There are two overall, often conflicting, strengths in this forum that need to come to terms. On the one hand, there are those that vouch for a spam free forum, centered on Bitcoin discussion. On the other hand, we’ve got a set of Campaigns that are here for their own profit (but that are also a core asset to the Forum’s financial structure), using the Forum as a means to their objectives, but with little regards for the former annotated conflicting strength. This duality of focus, that coexists within a single closed space, leads to the current situation.
Campaigns seem to be here to stay, but that does not mean that the rules that apply to them cannot be tweaked in favour of overall content quality. Merit is an approach in this sense, but it focused on the labour side of Campaign, whilst no additional focus has been placed on the root of the problem, being that Campaigns and Campaign Managers themselves.
Self-awareness by forum elders that also manage campaigns is creating a ripple in the system, by tightening the rules to specific campaigns for those campaigns that they manage, but the main core of campaigns are still running wild and remain rather much exempt for responsibility over their recruits.
I agree therefore that the focus has to be placed there, and that is the reason for the OPs thread, as well as other interesting proposal we’ve seen recently such as this week’s thread by d5000 on the matter (
The core of Bitcointalk's spam problem ), knowing full well that this kind of thread will be buried soon on the nth page of Meta and probably lead nowhere in practice.
But we do have a right to a tantrum and hope to actually get somewhere eventually, so let’s add our two cents to the thread.
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1) Allow forum moderators to penalize users by revoking signature display rights for a month for poor posting habits.
It sounds good, but adds the difficulty of management and an overhead of time to forum moderators which I suspect are not too empty handed right now. If such cases were sort of rare to manage, the overhead would be small, but as we often see, the amount of spammers grows with ease and one signature block on a low ranked account could easily be replaced by another low ranked alt account taking on from there.
2) Penalize bounty campaigns and ICO's that use bumping by shit-posting by displaying their thread permanently on page 10 or a special penalty page which reduces the size of their images and fonts.
A lot of bumping goes on in the Ann section, but so long as it affects the Ann section only, the spill on other Forum sections is not an issue, and delimits only to competing for prime space within the Ann thread. It is not a spam issue, but a “play by the rules of the book”concern as I see it. So long as the bumps are legit (i.e. not paid to bots or serviced accounts that deploy that kind of service), they seem to conform to the organic positioning within the Ann thread.
Bump cheaters could be forced as you say to have a kind of visibility punishment within the Ann Forum Section, but from a the spam point of view at least, what goes on there, if confined to the Ann section, is a lesser issue.
3) Provide preferential listing on page 1 for ICO's and Bounty campaigns that pay to be listed there. Rather than paying an army of shills they could be paying bitcointalk to be listed on the first (featured) page.
The price would have to be heavy though, since I guess that the idea would be that the first page be for paid positioning ICOs and from the second onwards for natural organic bumped ICOs.
I would rather prefer for them to compete for the space than to pay for it. We could bring Merit in to the equation here. For example, we could play with positioning based on three variables:
- Accumulated pre-signature Merit of Campaign´s signatories (this could be gained Merit and not Airdropped Merit for the signatories instead).
- Accumulated Merit of Campaign´s signatories during the actual campaign.
- Natural bumps.
The algoritm would create a scoring based on those three variables, being the second and third more relevant. For example, whenever a signatory is merited, the score for the positioning would be incremented, and thus the ICO’s positioning thread within the Ann section. Gained merit would have more weight than a bump, and a longer time effect in the positioning algorithm.
The above would play on the lines of basing positioning both in terms of participation (natural organic bumping) and quality/interest based by the signatories posting capabilities. Good posters would draw more attention to their signature through their natural activity, whilst rising collaterally the ANN thread’s position. Crappy posters would benefit the Campaign on neither accounts.
