Topic: Shouldn't Theymos act on Bounty Managers Now (Read 1187 times)

This is ridiculous, let the Admin head institute an action against these managers or else, they will destroy the forum in his hand, as the Head Admin. Exploiting the system for their Contentment and never worry of the forum future? they aren't seeking for the forum progress therefore the forum shouldn't seek theirs too.


Not comfortable with them not be able to check their employees work at the end of the day, before payment be made to their respective accounts. Let the upper room take the necessary action now or never.

Absolutely in agreement with your idea to provide guidelines and rules that will govern them all.


That is the spirit of patriotism, and am convince you are one among the good citizens of this forum, keep it up sir/ma'am, "we will get there to put an end to them someday!!!."

I just gonna drop those here, so hopefully someone will see the problem all the way from the past til now.
Improvements in Bounty Campaigns
Campaign Managers and Bots. The main reason for the SPAM. Solutions?
Shouldn't bounty managers clean up spam posts in their thread ?
Setting Bounty requirements

They are because they accept anyone who applies in an altcoin signature campaign!
Is there any screening process that these bounty managers do? Do any of the applicants get rejected? I am not asking the reputable managers managing BTC campaigns but the rest. It seems that anyone gets accepted as long as you have the needed rank.

Simply looking at the numbers you would understand that a manager of an alt campaign doesn't have much time to check the posts.
- They accept 300+ users, maybe even 1000s in their signature campaigns.
- Many campaigns also have social media campaigns. Not sure what the average is in those, but lets say 2000 users. X3 for facebook, twitter, instagram for example.

So lets say that a campaign has 300 participants in their signature campaign. Every user has to post 15 posts weekly. 300 users = 4.500 posts weekly.
2.000 social media participants in facebook, twitter and instagram campaign = 6.000 posts daily, 42.000 weekly.
Altogether that is 46.500 weekly posts that need to be checked by a human in terms of quality!
And that is just the work that needs to be handled for Sig and Social Media campaigns and there is much more.

To sum up, most bounty managers can't check and don't check what the participants in their campaigns post as there is no time for that.
We are in need of a particular set of guidelines and rules for Altcoin bounty managers if something is to change.

The same reason all the bounty spammers are here - greed, money, personal gain, etc. They don't care about the future of the forum, they only care about how best to exploit it for themselves.

We shouldn't be forcing the good managers to clean up the mess of the bad ones. If the bad ones can't follow the clearly laid out rules that I linked to above, then they get a warning then a ban from the mods. Mass bannings would quickly send the message that they need to clean up their act.

  Then what is the reason why they are still here on the forum, if they aren't ready to contribute to the progress of this forum?. Although am not yet conversant with these Campaign Managers on this forum, but have read some comments about some good Campaign Managers who have been here for longtime and doing well in this regard.

Suggestion: Let these senior Campaign Managers take it upon themselves to work on the new springing Campaign Managers to be useful to the forum, and not just to make money to the detriment of this forum. If possible, let them form a union to handle issues of this caliber. Defaulters within the unions will be dealt with if found accept spammers into their campaigns. “Just my little cent”.
  

The problem is that most campaign managers don't do their jobs. Have a look at the guidelines in the following stickied thread: Signature Campaign Guidelines (read this before starting or joining a campaign). It states that campaign managers should be actively monitoring their participants daily, and that they should not be paying people to make poor contributions en masse. This clearly isn't the case.

There are small handful of good, clean campaigns, which are generally run by one of the users on this list (Overview of Bitcointalk Signature Anti-Spam Campaign Managers), but the vast majority of campaigns pay out for any old spam, whether or not it is contributing to the thread, whether or not it is on topic, sometimes whether or not it is even understandable. We can't leave it to campaign managers because there are too many campaign managers out there who will employ spammers en masse.

That we have seen many time on the forum, where accounts are rank up behind higher accounts which to me act like grandfather account rank children's accounts. Many deserved accounts on the forum are starving with merit while others with grandfathers are enjoying the privilege of grandfathership, thanks for your diligent notice.

As rightly said, the merit could be fix on 20 earned merit from Full Member rank and above while 10 merit for Junior members and Member account. This can curb spam and plagiarism, although this cannot be rely upon, but the rest should be left for the Campaign Manager to decide whether to allow such account to participate on the campaign or not, as merit cannot be a yardstick for quality post.   

32k active users, hmmm, close to the number of all the people that received at least one merit

So, 5000 users the AI saidddd...wtf..you've gone eco too?

It didn't pass emission standards?

Seems like the 10 merits idea is indeed feasible...

Among ~32k users who posted at least once in the last 30 days ~5300 have "http://" or "https://" in their signature.

I don't care much about those ICOs and most of them end up paying their "workers" useless tokens.
That "ecosystem" needs to be cleaned and invasive species exterminated
Overall a lack of people able to display a sig might end just like in the real economy, higher wage for those qualified, employers must prove they can pay you, better rates...and a lot of those who don't qualify will try to earn some merits to join the club.

I don't know if it's possible to find out, but would be interesting to know how many active users carry a hyperlink signature right now.

Those BTC paying campaigns would currently be covered, and they also tend to require a minimum amount of Merits per se.

What would not be covered are all those other signatures that pay in their own token. Much as we may like this fact (lack of mass candidates for ICO signatures), ICO campaigns are a large part of the current signature ecosystem. Unless the forum wants to play a hand here through means that have been suggested before (i.e. only accept BTC paying campaigns), the numbers would not add-up for them with the current volume of overall campaigns (plenty of smiles here I guess …).

I consider 7500 as being a big enough number, and you have to take into account that a lot of people will slowly earn this in the future as they will get motivated to at least "earn" the merit.
Let's exclude 1/3, 2500 (and I think I'm pretty generous here) for the older members who don't give a damn about sigs, old accounts no longer active and you still get enough members for 100 campaigns with 50 participants.

According to this: we currently have 18 campaign running. Haven't' checked them all but I doubt they have more than 50 participants on average.

Oh, and obviously I don't care for ico/bounties sigs.

Personally I think we should be tagging the shit managers, they are a bigger problem than the shitposters now

Plag busting isn't something new, and everyone that takes their time to read the rules know's the price to pay for this >>>BAN

Not to defend anyone or anything but Most if not all bitcoin signatures at the moment have atleast reputable campaign managers that cross examine users post history before accepting new participants unless in a few cases were a company tries to manage it's own campaign with their hand picked manger...otherwise if your post history is bad you won't get into that campaign!

Maybe the problem lies in the companies that are seeking for bounty managers services away from the forum were they get to engage newbies for the job and the end result is everybodies guess....spam but with the merit system it counters for better posting.

Indeed but posters with tons of posts and never a single merit, stands a bit for sh*tposter or spammer, and indeed I would think earning 10 merit isn't bad to exclude more members with only intentions to sigh campaign and spam the place...

Most of the times people with interest in specific sections and making good or contributing posts will be noticed and be merited, i'm sure of that.

I don't see that necessarily as a bad thing. The majority of running signature campaigns are for either trash or scams. When you can pay participants at no cost to yourselves from a token you've just printed out of thin air, then there is no requirement to either have a solid business plan or select good posters to maximize your advertising. If the majority of these scammy token/altcoin campaigns ended up struggling to recruit as many people as they want, then so be it. The campaigns paying in bitcoin for real services and business will continue to have no issue.

Your numbers are interesting. The massive drop between 1 and 2 merits, compared to the much smaller drops between 2-3, 3-4, and 4-5, suggests that several thousand accounts have bought or traded for a single merit. Even an increase to 5 would probably be sufficient.

There’s also a number game behind the scenes to consider. Delimiting Campaigns by earned merits, whilst conceptually interesting, renders poor numbers to cover all currently running campaigns as soon as we start increasing the threshold.

If we take a look at how many merits people have earned, the numbers as of last Friday look like this:

1 earned merit or above: 28.339 accounts
2 earned merit or above: 17.419 accounts
3 earned merit or above: 13.606 accounts
4 earned merit or above: 11.888 accounts
5 earned merit or above: 10.739 accounts
10 earned merit or above: 7.503 accounts
 
Delimiting campaign signatures to 10 earned merits or above leaves only 7.503 currently qualified accounts that could take part. Likely small for all current campaigns, which could have some benefits on the other hand both overall and individually for those participating, but may cause a shortage of candidates and have an impact on the number of running campaigns.

Edit: I don't see it as a bad thing either, but likely there is a likely delicate equilibrium to keep, and a shortage of signature candidates may cause more than a ripple in that equilibrium.

Your suggestion, if implemented will also look chaotic like de-ranking. The forum will run amok and the Meta section will go up with petitions. We saw a little of that during the "1 merit" requirement for ranking up Jnr Members. Again, that someone doesn't get his posts merited doesn't mean the poster is a shitposter/spammer. It could (rightly so) that he isn't lucky getting them merited. I have seen great posts which aren't merited lot here.

I don't want to de-rank anyone. I agree that that would be unfair. I only want to remove signature privileges until you have earned 10 merit. That is not a difficult task for anyone who isn't a spammer.

There already is. A limit of 1 merit is too low because it is trivial to buy a single merit. Buying 10 merit is much more difficult and will mean the supply of merits being sold dries up much more quickly.

Link to these good posts in this thread and they will be merited: [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source

I don't think they would care about that. If a project makes a bounty with the intention to cheat their bounty hunters they wouldn't be interested in the consequences. Considering that these projects usually only pay after a successful ICO, and not on a weekly basis, they would have already gathered enough funds and the ICO is over so posting proof that they are scammers and expecting a punishment wouldn't change anything. They already got what they wanted.

The only way to get some regulation in the bounty and ICO world would be enforce these campaigns to pay in a weekly basis (like BTC sig campaigns). There is still the risk of getting a bag of worthless tokens.
Or, force them to pay in BTC. It has been suggested many times before and it is certainly not on top of the admins to-do list.     

IMHO, not a good suggestion, you can't overrule the old rules with the new one.
Members who have a higher rank in the forum now earn it because of their loyalty, and we have to thank especially the Legendary that they stayed in this forum.

I am also afraid that there will be merit selling and merit farming with that rules being followed.
In addition, merit should not be the major basis as on our standing in the forum as I have seen a lot of good posters that posts were not merited.
Trust either cannot also be a major basis, as one can abuse the trust, but loyalty cannot be bought.

You mean no signature or a demoted signature(until you earn the required Merit) If there is no signature then legendary will envy of senoir who is able to get display signature by just earning 50 merit while legendary left without signature even after earning 100 merits

User authentication posts, social reports every week — these threads are bound to be messy. What kind of knowledge one would seek in a bounty thread, anyway?

I agree with the guidelines proposal you created but I think there should also be an inclusion of penalty for project that don't pay bounty hunters for the tasks and time they spent.

If you got scammed make a thread in the Scam Accusation section with appropriate proof and DT members will tag the bounty manager. Also make sure that you check the trust rating of the bounty manager prior to applying for his bounty. I would be careful of bounty managers who are new to the forums and have just created their accounts, with a bought copper membership, running a bounty campaign. 

Unfortunately it's a bit too much to expect theymos to know everything about the ICOs or bounties that get posted here. And users only get tagged and not banned for scams so everyone has to decide for himself what to take part in.

In my opinion it's a good idea, and one I have suggested before. I don't think the requirements even need to be as high as you have made them - most spammers are unable to earn a single merit, let alone 200. However, users can and do buy or trade merits, and use one grandfathered account to rank up many alts. With that in mind, I would simply change it to require 10 earned merit, regardless of rank, before being allowed a signature.

What happen if same requirements on minimum earned merits to display signatures, without demotions? I meant for each rank, users in that reach have to earned a minimum number of merits to be able to display their signatures. Demotions might cause mad situation, so such requirements to have rights of displaying signatures might be a good alternative for demotion. For example:
- Junior Member:  remains 1 as of demotion in September last year.
- Member: 15 earned merits
- Full Member: 25 earned merits
- Senior Members: 50 earned merits.
- Hero Member: 100 earned merits
- Legendary: 200 earned merits.

This is true, but the problem is better than it was. This thread from LoyceV tracks the changes: The new rule (1 Merit for Jr. Member) is already reducing spam.

Essentially, changing the rules to require 1 earned merit to display a signature, and therefore knocking thousands of users out of their signature campaign, reduced the number of posts on the forum by two thirds. Even accepting there would have been some compounding factors such as the bear market, this is still a huge number and goes to show how many people are only posting because of their signature.

More users regularly reporting is only a good thing, but it will never overcome the mountain of spamming unless something is done about the root cause, which is bounty campaigns.

Thanks for this link.  I re read my old comments. Still I guess we are not sure how we deal with somebody who will be running the bounty from outside of this forum.
Best way is to focus on the user that are spamming and encourage BM to contribute in SMAS list.

Rules or no rules, signature or no signature,  spam and unhealthy poster would still make there ill sort of post.  Even some that can not get one merit to rank up to the level of wearing a signature still constantly make redundant post. So the aim should be tackling the Shit posters and Shit post. How can that be done?  Well for now one good way, and majority knows(but don't execute it) by now is to use the report to the mods button at the bottom of a post or reply, yes if we can effectively do this with out been bias or trolling this can really help to tackle spam post until more measures are put it place

Maybe it's time the community to start controling those managers. I created this thread long ago but wasn't that success. List of Campaign Managers accepting shitposters. Report here >

We already have a set of rules for bounty managers to follow, and a set of clearly defined escalating punishments which they will be subjected to if they do not follow them. See the following sticky from the Services section: Signature Campaign Guidelines (read this before starting or joining a campaign). The problem is that these rules are not enforced. If we were following these rules, then about 90% of altcoin bounties would have been banned already.

There is an endless stream of users who are willing to spam, shitpost, and plagiarize for next to nothing in payment, and we will be fighting them forever unless we crack down on the root of the problem - the campaigns that "employ" them at zero cost to themselves, paying them in a token they've just created out of thin air.

The bounty rules are irrelevant. The forum rules state no off topic posts, no low or zero value posts, and no plagiarizing. It doesn't matter if a bounty campaign states that users should copy and paste a specific message across multiple threads and boards. If they are breaking forum rules, they should be banned.

Any hiring of services that use the forum, such as bounties, and do not pay using Bitcoin, should pay a small fee in Bitcoins. This fee would considerably reduce the number of spam, ghost accounts and bots. It would also help to separate the serious services from the junk that are created daily.

This was what the Campaign Manager, Yahoo, did with the MB8coin project he managed which I also participated in advertising on my Facebook profile. We had to share, retwit and post on social media outside this forum as he refused to include signature bounty. I can say that took the spam outside here.

I guess bounty managers are only bound by moral and legal ethics. Nothing in forum rules specify anything for them.
Theymos never created any guidelines for them, so what you want from Theymos to check?

If in next wave , temp / perm /sig bans are started getting awarded to spammers, then these problem would be solved.

If you are relying on bounty manager then how you will tackle user who are not in any bounty and still spamming.

Theymos allows the users to earn from bounties but there is no endrosement for them. Actually making a list of bounty managers by Theymos will be implied as endrosement by Theymos.

Things changed fastly in the forum, and in crypto, so we only have unofficial rules of the forum, instead of official rules. In addition, theymos stated long time ago, maybe in 2019 or late of 2018, that he actually felt campaigns paid in altcoins, tokens are distasteful, and might serious consider restrict all campaigns that not pay in bitcoin. The main reason (likely come from @LoyceV) is that by restricting all campaigns, bounties pay via altcoins and tokens, scammers have to pay some cost (via Bitcoin, the only acceptable payments for bounties) to scam others. It means they have to pay a cost first, and it might potentialy reduce numbers of scam projects that run bounties there to scam crypto enthusiasts.
Such restriction will automatically and dramatically reduce bounty topics and spam in bounty child boards for sure, like what we have witnessed with merit system, months after start of the system, demotions on Junior Members activated, after that spamming reduced considerably.

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For a official or unofficial guideline for bounty managers, I don't think that sort of guideline will be launched by admins. Main reasons are most of important things are presented here: Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules, guidelines, FAQ, and related reference sources.

You can suggest here: Signature advertisers: suggestions? He created that thread for this type of topic and it's currently in need of a bump  
Read the previous discussion before suggesting, it might be already mentioned by someone.

Take note that he also mentioned somewhere that there are tons of work that have to be done.

It's a big job for Theymos doing it, he just owned the forum and just like Mark Zuckerberg owning facebook that cannot prevent everything that is posted and shared even if it's illegal. The consequences happens after the very action, and we have the rules to follow, that doesn't change at all.

This is a complex issue to address. To what extent a bounty manager should be liable for his/her participants behaviour?
But one thing for sure is these managers are taking up too much job for them to handle. And they are compromising the quality to make it look like they are doing the job properly. And in some instances, they even work with the plagiarizing and spamming to scam the bounty issuer.

Bounties section are the busiest section in the forum with a lot of spam, and scams project. Managers should be more liable with their participants and choose only the good one but in bounties section, its easy to join and spam the forum.

My only suggestion is that, stop the signature program of the bounties if its not paying through BTC let them ask for the bounty hunter to just advertise outside this forum or on social medias because I think BTC signature campaign managers are more strict, respected managers and compose of a well participants, because of the huge competition joining the campaign.

Plagiarism is a crime, its a massive offense everywhere. Bounty management,not so much or at all. Spam is all across the internet, only difference here is, people get paid to do so, and worse of all they abuse that crap to hell's extent.

A simple solution would be to not allow any bounties on this forum since its a bitcoin forum, and to host all the altcoin bounties campaign elsewhere, but that argument has been used for far too long, and nothing has come out of it. There are a million solutions to tackle this(exaggeration), but none of them would be viable here because liberation rules this forum, so chances are very minimalistic.

Great managers can handle many campaigns at a higher quality so its not good to limit them because we honeslty want them to manage many campaigns since we can have the confidence of a good management.

Everyone can put up their bounty campaign, and even a new account or lower rank can manage that but the real answer with this one is that, its the bounty hunters job to do their best lookin for a good campaign, and report if there’s a suspicious bounty program. If there’s already a negative trust on the manager, then don’t take the risk anymore, don’t be greedy and look for other good bounties.

Suggestion to this, what about the forum limiting how many bounty or signature campaign a manager can handle altogether at a time ?  . I'm thinking this can be possible, I don't think this is controlling them on the terms and rules to the campaign but a condition precedent to become a manager. Perhaps, they could have lesser work to do so they might have the "conscience" to give more time to the few bounty/campaign they will be limited to.

Like 3/4 at a time, I hope this could help the forum. This is an opinion anyway  

Agree, I'm just referring that it was discussed long ago but don't have any output that has been done by our admins. I also liked to see how will admins set regulations to bounty managers because some of them are receiving huge payments just to fool the participants. I've been scammed a lot of times in a project and BMs are included in that action.


Systems that have been created for the forum are trust and merit system. As we can see, it's a general solution that is applied to all of the members of this community but if we think deeper, those systems cover up all of the problems in this forum, there's a lot of factors they consider before implementing the system. So basically, the issue in bounty managers will not be given any attention, even we create a lot of solutions there will be always a problem. Members are the one should change and be responsible for their actions here. The trust and merit system is enough and I think it's the best solution as of now to avoid things that hinder the betterment of the forum.

Yep, most definitely.

I don't even think it was all that long ago, but I do remember that the discussion went on with no input from Theymos and ultimately no resolution.  I'm really happy about all these bans that just happened, but I really don't think Theymos is going to put any restrictions on bounty managers, regardless of what the community thinks.  Believe me, I'd love to see some guidelines laid down for bounty managers and how they should have to conduct the application process and post monitoring and everything else, but I'm not going to bet that's going to happen.

I was Proposed guidelines for bounty managers, but unfortunately I haven't got any answer from admin. Likely admin don't want to moderate bounty section. I believe there should be something that would drive bounty managers on right way. BM are living now on freedom forum and they are doing whatever they want. I don't think admin will do something for bounty mangers and perhaps he left it for trust system .   

This is already a topic long ago, we all know that shitposting was commonly done by the participants of campaigns. The issue in bounty campaigns wasn't prioritized, it's just a part of the marketplace where we can earn income by posting. Staffs and admins are focusing on how we can develop our community into a good one. I know that diminishing those irresponsible bounty managers might decrease the shitposters but admin's actions towards the forum will benefit the whole community, not just on a specific section. Also, we can't control the rules of the bounty since they own the project, they will decide what should be done, and that's the risk part of joining a campaign.

Most of the bounty managers in the altcoin section were not that good at checking post history of their participants because they're too many of them. This is the reason why shitposting, plagiarism and spamming was very common in those kinds of participants. Some of the bounty managers are holding a lot of campaigns with a lot of participants, do you think they will manage it? I think not. Bounty managers are also a victim, but that's not an excuse to be used here because it's their responsibility to manage the bounty, they're the one who will control and distribute the income of each participant, no matter what happens, the bounty manager is the point person of a specific project. But no worries, some good bounty managers had already received negative trust.

Why there still a shitposter in this forum despite having a lot of additional systems to control this problem. They should have known that at the beginning, they already know how to speak and read, I think they should also understand the rules.

Now that stringent measures are being put in place to eradicate plagiarism and spamming through ban and all that, will it not also be time for Theymos or the admins to put in place measures to checkmate Bounty Managers on the way they run their bounties? I mean shouldn't these mangers become strict (or be forced to) on crosschecking the post habits of their participants? The altcoin bounty threads are now messy. What can be done to make it better? Your suggestions can help Theymos make a valuable change.