Topic: The core of Bitcointalk's spam problem (Read 706 times)

 I think merits has drastically reduce the rate of spam in the forum. Most of the signature participates now read and post constructive meaningful post at least it now make the forum lively for investors to visit because the will see something good while they are here. Some forum members lack English which makes their post not to look organised.

Even if it didn't "improve anything", it also didn't make nothing worse, don't you think? At least for "honest" forum members who want to contribute something here, and are not only writing because they're paid by a bounty campaign ...

In my opinion, since Merit's inception, the spam situation is improving a bit. In the most spam-plagued subforums (Bitcoin Discussion, Altcoin Discussion, Economics) there are now usually some interesting topics - 3-4 months ago all of them were almost instantly buried by spam megathreads. That may be, however, also a side effect of the cryptocurrency bear market, so it is too early to tell if Merit is the reason.

Maybe we can simply wait and see ... but the ideas discussed in this thread are worth been taking into account by the forum staff, I think.

some interesting thoughts here. but i dont like all the merit related ideas. because i think that the merit system did not improve anything here. thats why I have to admit that i stopped to visit the forum every day and i almost stopped posting.

You're right - it would be an "indirect" solution, while "banning ICOs" would be a more direct attack to the core problem (that "printing tokens" doesn't cost nothing). However, controlling Bounty managers in a stricter way would benefit ICO projects that do the things right - i.e. control participants' posting quality. And I understand that ICO advertising is a traffic source the forum staff would like to preserve. So it may be the less controversial solution - although it requires a little bit more staff work.

Related: I had somewhen thought about "pay per click" campaigns in the style of Google AdSense. But unfortunately I think abuse control would be very difficult. The companies advertising in the forum would need a middleman with the power of Google to detect "script clickers".

Merit is currently the only indicator with some value for "social influence", and selection based on merit is already happening - mainly in Bitcoin-paid campaigns. One could make a merit requirement mandatory for signature-bounty campaigns. The rest of the indicators you mention, as TheQuin and bitart said, are too easy to abuse, I think.

They wouldn't even do that they would use thousands of bots to do it.

Scammers, spammers would farm thousands of accounts to click on their main account's signature, in order to rank up their account to be able to join the campaigns...
Normal people don't think like this but you have to think it over from the evil's point of view, because if something is abusable, spammers and scammers would abuse it, that's for sure...

- I totally agree with point 1. ICOs inflate the spam by creating value out of nothing. (Remember why we all love Bitcoin?)
- But I'm not sure about point 2 though. Bounty managers are really just the middleman stuck between hundreds of people that want to get paid and a company that wants to get heard.
And I very highly doubt that the "company getting heard" part is any efficient. From what I can see, signatures get next to no clicks what so ever.

How about implementing a "social influence" sub-category of publicly visible profile stats, that simply tracks things like how often someone cites you, how many views your post get, how many clicks links in your signature receive. Based on these numbers Bounty managers could actually pick people for their campaigns which are doing a lot right. Right now all they see is how many posts they make and how many merits they gathered in the last 120 days, which is an ok start but never really tells the whole story.

In the end, those (so called) companies (scammers, spammers, etc...) are hiring the bounty managers, but I don't really think that a red trust on a bounty manager would stop these "companies" hiring a red tagged bounty manager, if he offers a really cheap price for the service and can deliver a similar visibility as the 'normal' but more expensive managers...
As long as they are allowed to continue their service, they won't stop, why would they...
If you want to regulate the bounty managers (e.g. whitelist, etc...), you can be tagged as a 'centralist' in this decentralized forum, so it's not easy to find a working solution for the situation.

This is one thing I've been always wondering about...

If a bounty campaign manager is seen paying for shitposts, in some cases even by tagged shitposters, shouldn't that campaign manager also get a tag? After all, he is not properly doing his job, he is paying people for spam, he is incentivizing people to pay crap and so on...

Was there a case of a bounty manager getting a red trust for this?

We have lists like SMAS but shouldn't we have lists like that for those so-called managers?

If you report posts in very bad English, they may be banned.

That does make sense

I can imagine the French section gives a higher ROI than many other local sections, as they have more money to spend on average.

Yes but YOU speak English. 
Most spammers do spam because there is no other way for them.

Who decides of the rules for a campaign ?
I see most managers always have the same criterias for the campaigns they run so I think they're the ones who decide, companies just hire them because of their reputation and then they let them do things their own way.

If you think about it, I'm sure that many people chose their signature because of that specific rule, so that they don't have to post outside of their local boards.
That's the case in the French section where almost everyone wears the same signature. Hence, there are many projects we don't hear about there. If you change that rule, I believe there will be less spamming in the whole forum and projects will also benefit from it.

The fact is you can't really get rid of the whole "signature system", you have to find a way to manipulate it in order to get a cleaner forum.
I think this could be a good start.

Signature campaigns don't reject posting in certain boards, they just don't pay for it. I don't think you can require a company to pay for advertising that doesn't work for them.
My signature for instance doesn't pay for posts on a few boards, that doesn't stop me from posting there.

I'll repost what I said in another thread.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.40516875

I believe the spam problem comes from the non-English speakers who post outside of their local boards.
Why do they do it ?
Because that's what BMs ask them to do.
In order to get rewards for signature campaigns, a certain amount of posts per week is required... and most of them (if not all of them) have to be done outside of local boards.

If you change that rule in bounty campaigns, I'm pretty sure you won't see those broken English posts or useless posts like "good project sir" anymore.

Let them do their "thing" in local boards, the rest of the forum will be much cleaner.

And that won't hurt the projects. Most of them are unknown to local communities because of that rule.

I think the bounty managers/campaigns are the ones who should be using or developing their own tools to help manage their campaigns better or more efficiently.


For a shitcampaign there's no difference between someone writing a thesis or bashing their head against the keyboard. Both are still posts that bare their advertisement which is all they want and require at the end of the day. It obviously shouldn't be acceptable for them to pay for people bashing their head on keyboard but until there's repercussions for those that do then nothing will change and campaigns will continue to be lazy and pay for anything.


They're not trying to build a brand. These ICOs are not here to stay. They're fly by night scammers (or for however long the duration of their ICO lasts). All they want is their ICO to be promoted as fast as possible, take as much money in as possible, then disappear or onto the next scam. Rinse and repeat.


I've suggested this before. I don't think lower ranks should be able to have a signature or at the very least a very minimal one (though there are still campaigns that will pay for those).


It would still be very difficult for people to farm accounts this way. You'd have to spend a lot of time and effort on each account and there's no guarantees you would every get the required merit. I still think the forum should offer paid Memberships like Copper but Silver and Gold ones etc that give you the same benefits of a Senior and Hero account. You can either offer these ranks alongside being able to rank up naturally or they're the only way you can get a signature.

The first level of the new merit system has been reached, the initial merits were given out and most of the spammers and account farmers has managed to trade some merits, but from now on, it will be extra hard for them to get merit (if I understand the situation well).
A solution could be to have a look at the average spammer account rank now, e.g.:
- Are most of the spammers newbies (or brand new)
- Or, most of the spammers are juniors, because they managed to rank up, but they stucked at this rank
- Or, more spammers are above junior level, because they have managed to rank up to e.g. member level, because of the farming/abusing, etc.

If we can strike a line between two ranks (e.g. juniors are (mostly) spammers, but members are (mostly) not, we can tell that there will be no signature for juniors, but only for members and up.
If the juniors won't have a chance to rank up to member without posting quality (and earning merit with it), it can solve the spam problem.

But sub-forums like "Bitcoin Discussion" and "Economics" are full of spam, too. These posts are usually a little bit more elaborated than the spambot one-liners in the altcoin forum, but they continue to be completely trivial, and it's really not fun anymore to visit these sub-forums (you have to search a lot actually for really interesting topics). There isn't really any forum, for example, to discuss things like the social impact of Bitcoin in English (maybe Ivory Tower, but I was disappointed, until now, by the topics there).

About the altcoin spam, this problem has probably no solution, but as you do, I tend to ignore it because I only follow some specific threads in the Altcoin Announcements forum. It would be nice to have a "Cryptocurrency technology" sub-forum however, where one could discuss technical topics not related directly to Bitcoin.

I also think it's the better one, but it means also a bit more work for the forum staff. They would have to set up a mechanism to agree on "trusted" bounty managers and control that only these are managing campaigns. If they could simply set up a rule like "ICO token-paid signature campaigns are banned", then there is no need for additional infrastructure. Users could simply report non-complying campaigns - threads would be closed and managers banned or at least they would receive an admonishment.

At the end, if a decision had to be made with only these two options, the forum staff would have to take into account this trade-off:
- more traffic but more work (control bounty managers)
- less traffic but almost no additional work (ban ICO-token paying signature campaigns)

Other bounty campaigns (Twitter, Facebook ...) would not be affected at all, as they don't really affect the quality of topics in the forum.

I think such a measure is pretty harsh, but I would support it as a temporary measure until the spam problem has been "dried out".

One could at least require them to pay out a part of the campaign rewards in Bitcoin or another full-fledged cryptocurrency. That would already solve the incentive problem, and most serious ICO projects would be able to afford that. It would probably only mean a small traffic decrease, if any.

I favour the model to control bounty managers, however, or to create an infrastructure for "approved campaigns" like DdmrDdmr proposed. However, I don't know if the forum staff is willing to invest the necessary work - banning ICO-paid campaigns would be cheaper, like I explained above.

Well most of the ICO's pay token and most of the participants to the bounty campaigns are... yes it's true are spammers and new members that doesn't read or care about the forums rule and all they want is the bounty rewards.

But for what I've read here in the forum is that we can't just simply stop the campaigns that pays token because it will result of a low volume of users here in the forum and in result the traffic of the forum will reduce and the profit will reduce also that's why I think moderator/s didn't approve to stop running a bounty campaign here in the forum.

It gives a lot of traffic.

If bitcointalk were to introduce a rule whereby only Sr. Members and above were eligible to advertise in their signatures--or better yet, have any signature space at all--you better believe the merit system would stop spam.  That would remove the incentive for people to keep creating new accounts to shitpost with.  They would have no incentive to do so once they figured out they weren't going to earn any merits.

Account sales would boom, I'm sure, but that could be managed and I think the problem would burn itself out with time.  Fewer higher-ranked accounts would be created, and some would naturally drop out due to attrition.  Anyway this has been suggested before, but I don't think Theymos wants to do anything so drastic.
I don't argue that the latter is true, but I strenuously disagree with the former.

I think the 2nd option is a more realistic solution in the forum. The kind of payment is not the problem as even though it literally cause them nothing it doesn't mean that the developers are the ones who are picking the campaign participants, except if they have their own bounty manager. The 2nd approach is a better one as bounty managers who are allowed and trusted by the forum can successfully screen the campaign participants as well as monitor their status weekly by doing so they can remove and even put the members on a blacklist if they started spamming in the middle of the campaign. By having a trusted bounty manager this developers who are paying ICOs must hire them as they are the only ones allowed to create a bounty campaign in BCT.

Yep.

I'm actually not so sure about that anymore.
Most "Spam" I see nowadays is actually zero-(or super-low)-content one-liners just to "push" an "ANN"-thread of some ICO.
Signatures are no longer "en vogue", it's the number of "pushes" for your "ANN".

This is primarily a problem of the "Altcoin"-subforums, which is why we tend to ignore it.
Not sure what to make of it, I've kind of given up all hope for a Spam-free forum

It would be interesting if this is actually happening, i.e. if the number of ICO campaigns (in relation to "real-cryptocurrency-paid-campaigns") is decreasing. Maybe some work for our "stat gurus"

I would support at least a ban for "ICO-token-only" payments for signatures. They could continue to offer tokens as a bonus, like some are already doing, but at least a basic payment in a traditional cryptocurrency should be made, so there are incentives to control quality. And if they want to offer token-only bounties they should do these campaigns at Facebook, Twitter et al.

If the forum banned ICO projects entirely from advertising then I can imagine a (still pretty) big traffic source would dry up, so I don't know if this will happen.

Could be a good idea. It's restrictive, as some honest Jr. members would not be able to fully use their forum account, but I would support it as a temporary measure until the spam problem is mitigated.

Right. That would be another point for TheQuin's proposal to restrict signatures from Jr./Newbie accounts.

Good post, I am wondering the same ... but TheQuin's answer, unfortunately, seems to be true: these projects are often of such low quality that they don't care about reputation.

Looks good! I would fully support such an initiative.

(I was thinking about technical restrictions for non-adhering campaigns, but I think that would dilute the spirit of that idea - to reward positive action, not so much to punish. And it would also restrict individuals with non-paid signatures.)

The developers don't have to pay anything for them. It's a free advertising budget to them.


Most of the ICOs are scams and they don't care about building a reputation. It's all about SEO. This site having a high ranking will make every linkback from every signature here promote the ranking of their site. If they are paying for that using free tokens then that's free SEO work.

I still don’t get why ICOs do not get the idea that Brand needs to be built, and is bases upon many pillars, one of which is reputation. Having your brand name tossed around in the hands of spammers is plain silly to do.
Normally, in social media, one would measure concepts such as Brand Sentiment (detecting whether the brand is perceived positively, negatively or neutral), Notoriety (number of media or in this case posts where your brand is being mentioned in) and so on. Focusing on Notoriety without looking after Sentiment is kind of old-school (“let them talk about our brand, be it good or bad”). Sentiment should be a focus, and that should be built by the message that the Brand’s hired hands (posters on this case) carry. “Spamming” only differs one letter from “scamming” and this similitude kind of settles overtime with the wiser.

Since the Forum wants/needs to have signature campaigns, perhaps it could create a proprietary logotype that enhances the visibility of those campaigns that explicitly and voluntarily commit to an anti-spamming policy, just as we have logotypes for safe e-commerce, green power, ISO certified and so on.
This proprietary logotype could be use by campaign managers who compromise with an anti-spamming policy, alongside their signature campaign, as a complement to the signature for their signature bearers (it would probably need to be a separate field, so that it could be switched on or off and not embedded along with the signature itself).
This would probably also need to be overseen by some forum representatives such as DTs for example, with the ability to hide the forum proprietary logotype if the campaign does not comply with it’s anti-spamming commitment.

Why not a token? I can't get your point I agree that they don't have a real value until they are listed in exchange, but some of them help in
solving real world problems and
the complete usage of blockchain technology in various fields.
If such a thing is implemented, almost all the spammers and bounty managers would join and conduct bitcoin campaigns which would deter the quality of forum even more as almost all the bitcoin campaigns (excluding chipmixer) demand a minimum post of 20-25. Spammers can't even post 10 meaningful posts per week, how can you expect them to post 25 good quality posts?

Nowadays campaigns are managed by Newbies and Jr.Members who doesn't even know how the forum works or doesn't know to evaluate posts. Allowing Copper Members, Full Members and up to create a topic in Bounty section may help a bit. Very few bounty managers look for the post quality and actually read them. Rest just check the number of posts created and award them stakes.

Bounty managers never consider the spams generated due to their poor regulation and management. They will not even mind using it?

If all the bounty managers were like you there would have been quality posts and real discussions flourishing all around the forum. Forbidding signatures is literally a bad idea to consider. They will severely reduce the traffic generated on the website and there might be losses on theymos side. On the other hand, a similar forum would be created and all the spammers(traffic) will leave this forum forever. Moreover theymos said he has completely ruled out this idea and will think of it only when merit system fails.

Increasing the merit requirement of Jr.Member to 10 and Member to 50. A member will receive 50 merits only when
1. He has good knowledge in bitcoin or
2. He understands how a forum works and makes some decent posts or
3. A prolific writer

Not only altcoin campaigns generate spam, bitcoin campaign also does. Hence reducing the minimum post count to 10 or pay per post similar to chipmixer would work.

In fact, there is a whole new way of spamming, whose protagonists are all those "Forever juniors", in here just for the money and complaining because they don't receive merit due to their spammy actions.
To me the problem has two solutions:
- A quality control in signature/bounties/airdrops, in which only good ones are allowed, and it is required some quality on their posters.
- Do not allow newbies to join them, and to implement the need of gaining merits to JRs.

That's why I've proposed several times to come back to the "newbies jail". Even when I truly believe there are good newbies around, it will be easy for them to gain the 5 merits required to become JRs (if implemented, of course) and to be able to go out of their jail but, for those ones with no will at all of learning, contributing and to enroll discussions, debates, conversations in  here... well, they won't be able to go out the jail, so they will be unable to join whatever campaign they are seeking to join. Besides, more of the airdrops, bounties and so are spam.
Notice again that not all the ones wearing a signature are shitposters, as well as no everybody without one is a great one.

The problem beneath, under my last perspective (since I spend some time on the Beginners board trying to find good stuff and reward newbies), is the lack of interest of many. They don't understand how the forum works, and they don't really care. But it is difficult to stop the issue if that kind of newbies is allowed to spam all over the forum. If they are no longer allowed, probably they will just go to another place to spam.
Kind of radical, maybe, but everything is becoming a spam-fest, even some good threads here in meta.

This has been suggested before, this is the first location I found back:

I'd like to see that implemented, but I don't think it's likely to happen.

If they have to buy a Copper Membership to wear a signature, they have a bit more to lose than just 30 Activity created by spamming.

They don't need tools, they need inentives to do so.

Correct. But spamming is much easier and cheaper, and barely gets punished.

That's true but 99.9% of the spam problem is caused by the ones that don't.

I think if forum staff can charge some "fee per spam posts" ( not by ICO tokens) in the campaign from the bounty managers, can ultimately Leeds to more involvement for control the quality of posts rather introducing incentive for bounty managers to control the quality of posts.( They didn't take it seriously due to the fact that knowing they can earn more than what incentive offers)

I'm sure that's true of most managers, but it seems there are a few who are prepared to pay extra for quality posting.

It's not tools they lack it is desire. They just want that URL plastered all over bitcointalk.org where Google will see it and give their site a higher ranking as a result.

We need to give the bounty managers some tools to help them to regulate their spammers.

From time to time we coming back to the same old problems, we discuss them again and make suggestions that we have already proposed before but at the end there's no improvement at all.

We need a strict control over the bounty managers, defined rules to follow, punishments for the rule-breakers or the easiest thing - get rid of all the ICOs.

It's Bitcointalk not a shitcointalk /sounds like a good domain name btw/, right?

But I don't see any changes in the near future...

Or the final choice only forbid all signature campaign , the decision depend on Theymos whenever he want to do it or not.
Meanwhile Merit already works well enough to control spamming problem compare before merit being implement

No it doesn't.

It would be so easy to abuse as the account farmers have hundreds of accounts each to use to upvote their own posts. The Merit system works well because the Merit sources are well chosen and then the sMerit flows down to the right people.

Isn't this suggestion pretty much what the merit system already is? If you like a post them give it merit. Allowing everybody to have the unlimited power to like or dislike any post they want would just lead to colossal abuse though and wouldn't work (not to mention it would never be implemented). People would bot the hell out of this or just 'like' posts on their alt accounts and dislike the posts of people they don't like to get their posts removed.

This is a forum so in short, everyone is entitled to give their free speech and ideas about cryptocurrency or answer the question ask on a thread that was posted. Spam messages are given specially to those beginners in crypto and wanted to be enlighten. I might suggest creating a voting system to each post or reply where each and everyone of us have an option to like or press that trash button. An automated system will count those votes and if a specific number of LIKE votes will be given, an automatic merit will be rewarded. If a specific number of TRASH votes will be given, that post will be deleted automatically. How's my idea guys? That makes sense right?

The merit system doesn't really stop spam, it just stops users being able to rank up with spam/poor contributions so most now put more effort into their posts. The merit system helps and is a huge step in the right direction but it does nothing about lower ranked accounts spamming away who are still able to get on to alt coin campaigns (and half of them will accept anyone of any rank because it's still better than having nobody advertise for them).


These are all things I've suggested before and as long as there's no rules or regulations for signature campaigns they will continue to be greedy and lazy and pay people to spam but until there are punishments for poorly run campaigns and their managers then nothing will change.

I would ban ICOs from advertising on the forum altogether. They've already been banned for bidding in the forum banner advertising auctions so why not extend that that to signatures?


That looks to be the approach being taken. It is a slow process but many ranked up accounts get banned each day and it is very difficult for them to be replaced.
I addition I'd like to see signatures removed from Newbie and Jr. Members. Most of the copy paste bots I report are Jr. Members enrolled in an ICO bounty signature campaign.

That's why I personally like to participate in Bitcoin paid campaigns. So far I have seen Bitcoin paid campaigns are running by good managers and they more or less care about good contents.

Thing is, when ICOs will realize that  the field of paying by useless tokens are dead then they will focus more in quality than quantity since they will have to pay by real currency (BTC, ETH, LTC etc)

Restrict creating ALT accounts unless necessary to apply for locked/banned accounts. Once the main account will be recovered then lock the alt account.

I think we all agree that the spam amount at Bitcointalk still is too high. The merit system perhaps has improved the situation a little bit, but even that is debatable.

The reason, in my opinion is related to the way signature campaigns work currently, and specifically, to the incentives they generate.

In short: In some campaigns there is currently no incentive for campaign starters and bounty managers to control the quality of the posts of the participants.

How are signature campaigns "supposed" to work?

- A company wants to advertise its services.
- It thinks that Bitcointalk is visited by a significant audience for the service(s) they offer.
- So they pay people to show signatures.
- Good content posted by a campaign participant should increase the visibility for the company, and thus the RoI of the campaign.
- Only if the RoI is positive, then the campaign is profitable, and makes sense for the company.

It's essentially the way the "content industry" works: Companies get attention by readers in exchange for their payments to the authors. They would only pay authors which met some quality standards to attract an attractive audience.

The incentive problem

In theory there should exist an incentive for the bounty managers to control the quality of the posts. If most of the posts were of bad quality, then nobody would read them, and the company would get little to no attention from the audience.

The core of the incentive problem is, however, that it costs them nothing to pay participants of signature campaigns, if they pay in ICO tokens! They simply create additional tokens out of thin air.

So the ROI of ICO-issuing signature campaigns will almost always be positive, regardless of the quality of the participants' posts.

That means that the "content industry model" does not work anymore, and that's why we see so much spam.

Solutions?

- One could restrict campaigns, e.g. only allow campaigns that pay out in Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency that has an independent blockchain and is not an ICO token.
- Stricter control of Bounty managers.

Both solutions would require additional efforts by the forum staff.

One could wait for the ICO problem to be solved by the regulators (i.e. the incentive for ICO-based campaigns could decrease drastically if ICOs are heavily regulated in more countries.)

One could wait for the merit system to flourish, but for this to happen, the moderators would have to ban farmed accounts.

Any other ideas?