Topic: Spam Sections - page 2. (Read 969 times)

From my point of view, Yes both participants and managers should be tagged if they're intentionally promoting this project which has been labeled scam and when i mean scam, am not speaking of the simple issues instead those that can lead to demage or lost of fund of forum members. If these guys are willing to put their reputations on the line for few bucks then they do deserve the tags.

No, if they're not aware of the scamming behavior of the projects. Some projects Initially don't start as scams from the very beginning so they shouldn't be held responsible but for those which are clear cases (like, fake team, Ponzi scheme, plagiarism sites, whitepaper etc) we should discourage people from patronizing this project through through signature ads on the forum or managing this campaigns and the best way to achieve this, is by enforcing tagging of the promoters and managers after they must have been warned but refused to take corrections.

I was referring to the campaign manager. Lets say we disallow new accounts from opening threads on the altcoin section, and we only allow Full members, and beyond. If that project turns bad for legitimate reasons or not should the campaign manager be held responsible too? They are not only managing the campaign, but they're also posting the announcement thread for the project.

I bring up the issue because I know that a lot of campaign managers do not care for the ethnics behind the project, and only care about the money that the job brings. Being a campaign manager brings in some decent money for the amount of work that's required of you. Especially, since it's quite obvious that some projects in the altcoin section especially are using automatic ways of enrolling users, and counting posts.

Personally, from my stand point if I were a campaign manager I would be micromanaging every aspect of it, and I'd probably be a little bit too strict, but at the end of the day your image, and the companies image is everything, and if you're allowing low quality spammers posting around the forum that doesn't look good. I know this isn't the way advertising works, and spamming actually brings results, however from a personal moral standpoint if you're getting paid to do something you better be doing it right, and to the best of your ability.

It is the fact. Honestly, I fall into that trap too when I was noob.
It is true that newbies will sure admire Senior Members and above (as I was), because their badges, their ranks, their rights to wear signature, avatars.
Furthermore, some scam projects build their bigger and clever traps by sending bunches of sMerits to OPs of scam projects. Newbies are easily to think projects that have OPs received bunches of merits from other high-ranked users are really potential projects.
A project with 100 merits from 10 Legendary members. Damn it, at first glance, they are likely good projects.
Then, they move next to bounty thread that managed by another Legendary account. What a perfect trap!
Participants should not be tagged, if those scam projects and OPs have not yet get negative trusts and Active Flags from DT members.
I think if there are required fees to run signature campaigns. It should be bi-weekly or monthly-fees.
Fees should be determined based on companies plan to hire how many participants, and how many maximum posts their participants might make and get paid per week/ per month.
If one company plan to run a campaigns with 100 participants, and maximum posts per week are 600; fees should be different from campaigns that ask their 100 participants make only 250 posts per week.

I knew a project that run by one person, run their campaign here with a few cents for participants, but they ran it seriously.
Microlancer.io

The only issue of higher ranked members accepting payments for posting an announcement for them they're effectively promoting that business. The owners of the coin are using the reputation, and age of the user who posts for them. Despite what I think, and what others might think that age of account doesn't mean squat when it comes to advertising or vouching for a service or whatever. From a newbie perspective they're generally going to trust those higher leveled accounts. This then begs the question, should we tag those that are advertising these projects? I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't be willing to put my name to any old project.

I do agree that the moderation of the current signature campaigns from the signature managers point of view is an issue. However, I feel combining copper membership, and the required to pay the forum a yearly amount or something to be able to post their thread would prevent most issues. Although, not all startup projects are going to have the funds necessary for this, and they might well be decent projects.

Most of the altcoins ICO and projects are made to collect money and they in reality spent zero amount when they give their shit tokens to the signature campaigns participants. How many times we have seen that people never receive the altcoins at the end of the campaign or even if they do, these are worthless piece of shitcoins.

Now if we implement this rule of bitcoin payment for every signature campaigns, many of those scam projects will run away. And there will be left only two types of altcoins project campaigns.

1- One that are legit and they are willing to spend the bitcoins for those who want to participate in promotion of the project.
2- Some scam altcoin projects may still exists but then they will pay something to get their scam advertised (currently they are enjoying free service)

There are two main consequences from those campaigns, bounties that run for free, and managed by brand-new accounts or potentially scammers:
1. They only want to get money
They run bounties, campaigns for their free funds (free premined/ instamined altcoins/ tokens). So, they have nothing to lose from their bounties/ campaigns here. If their campaigns/ bounties succeed, good; if not, it is not too bad at all. Hence, they don't care about quality of their participants and their posts after accepted to join. Consequently, their participants post shit around, damage the forum. People who own those companies, and who run such campaigns/ bounties, don't care what they bring to the forum, at beginnings and after all.

2. They probably scam their participants
Scam projects mostly don't hire any managers; they run their own bounties/ campaigns. Due to they are scammers, they can change rules at ends of bounties/ campaigns with some unacceptable reasons (projects fail, ICOs fail, IEOs fail, blah blah); change payment rates; or abruptly shutdown their bounties without announcement.
Participants of those bounties/ campaigns are victims, unintentionally. Somehow, they might have bad experience and feelings about forum.
I don't mention bad guys who readily promote projects that well-known and warned as scam ones. Good people, who are lack of experience, and promote scam projects (that they don't know) for weeks/ months, and get nothing back. Even useless tokens/ altcoins.

My personal stand on the situation is; Yeah put limitations on signature, and bounties which aren't paying in Bitcoin. Make it mandatory that they either pay Bitcoin to the forum as a payment to advertise or pay its participants in Bitcoin. Possibility even combining the two.  This would in my opinion remove most of the scam projects which likely don't have any Bitcoin to their name, and therefore promise that their coin is going to boom, and you'll be rich through the minuscule shares they're offering. I'm generally not one for putting restrictions on users, however what's the alternative? Eventually, theymos will likely have enough, and end up banning signature campaigns period, and despite all the problems they're currently causing that would be a shame. I wouldn't be entirely against the idea of banning them completely though, honestly.

For the projects that do have the funds, then great this likely won't affect them too much, and generally those that are paying in Bitcoin are of higher quality. (I say generally as I know what the counter argument will be concerning a recent Bitcoin paying signature campaign)

I also believe that, but only theymos can act on or enforce that, unless he gives the power to banish certain campaigns signatures to someone else. Luckily I don't think there's too many campaigns that are causing too much damage right now but there's probably a lot that are paying for mediocre posts. I don't pay that close attention to new ones and only really notice them when spam is everywhere so maybe I'm wrong.


There's probably plenty of people here who could run them decently. I'm sure some users would even accept payment in tokens, but it's a real issue when inexperienced users run them, many of whom are brand new to the forum themselves and don't know how things work here or what should be expected of them, but if we let people run them how they want then people are going to take advantage of that and be lazy in doing it. Then of course there's the campaigns that don't even have a manager to begin with and those are the ones that do the worst damage.

I'm off the believe since the final decision making is mostly influenced by just one individual in the person of theymos (correct me if I'm wrong) that's why he's finding it difficult to implement the suggestion of making all signature campaign payment to be made in either Bitcoin or any altcoins with value (preferable Grin or ETH). The truth of the matter is these projects popping up every now and then would comply simply because it's the rules of the forum and this will bring about more professionalism to signature bounty. As a result reduce the spam level on these boards tagged spam baords.

Remember when the evil fees idea was implemented many felt it won't work but now, people are paying this fees just to get access to the forum even the success of buying the copper membership which many projects uses to give them the privilege to post images to make their project ANN more visible, is a good indication that this suggestion would work perfectly. These projects spent thousands of dollars for other advertisment platform, they do have the funds.

Standardizing payouts is an interesting one. Although, I'm not sure how that would work considering that most altcoins are paying out with shares of their tokens which are generally worth next to nothing. I'd like to see altcoins required to pay either in Bitcoin or pay the forum to be able to run a signature campaign. Same goes for bounties, I believe they should be paying to advertise on the forum. The amount of issues that prop up from these sort of campaigns are probably the majority of reports we have. This has been discussed before, and as far as I remember theymos wasn't entirely against the idea, but would probably make a few changes to fit within his vision for the forum.

Agreed. Forum should have new rule and requirements on mandatory fees to run campaigns, especially altcoins/ tokens. It is rarely to see good altcoins or tokens. Good means they actually not scam ones, and really developed by their team over long period enough, and have their usecases. Most of altcoins, ICO-based projects run here are scam ones, so yes, they partially damage forum reputation.
Those projects should pay for it. Why forum has to pay money to clear their shits, while they earn money from their shitshows in the forum?
Some projects hire professional managers to manage their campaigns/ bounties; they do readily to spend funds for their promotions. Not all of them are good projects, but at least they initially want to run their serious promotions in forum. For the rest, they create Newbie accounts, buy Coppermembership, or bug high-ranked accounts, then run their shit campaigns, zero cost but might bright huge returns back for them. It's unfair for forum and our community.

Agreed.

Look at what happened to the Yobit spammers when theymos stepped in. All signatures removed, Yobit signatures banned for 2 months, all spammers wearing the signature banned for 14 days. Yobit was contributing huge amounts of spam, and the problem with that campaign literally ceased overnight. I know we've had this conversation before (and I don't want it to seem like I'm blaming you in any way) but if we subjected all campaigns to the rules you have laid down here (Signature Campaign Guidelines), I firmly believe spam would drastically reduce. Once word starts spreading that signatures are removed and both users and campaigns are banned when their participants spam, campaigns would be forced to actually moderate themselves and monitor their participants, and spammers would be forced to actually write something useful or just give up altogether.

Without a clear statement of intent regarding this from theymos, plus some more mods who will focus on banning the offending campaigns, then it always feels like we are just swimming against the tide with spam.

I think we should probably have some dedicated 'sig spam' mods that deal with unsubstantial posts. There's just far too much of it for current staff to deal with and it dwarfs all the more important stuff. If we have two separate report buttons/queues like I suggested then those sig spam mods could just have access to that and handle all reports on spam so it frees up current staff to deal with the urgent things. As I've mentioned before I think we should also look at charging campaigns a fee to operate here or alt coins can pay a fee to have their own sub board and that money could be used to pay the sig spam mods as I don't think campaigns should be allowed to advertise for free here, especially when it's them that is causing 99% of the damage to the forum in the process.


Maybe, but at the same time I don't think the forum should burn through money paying for an issue that is being caused by campaigns and they should be compensating the forum for money spent trying to clear it up. Either that or change how campaigns are allowed to operate here and the bad ones should be banished. Once they realise there's repercussions for their laziness and ineptitude they'll soon change their ways.

@tranthidung Some sections are only handled by global mods because there aren't any moderators assigned to it.

Patrollers can only handle Newbies & Brand new users (correct me if I'm wrong). There are tons of high post-count Sr. Members and above. So... moderators are needed.

The forum currently has 1250 BTC in cold storage, plus an undisclosed amount in hot wallets. It also takes in around $500,000 a year on ad revenue. Forum funds are not a hurdle to employing more moderators.

I agree with you here. Reporting is a thankless and often mind-numbing task. Some sort of recognition such as reporter badges or some other perk would be great. I also think it would be great to remove the 4 second cooldown for a small handful of regularly reporting users who would not abuse it. There is no point in making life more difficult for someone who wants to give up their time for nothing to report en masse.

Those boards are likely heaven for spammers. They are nearly safe in those boards.
I think more patrollers are enough, and forum might not need more moderators for those boards, that will result in additional burden on forum funds (to pay for more moderators). Moreover, those boards can be kept cleaner from community-led efforts through spam reports. To do this, forum should have something new (like long-considering report badges) in order to motivate users to do more spam reports.

There are no spam sections but users who are create spam posts/topics. Even P&S society have some topics that have interesting discussions going on but users start with their personal attacks and keep taking the thread to 50+ pages and Speculation is the next where no predictions are made based on any logical analysis. Not to forget topics like the Wall Observer thread. People get most of their merits by posting images on that topic.

It's a catch 22 situation. Serious users don't use those boards because they are filled with spam, and they are filled with spam because serious users aren't using them.

Until we increase our efforts to deal with the spammers, the quality of discussion in these boards will not improve. I agree with other members here who have suggested more mods and patrollers, but we also need more regular users reporting the spam. I would also like to see more bans of escalating length being handed out for spammers, and more topics being locked when they have run their course and before they turn in to spam mega threads.

I have created this topic and have been watching the views here closely and i have come up with the following conclusions.

1- Almost all the boards contains major spam and altcoin discussion is the worst section (I do not agree to it to some extent because there is no other place to get info about altcoins)
2- Use Self Moderation threads if you want to create a new discussion / thread.
3- Merits & Report to Moderator feature etc are helping to reduce the spam but not fully address the problem

Beyond serious boards, everyone have rights to post anywhere else in the forum. I pointed out that if they don't get benefits from their posts (due to signature disabled in Discussion boards (bitcoin, altcoins), they will reduce their posting intensity in those boards. Just kind of posting reduction, there is no way to stop spammers spreading their spam around; if there is no Newbie Jails, or WhiteList procedures.
Users can make reports on spam posts they see in those boards, but honestly I don't think there are demands to have more moderators for those boards, that have been totally burried with spam. Serious users never or rarely visit those boards, so there are mostly spammers in those boards. Consequently, they do neither care what they write nor what others' written. Only posting, continuously.