Topic: Spam Sections (Read 1000 times)

You are right that a certain user should not apply if they are not capable of posting into boards that they are not familiar with but  based on my understanding what welsh is trying to point out is that you shouldn't also stop posting into boards that you are somehow comfortable to. As long as you can meet the requirements that your campaign requires you that is pretty reasonable.

I have seen none from any legit campaigns that removed somebody by posting into boards based on his/her habbit that is not counted to the certain campaign where the user is currently enrolled as long as again the user meets the campaign requirements.

You're absolutely right. I remember writing a thread about this issue titled; [Guide] Factors to consider before joining paid signature campaigns and what you just suggested above was highlighted as one of those factors. Most applicants don't care about this though, that's why i appreciate quality managers that take time to review applicants post history before accepting them into their managed campaign.

A popular example is the campaign manager @yahoo62278, hardly before you see him employ an inactive poster on the gambling boards for any of his gamble related campaigns. I know this because I have been affected once after been inactive for sometime and apply for his campaign although my post quality is decent, got rejected and I'm positive the reason was due to me not been inactive for the last 2weeks on that particular board before applying for that campaign. Someone who was very active than I got offered the slot although my application was before his and i applaud that decision regardless I was affected.

We can't stop those dumb people from applying on the campaigns but we can definitely restrict them from being on that campaign if it has quality management.And obviously they are going to get selected on any campaigns that pays off in bitcoin if they are local boards unless they have some technical skills of cryptos and high merit counts.

Users should read rules of campaigns that they are interested in, before applying. One of requirements that they should consider is which boards in which posts accepted and/or there are posts required in special boards, such as gambling, local boards. If they are not familiar with gambling boards, and have never posted in gambling boards, it is better to do not apply. Altering posting behaviors and trying to post in unfamiliar boards might make posters looks dumb by their non-sense posts, somehow.

You should start pointing out names, it is quite hard to identify this one because as far as I am seeing most of the higher paid signature participants are actually posting a quality ones rather than to those who are paid quite lower. It is also not good to try posting about how low the quality posts are based on your point of view. Are you relatively saying that the one who's been managing the "High Paid Campaign" is ineffective?

There are actually very few discussions in there that are somehow good so do not discourage all not to post there if they are getting paid for it. That is completely irrational.

I don't think they need to avoid posting in Altcoin Discussion. I wouldn't change my habits just to get paid more, and I definitely do post in sections that don't get paid. For example serious discussion, but I'm not obsessed with hitting the maximum posts that I can get paid for, and I often don't even do half of that since becoming a moderator. Point being, I don't think just because you're in a signature campaign you should be altering your behavior, and avoid posting in sections that you would normally. Its the campaign managers job to decide whether they pay you or not for posting in certain sections.

No healthy discussion you say and you think the Bitcoin discussion, Gambling and Trading discussion board is better?, even the economy board is getting affected. No board is spam free and there are decent (quality) discussion in all board. A quick sign to identify a discussion that doesn't need generic response are the numbers of replies on that topic. Being a frequent visitor to the Alternative section i can testify I have encountered quality discussion that the bitcoin boards can't boost off.

Sure the board is full of spam but so are other boards, you don't discourage members to post there just because they're on high paying campaign. Running away from the spam problem won't solve it.  The healthy discussion on the board are lacking audience due to suggestion like yours, I don't support it.

Signature campaigns usually do not count posts in those sections, so how come users spam there? What's incentive?

If they still spam irrespective of signature campaigns, then the issue is something else, not signature campaigns, which everybody keeps saying.

I partially disagreed!
High-paid campaigns are the most attractive ones in the forum, so they are most competitive. Applicants have to fight each other and with very high rejecting-odds,
It is just beginnings, after accepted to join, if participants made low quality posts, or good/ high quality posts at early weeks, then slowly and gradually decrease their post quality over weeks, they will be under risks of attacks or reports from others whom always find for chances to join those campaigns.
They might do reports to campaign managers (through complaints); reports to forum staffs; or even publicly open threads to complain about that.

In fact, there is no doubt that average quality of participants in high-paid campaigns are higher than participants in low-paid campaigns, especially in shit-spamming campaigns.

I definitely agree! Most of the campaigns now, even the high-paying campaigns do have low-quality posters. It's such a disgrace if they're receiving a high payment but their posts are like a newbie. Those participants that are on paying campaigns should avoid posting in altcoin discussion. There are no healthy discussions produced on that section, more like it's just a spam area. Most of the campaigns require to have a constructive post but still, some participants aren't aware of that rule.

Altcoins signature campaigns are trash and most of them are scams. I doubt that the altcoin discussion will be managed and organized unless they implement another rule or system to avoid shitposting on mentioned discussions.

If you see the repetitive or useless topics you can report OP to the moderator so the whole thread will be vanished with all the spam replies on it.And also the users who need to lock the topics if the replies get reluctant on it.

Trading Discussion and Altcoin Discussion section are getting the shelter of spammers because of that persons who are continuously creating new topic which was previously posted. I don't say it is 100% same topic but the main focus of these post are quite same. So some people are persistently creating same topic and people are continuously answering the same things on these topic.

The current problem we are facing is many of the campaign managers aren't running their campaigns effectively. The majority of the altcoin campaigns are very poorly managed, and let just about anyone join them with no sort of moderation at all. The Bitcoin ones seem to be generally managed a little better overall, and we all know who the good managers of the forum are.

In a perfect world we would have good campaign managers for all the campaigns, but that's never going to be a reality unless restrictions are placed on posting signature campaigns.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. Also what is the difference between the serious campaigns and non-serious campaign ?

The fact is that many few good campaigns do pay for all the posts including P&S and off topic too. You can post constructive in these sections also and more importantly if the campaign manager is reputed and does his responsibility well, it is hard for spammers to remain in the campaign.

But is that really happening right now? cause to be very honest  I find more posts in the PolSci much worthy to discuss than those from the Bitcoin Discussion. Or Is it maybe because I'm just keeping an eye to those threads that interests me.

What you were talking about really are a possibilities but as what I am currently seeing (There are still more nonsense threads being added in the Bitcoin Discussion Sections and even economics is much worse.

Wherever posts counted for bounties, campaigns, there are spammers. Serious campaigns often do not count posts in P & S section, but shit bounties count them all. They don't care where their supporters post. They just use stupid bot to count posts, or manually check posts in profile pages, and don't care to visit post history to see where supporters post (with or without signature display), and post-contents.
Another plus point that P & S section can be abused to spam is signature enabled to display.  

I am not aware that Politics & society section are more spammy lol, Maybe because of those new idiots who started creating a lot of new threads but when you are going to look at the bitcoin discussion section. Most of the topics are repeated and getting ridiculously swarmed up. So I personally can't agree that the polsci section are more toxic than those sections that were stated above.

We all know that the main reason why those certain sections are having a huge trash posts because of the campaign and mostly polsci post is not counted.

Having seen the mentality of many signature spammers and the rhetoric that they spout in the topics regarding bounties, it seems that to many 'bounty hunters' that they realize tokens can fail but will participate with no regard for the actual prospective success of the project. Rather, it's more like them gambling on the result of the tokens. Signature spammers with this mentality contribute greatly to the spam since all they truly want is to jump in quickly, post their quota and leave with the roll of the dice. When it comes to social media campaigns that are confined to the bounty section, this is less of an issue since the section itself is basically created to contain all the generated spam.

Even the higher-ranking members will post on the "does Legendary posting ANN" threads will say something asinine about trusting a project more because there's a Legendary member posting the thread.

Sometimes, the threshold between scam and non-scam are vague. There are always efforts to do personal/ institutional assisinations by scam accusation, or whatsoever. Bittrex got attacks, Binance got attacks, and Bitmex or Bitfinex too. Fake scam accusation can turn into active Flags if scammers successfully trapped DT members. It might be rare probability, but we can not exclude such probability.
What if, a project get active flags, their participants got red tags; then months later, their active flag turn into inactive?
Will DT members spend time to remove neg tags on that project's participants?
I doubt that DT members will do that, especially in case number of participants are huge.
Let's see what Yobit did. Only theymos' manual handle solve issues, but there is noone got red tags due to this. Yobit is a shady exchange, but yeah, admin, global moderators, or DT members have reasons to not tag anyone supports Yobit. Only people who spam and hit threshold of total spam reports got bans from admin.

Are there anyone will tag other people who support Bitcoin Cash, ie.? And, yes, even there are scam projects, people still have rights to wear which kind of signature they want, as there is no restrictive rule on this, as of writing. How to prove that they wear signature as free supports or wear signature to get payments? No one can prove if scam companies really want to run their shady promotions with acceptable level, not massively like what Yobit did.

I would agree that a project failing doesn't mean it's a scam. These are called investments for a reason, however this of course means that a project stuck to its promises, and it simply failed because it wasn't as successful as they originally planned. This is where the area gets gray though. What if the intentions of the project was to scam from the beginning, and we have evidence of that, but there's no evidence of the project manager being involved. I would probably lean on the side of innocent until proven guilty on that one, but this is why I believe putting your name to a project that you aren't personally involved in is a pretty risky move because you don't know the intentions of these projects. Managing a signature campaign is different, you're effectively promising to pay the participants for advertising the service as long as you carry out that you aren't really tied to the project, unless you're willingly advertising a scam project which again is a different scenario.

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.

Why not both?

Create self-moderated threads in order to propagate the board with real discussion.
Force spammers to be binned into useless threads or to start them and then now you have fish in a barrel.
Wipe the thread or wipe their posts: either way, you're lifting the board of its spam.

Altcoin Discussion and Bitcoin Discussion are both spam sections because most of the topics are just repetitive. After creating a unique topic, it will have another version by next week and most of it doesn't have any complexity so people will try and give common replies even they lack the knowledge required to post on that specific topic.

As we can see, most of the sig spammers are posting in Altcoin Discussion than Bitcoin Discussion and many topics on it can be answerable by a normal person. We should be more intellectual on replying to threads because we're advanced and we are here in a big community that has a lot of information. It's such a disgrace if they're here for a long time and still making dumb posts. This is also the reason why some people choose Reddit to discuss some important topics because the statements are very considerable.


Agree to this, you can avoid spam replies by making it in self-moderation.
But the real cause here are the sig-spammers, they're the one who makes shitposts on the abovementioned threads.

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The only solution, for now, is to report them, moderation isn't quite effective if you really want to dissolve shitposting because they will just avoid those moderated topics and post to the other threads. Remember, they're sig spammers who will post everywhere just to complete their task and earn bounty, it's really hard to stop them.

It's not that bad, but it still is quite bad. As opposed to the 99% spam threads in Altcoin Discussion, you have somewhere around 65-80% spam in that section. Trading Discussion is more or less the same in that regard. Speculation would be somewhere around 50%.

The natural enemy of the spammer, the elusive moderator.

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I don't like excusing things because of a minority of contradictory instances. There is an invisible "generally" prior all statements, including this one. I won't say that you can't find genuine threads, but they are always overtaken by spammers or slammed down three pages deep when all the spam threads bubble back up.

I don't really think economics is that bad, I post there rarely, and sometimes come across ok-ish discussions, topics by Hydrogen and O_e_l_e_o's arguments are really indepth and interesting to look into. Other than that, its usually a shitshow of people having ~0 knowledge in theoretical economics.

Speculation has surprisingly good discussions occasionally, but that's only because of those fucking magical Wall Observer thread-bastards, they strive hard for real.

I think the spam would be genuinely reduced if there's just like a little more mods or patrollers around than what there currently are.

Bitcoin and Altcoin Discussion especially, and it's probably because a lot of sig spammers know they can post garbage there without having their posts deleted by mods--and it's true, because there are so many shitposts in those sections.

The gambling sections seem to attract people who are genuinely interested in gambling topics, but there's still a lot of spam last I checked.  There are a lot of members who can't write proper English but who persist in trying anyway, and the result is a mess.  Not sure about Trading Discussion.  I think there's a lot less spam there (in a relative sense), but it's still pretty bad as far as I know.

This has all been discussed ad nauseum, and it's pretty common knowledge how bad the situation is.  Theymos doesn't want to censor members, and I think that's why the problem has persisted.  But hey, at least we got the merit system and the requirement for 1 merit to rank up to Jr. Member.  That put a huge damper on account farming and the ability to earn money by shitposting.  Those actions didn't solve the problem, but they helped.

It's what people do. People often use blanket statements to be more effective in the way their words are perceived. It's alright saying "there are good posts there but the majority of it is spam" when "Altcoin Discussion is a spam section" has a much more active, and aggressive way of saying it. It's all about impact. Obviously, there's some really good discussion in every section of this forum about various different things.

You are correct in that, actually. While seeking out high-profile spammers, I found that Bitcoin Discussion has been flushed of the majority of the spam. The same can be said of SOME of Economics and Speculation. Strangely enough, Speculation is kind of better than Economics in terms of quality. You'll find more genuine discussion than the drab "Differences between an investor and common man!" and "Who is the richest person?" kind of threads.

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The worst board is Altcoin discussion by far, with Economics and Trading Discussion are probably next in line.

Off-topic is still a creature to be tamed because uninteresting threads with uninteresting one-liners should be deleted, but uninteresting threads with interesting replies should be kept. The problem is when we have crappy threads like "What's your favorite movie?" and you can't find a single response that adds to anything. A simple answer->explanation would make the posts worth reading. Unfortunately, there are too many posts that just write down some random movie title and drop off. What's the point?

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Posting in bitcoin discussion board require any rank criteria? I don't think so.

I can only see better moderation made less spam posts particularly less spam threads on Bitcoin discussion so I said other boards also need that kind of moderation level.

I have made self-moderated threads in spam sections before. Surprise surprise, look at the users that don't show up. After all, what is a forum designed for? Discussion? Pfft!

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I was going to make a proposal to create more self-modded threads (and a 2nd post "trash bin" for transparency) in order to return the spam boards back to reality. Unfortunately, all that spam has corroded my brain and I'm not exactly sure what would be an interesting-enough discussion to start.

It's not really that bad.
Spammers avoid moderated topics, especially if the OP is an old user.

They know their shitposts are going to be deleted and that would simply make them waste time and not get paid at the end of the week.

The kids in your example do that for their own fun or just because they are jerks, them trashing something takes a few seconds, for posters here is all about the money. Wasting their precious time on a post and have it deleted is going to hurt them, unlike the teenagers who won't lose anything when their garbage is cleaned up.

Hmm, we could actually have an experiment with this
I'm betting on a 1 to 5 ratio at least.

To me the spam sections are those sub boards where you can get away with making low value posts in large volume. Gambling Discussion is the main one to me because people are just discussing sports and you can make a lot of posts in there that don't require any technical knowledge of bitcoin. Many signature campaigns are also gambling based ones and they seem to understandably require a certain amount of posts in the gambling sections and that will obviously fuel the fire. Off topic used to be the biggest abused one imo but since most campaigns don't pay for posts in there and with the invention of the merit system posting in there is probably mostly useless other than for post count so users go elsewhere and Gambling Discussing is probably far easier to abuse and get paid for it.


A self-modded thread would be a nightmare. It would be like being an unpaid janitor of a school of unruly and illiterate kids. No thanks. It would take far too much time and from my understanding of the rules people can just create an unmoderated one if they wanted to.

It depends on what you consider to be spam (apart from the obvious). Every section is affected one way or the other although the spam level on some board are more obvious that's why they get tagged as spam section by majority. From my judgement of what spam are, I'll say this boards; beginner & help and serious discussion have also been affected lately.  Even the technical discussion and support section that many feel to be clean off spam isn't although theirs aren't as obvious as others.

The fact altcoin or gambling boards are tagged spams doesn't mean we should take discussion that fate more in those sections to other boards. Preferable you create your topic and enable the self moderation feature to keep the thread clean off spammers or report spam posts to moderators for section which those feature aren't enable.

Its not about the effort to create the self moderated thread but it more relates to the requirement for a new self moderated thread.
I need to know about the

Odds of the upcoming cricket match,
Need to know if any particular gambling site offer is worth investing
Why bitcoin price pump 1000$ in a day
best service alternative to paypal
when is the hardfork of the coin
why people are not using bitcoin in my country

and many others things for which i do not need to create self mod thread and can discuss them in the existing threads.

You do not have to always create a self moderated thread, what was suggested was simply measures you can take to curb spam attack on your thread or topic immediately without waiting for a moderator to act upon your report of a spammy reply/replies

Create a self mod thread, if you want to keep things a hundred percent "civil" on your topic as you can easily truncate/remove irrelevant replies and on your threads or topics anywhere around the forum that aren't self moderated, then always report spam posts/replies to the moderators, they'll act on it.

Why not? Creating a self-moderated thread does not require more work than creating a regular thread.
In the end, you still decide how much work you want to put into moderating it.

On most ANN threads, you still run the risk of not getting your question seen, precisely for the reason you've mentioned yourself (spammy replies in between).
Plus, you're potentially losing a bit of outside input from people who are not affiliated with the project in question.

Any board where you are stating your opinion and not facts tends to have more spam than those that require a very specific post.
Topics in the gambling sections are about your favorite casinos, gambling system, stories of big wins and losses and topics were there is no right or wrong answer. Therefore there are many spam posts and repeated answers.

Boards like Technical Support are strict and you cant spam there as the problems and discussions there are very specific.
If a user requires help to setup his hardware wallet your post needs to be about how to do that in a proper way. If you try to spam that thread about your top 5 hardware wallets and how cool they are, your post will be deleted.

The advises mentioned by you are not easy to implement. I cannot create a self moderation thread on my every query / discussion. If i want to discuss or get update on any altcoin project, i do go to its ANN thread and visit the last few pages to get update on what's going on that project despite the fact that there are spammy posts too in between.

The Altcoin Discussion board is definitely a great place to get your report statistics up
There sometimes are some interesting topics there, but in my experience, most of the in-depth, interesting topics get buried too quickly due to all the spam topics people tend to reply on.

I've suggested a couple of times that Altcoin Discussion really needs some cleanup and/or another moderator.
Personally, I do try to post there, but none of my topics ever get any traction there. Probably because they're a bit longer than the average topic and require people to actually read and think before they reply.
Or maybe I'm just talking about coins that aren't that interesting to people...

It's a bit sad really, I think with some additional moderation, it could definitely become an interesting place for discussion.

It is incorrect.

Forum changed its rank system, with stricter requirements and good supports from merit system. It is the third biggest change of forum rank system. Read more: History of bitcointalk.org's rank system
Those changes only play as supportive hindrance and prevent spammers to rank up to higher ranks. Unfortunately, merit system and new rank requirements have no power to prevent spammers keep spamming. In some cases, spammers don't need to rank up, they just need to show their shitposts for their bumping services. This time, it is a turn of report button, and forum community to report spammers whom run bumping services.

Bitcoin discussion is not more place for spammers because I can see heavy moderation there in recent months and most of the spam threads will be deleted in few days after gets created but other section on the list needed that kind of moderation too.

The altcoin boards and speculation are the spammiest boards in my opinion, because it is trivially easy to churn out a one liner that will get paid by a bounty campaign which is vaguely on topic and so less likely to be deleted.

Bitcoin discussion is better than those boards, but still isn't great. A lot of topics get started there that don't belong there, and again, there are a lot of signature spammers.

If you want to discuss topics while avoiding spam, then you could consider creating a self-moderated thread. You then have the power within that thread to delete any spam comments and keep the discussion focused and relevant. You could also consider helping out by reporting spam comments elsewhere to the moderators for deletion. You could also consider posting in the "Serious Discussion" board, but be aware that, as the names suggests, any trivial topics in that board are likely to be deleted.

Imho Politics & Society and Speculation are more spammy than your list. But as said, it depends from one user to another how he perceives certain posts as spam.
All in all, most of the forum has big amounts of spam, unfortunately. Simply some manage to ignore it better than others.

You discuss the topics in the relevant sections regardless of whether someone has dubbed them 'spam sections' or not, but we can't stop people calling them what they like and people are allowed to have an opinion on that. Most sections are filled with spam to be honest, but some are abused more than others, but nobody is saying all posts in those subs are spam, it's just for every substantial thread it will be swamped by dozens of unsubstantial ones. Until there's repercussions on how signature campaigns can operate here then nothing much will change and people will continue to spam if they can get paid for it.

I hear every now and then that Bitcoin discussion / Trading discussion / Gambling discussion / altcoin discussion (and many others) are considered as spam sections. Like to hear opinion if all the above sections come in the category of spam sections and if so, where do we discuss topics related to gambling, altcoin and general bitcoin discussion ?

Why do we declare these section as spammers heaven when i do find some good discussion going on there (if not all).  There are many spam posts too but we cannot say that they are 100% useless post in there.