Topic: Spondoolies Spam - page 3. (Read 8119 times)

Xmas day and he still takes time out to whinge

Dogie Spam McScrooge.

What else can we expect from dogie than a bunch of spam...

You can blame the 'spam' on users purposely spamming as to why those threads become what they become, but at the same time it doesn't change what the threads become. It was more than a WEEK after when I posted the screenshot that virtually every single SPTech thread was at the top of the front page, because the same few users kept bumping all of the threads at once.

I still don't think you understand why I argued that the practice was not a good thing. Its to retain that level playing field. How could a new or small company compete with a larger company giving $1000s and $1000s of products away so they can layer the front page? And on the flip side, you would have been complaining just as hard when larger companies were spamming even more threads than you could have. Bitmain could have posted literally 100s of threads if you had your way and review 'parties' were allowed. Its not a good practice, not a good idea and not something that should continue.... as you've said in private but seem to be saying the exact opposite in public.

Regarding your claims that you receive different admin policies to any other company because you don't spend on advertisement, please break that into a separate meta thread. Its a serious allegation and (if true), needs to be dealt with.

Regarding some of your posts being deleted, its because they often don't add information/content and are too short. You can't simply quote someone elses post and say "Thanks" when the post wasn't written towards you and you'd had no interaction with that thread beforehand. I have no say in this policy as its a policy and working standard of the forum which we all have to adhere to all the same. Again, if you feel like you're being singled out then you can post a meta thread so a tribunal of peers and admins can discuss the problem and if things need to change.

One of the things /hardware is suffering from at the moment is that users are spilling out of different threads by asking too many questions. I tend to get flamed when posting that they'd be better off in the S2/S3/S4 threads etc, but that's where they belong. The whole point of these centralised support threads is it keeps the boards clean, reduces the time for a user to get support and centralises the knowledge base and information.

The solution is more timely moderation, but that's not really a solution in itself as there are only so many mods, so many hours they can spend on here. CK did a great job of helping to clean up things when he was made a mod.

My setup guides act as a box to mining reference guide, they're not meant to be entirely exhaustive for 99.999% of people and anything and everything they could ever encounter towards that miner. Just because I don't publish pages and pages of test data doesn't mean its not being taken in different simulated environments and verified. That gets condensed into the miner specifications (as a validation of the manufacturer's rating), because 99% of users don't need raw data. I also don't think you understand the amount of time required to process that quality of photos.

Now, to answer your other concerns (which, including this discussion are heading towards OT-ness), there has to be a reason to post on the forums and keep things going. I could move my threads off site and monetise them there, but then that harms the community. The majority of the products I review in the modern market don't get close to paying for their time via the unit's value. Studios charge up to $1000 for the photography I do and up to $400 for the product 360s I've started doing when you put multiple products in at once. Tldr, expensive.

By offering exactly the same service to all manufacturers - big or small - it provides an even playing field which gives everyone to show off their wares in a sterile environment. Then, the review thread transforms into a setup guide, providing everything customer needs to go from box to mining. And then, if a customer falls into difficulty they can post their problems and they'll be dealt with as soon as I'm available. Advertising, (all $1000 of it a month...) helps pay for a portion of that environment and level playing field.

My threads are also published and then they drop off the 1st and 2nd pages until they are needed. When a customer has a problem, they post, I answer and it drops off again - they're not in the way unless they're being specifically utilised. If only one thread is being utilised, then only one thread is on the front page etc. That is different from posting 10-15 threads simultaneously and juggling to keep them all active at the top of the front page at once. Additionally, the majority of the traffic comes from Google searches, which brings external users onto the forums and keeps the ecosystem on bitcointalk healthy. The guides do not rely on the front page to garner views, hence some reviews with only a few replies have 1000s of views.

Now, to answer your other accusations - which should be in a scam accusation thread... can you provide an example company to which I show veiled aggression towards because they don't 'pay me'? I would also very much likely to highlight YOUR actions involving HashCoins, as I did nothing but provide a level playing field by not jumping to conclusions. In contrast, YOU decided that what they were doing was impossible, and so without proof YOU left them negative trust. Imagine if when you were establishing yourself [even though they have 9-12 months trading history...], someone else decided they didn't like what you were doing and dumped negative trust on you and called you a scammer - without giving them a chance to prove anything? You decided that they were a scam, until they could prove anything. You acted as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner in one move. Now, are able to explain what I did (by saying don't jump to conclusions....) was so heinous?

Some thoughts looking at Hardware page 1:

Bitmain have a thread for every model. The title says "announcement and support". There is a support section, so?

Spondoolies, apart from the reviews, have one thread plus an unoffficial model specific and the Legendary thread.

My suggestion is to have a model specific thread per model per manufacturer. Reviewers could post there. And if it turns into a support thread (which it will), so be it.


Guides how to do things belong in Support, IMHO.

I think if people want to post reviews or comments on a product and there is that much discussion then it isn't spam.

Spam should be when one user posts multiple threads with the same topic over and over.

I am not saying that anything is wrong with the fact that dogie makes a thread for every new miner. What my point is that if more people do the same thing then there is a better chance that people will find value from a review.

Plus some people think the fact that dogie is paid by bitman makes him somewhat biased (I don't agree with this point of view, but it is shared by some)

I don't necessarily agree with Dogie essentially using the forum as a free for-profit review website and if I were the mods I would ban his in-thread banner ads, but (I assume) he gets his revenue because his threads get a lot of hits. If anyone else is interested, many of his reviews are very basic with not a lot of real content so there is much room to improve if anyone else is actually interested in putting in the work. There's a bunch questionable things with how he conducts himself (such as the veiled aggression towards companies who don't pay him or the whitewashing of the extremely sketchy behavior of HashCoins who are), but I don't see that as a reason to not let him post a thread per device. It's not like he's banning other reviews, other people just don't bother making them which you can hardly blame on dogie.

By having 10 reviews (13?) from 10 long standing members of the community, the review process is much more decentralized then it is when we only have dogie's review, a "main" thread and little incentive for anyone else to create a meaningful review thread. IMO this gives potential customers the opportunity to see how well the machines work and can make an informed choice if they want to purchase.

I agree that whenever a new 'model' miner is released the mining subforum is going to be somewhat cluttered with that model's reviews. A simple solution would be to create two additional subforums - one for 'official' threads and one for customer reviews

I'm not sure I can. I locked it by editing the OP and selecting lock under the advanced options, but I don't seem to be able to edit any posts in that thread anymore so I'm unable to do the reverse to unlock. I'll muck around to see if I can figure it out, but it might require an act of Mod to unlock it at this point.
Edit: Fixed. The unlock is in the very bottom left of the thread.

Very nicely put and exactly what I've meant.
We don't want to spam Hardware. Yes, for few days, hardware was flooded with reviews.
Few days afterwards,  only the intersting stuff remains.

Dogie pressed the panic button too fast. My guess is that BitmainTech got nervous due to the immenet S5 launch.
They didn't want the SP20 reviews to spoil their (inferior IMHO  ) product launch.
The moderators are being used and doesn't exercise enough judgment here (I'm referring to posts that got reported and deleted in those threads)

Edit: We're at inherent disadvantage here. BitmainTech is paying a lot for ads and we don't.
Edit2: MrTeal, can you unlock your thread?

I don't mind unlocking my thread, I primarily did it as a courtesy to Con and the forum. Discussion of the reviews hasn't transferred over to the main thread as I'd hoped though.

I'm pretty mixed on the whole thing. I don't think there needs to be 13 review threads in addition to all the others, and I am a little worried that it does set a bad precedent. On the other hand, while a lot of reviews were pretty similar, there were a good number that put a lot of effort into their and gave some good data; often more in depth in terms of things like efficiency curves than is available elsewhere. As a whole they did add value to the forum and are not just pointless spam like a lot of the sig campaign garbage.
If there was an elegant way to merge them I'd support that, but I can't think of a way to do it without it becoming a nightmare to read and follow.

People!

Give a burgeoning business a chance.

I've been in the media industry for 17 years and i feel a serious dejavu about all of this.

Final conclusion: censorship is bad.

Stop deleting posts.

I even had a post 'sorry for your loss'

Deleted.

Sick censorship is what's going on here.
Theymos, recognise that your moderators have an agenda and be more liberal in making sure your users are allowed to express an opinion.

I believe those reviews turns out very nicely and a lot of them contains very interesting information and new tweaking.
Yes, few users include some well known haters (not Dogie!) complained and created this thread.
Dogie also complained and kept this thread alive. Some users enjoyed "playing" with him by artificially bumping the threads up.
I don't think locking by moderator is the right solution. Each Legendary may choose to lock his/her own thread.

In the last days, three of my posts were deleted by moderator, probably due to someone complaining.
I urge the moderators to be more careful with censorahip and posts deleting.

Compare to our main competition, we usually have much less threads under hardware main page.

there was no page full of sp20 review threads as there is always few threads by bitmain or dogie on main page!
also bfl and knc fucked up bussines

did anyone make any fuss about the fact that dogie has 20 or more threads of ''guides''?
or about the fact that bitmain has a thread for each of it's miners? spondoolies has only 1 main thread and that is it!

The moderation guidelines say:

If an entire page is taken up by Spondoolies reviews, then that's probably too many topics. How this should be handled is more tricky, since I don't want to suppress anyone's honest opinion. We'll see if ckolivas' locking solution is helpful.

I wanted to add that it seems that now innocent posts I am making are being reported and deleted.
It's ludicrous but it won't deter me.

well, in reality, this thread was started by one of your biggest haters.
It just goes to show how truly 'impartial' that dogie (et al) is, when joining in with this type of hate-campaign.
dogie and his 'manufacturers trustworthyness guide' what a crock of shit.

dogie, lock all your threads, by the standards you have set out in this thread, they are all spam.

I think that we got some very interesting threads.
The uninteresting slowly sunk.
I wish MrTeal will unlock his thread.

I think that it turns out very nicely, and it's clearly not "spam".