be done to cover up abuse. If a post is deleted for whatever reason then the merit should go with it.


As I mentioned in another thread recently, I don't think excluding bounty threads from being able to receive merit would be bad thing.

For telegram, Facebook, twitter, article writing, video creating, blog writing I think it is okay if he/she is brand new or newbie. Because they will not make any marketing on the forum they will do their marketing out of forum. And also same for airdrop. I think only signature should have restrictions nothing else. As only signature has limitation regarding membership ranks. And for your kind information signature cant be considered if they post report or joining. I this case newbie and brand new members are necessary. Because there are not too high number of higher rank member. If there is any more restriction on newbie and jr. member then that will be harmful for bitcointalk.org Already decreasing number of participant on bitcointalk. I want to say if you post bounty on bitcointalk then if you get 100 participant then you will get 1000 if out of bitcointalk. For example bountyhive, bountyportal etc. So, more restriction mans to loose users as a result lose projects. SO no need to make restrictions any more.

Update:
If any more restrictions then existing higher rank members will be benefited for a short time. But for long time all will be looser.

I would go for the raising of the merit requirement for the juniors AND to let them nuked if needed.
This would solve the merit and the spam problem, parallel. Spammers would need more merits to become juniors (they have to trade/buy/etc. more merits, which costs them money) and those merits would lose if they are nuked when they are juniors. So in the end, farming a spambot army from juniors would cost way much more money than now.

I don't know what you mean exactly that 2 month backed I joined. But even I joined today I will be able to read 5 years back post. If not deleted. Btw once daily I visit patrol to report spam that time I found there is maximum spaming by Jr. and newbie. So I can say there are joined recently and making very poor thus forum. Even I am not an established member but as a genaral member I share my thought to reduce spam. Actually I always try to prevent spam. Due to spammer sometime we missed some good comments or post.

If you have a business selling holiday homes, and you decide to provide a free lunch for marketing, you need to restrict the people attending. If you allow the room to be filled with people with no money, and who throw the food around and insult the prospective buyers, then you need to get rid of the free loaders, and prevent them returning. Bitcoin Talk is in much the same situation at the moment.

Jajaja, you are absolutely right. Maybe it just desperation, but you know, this is terrible to spend some time in here and to find more and more difficult to engage in a real discussion due to the state of the forum.
The merit system is working, from my point of view, for it absolutely encourages some good members to rank-up and do their best. But, also, there is the well-known spam problem having place, each day worse than the previous one.
We have an average of 500 new users per day. Probably the 90% of them are only seeking to earn some (some others just bots), not to learn or discuss the forum or the crypto world. I agree with some kind of "effort" is necessary for them to can earn something, for actually, the system is out of control, and mostly all the new users are just trying to post whatever, even if they are unable to speak the language.

Now, I don't like "social classes", I don't believe that a new one is strictly worst than and senior member: they are some good new users. But maybe it is time to be realistic. We can try to encourage others to become a good "citizen" in here, to contribute to the forum, and we are doing it by meriting those who try their best. But there is a reality in here: they are few. The ones willing to give a shit are few in comparison with the ones with no interest in the forum but in their "earnings".
As a product, we are all seeing how the boards are getting lost in between bumping-nonsense quotes, and to enroll a good debate is impossible by now in some of them.
So, if by encouraging and meriting the people we have achieved nothing, what can we do? I would like to see a good forum with clean boards with a nice debate, discussion, information, et all in there. But it is not happening (maybe utopic, but why it should be utopic?)
So, what to do, then? I don't like prohibitions too, truly, I don't. But what can be done? To leave the forum to die in between all the crap we have to read every single day?

Why "restricting things" and "banning stuff" are the only solutions everyone thinks is perfect? Theymos should start a sub-forum under the domain www.elite.bitcointalk.com where there would be no signatures,no bounties,no marketplaces , just elite posters discussing stuff. Also the sign-up process would be invite basis only.

Condition was always this bad since a few years. You happened to the forum what 2 months back?