The Solution
The perfect solution doesn't exist. The only thorough 'solution' would be to impose restrictions. Whether, that would be completely removing signatures, bounties, and campaigns or limiting certain sections to certain ranks. I've made this clear a few times that I'm normally against restrictions, however this particular issue is effecting the forum in every aspect. Therefore, restrictions may well be justified in this case. The thing is about the other solutions we could ask the campaign managers to set stricter rules until we are all blue in the face, but they aren't going to do anything, unless there's punishments for their actions. The advertisers which hire the managers aren't interested about those who spam, and only that their name gets out there. So convincing them would to request stricter rules would also be a lost cause.
They are suffering from poverty and if they have a chance to get money they will take it. That is why I can understand all the effort of them, even if it’s very limited.
Effort? If they put in a effort there wouldn't be a problem. I'm not against people who want to make a living off the forum if they can. But, breaking the rules, and making the forum unpleasant for others isn't something I tolerate. The fact of the matter being is they put in minimal effort even though they claim they can make a living from the payments they receive from campaigns. I don't know about you, but if I was getting paid well I would be motivated to further my skills, and keep that job. It's well known that money is a good motivator, and is often offered as an incentive. For example, promotions are often chased after by existing employees resulting in increased workload from them.
So what I can't understand is why these very people don't work on their posts, and language skills. But, I guess we already know it's a lack of moderation from the campaign managers. If there was much stricter rules put in place on who gets accepted only the best of the best would be accepted. Resulting in a cleaner forum, better posts, and legitimate people who put in the effort getting selected.
Currently, the majority don't make any effort at all. All they make an effort in is ranking up their accounts, and getting accepted. Then they are set, and spam throughout the forum.
And yes, the result of their participation is a huge amount of meaningless spam, especially for bounties. Stopping this will be very likely not possible, I think if the price per Bitcoin raises again we’ll see another bunch of new members only interested in bounties coming in here.
This could be stopped if there was restrictions imposed. Although, I don't think this is the best solution it's definitely a option right now which I'm hoping theymos is at least considering if the other options don't work.
There's also more moderation, however this also has it's drawbacks, but I would prefer to have a few more mods that complete restrictions.
But I have some concerns launching a registration process like a KYC. One of the main points Bitcoin stands for is anonymity (at least you can see the transactions but it isn’t related to a name). The most of the latest upcoming ICOs require KYC, even some bounties or airdrops and I don’t know if this is the right direction. This was never the idea from Satoshi and I don’t know if he’d liked the idea to implement a KYC in this forum.
It’s true a KYC will complicate cheating but we would have to pay this with everyone’s privacy.
It’s true a KYC will complicate cheating but we would have to pay this with everyone’s privacy.
Alright, yeah I can agree on you with this. I think it's worth mentioning that KYC wouldn't completely prevent it either. There's several ways that someone could submit faked documents, and the process would require quite a bit of manpower to verify this sort of information as well as storing it securely which is probably one of the biggest concerns. KYC would never be implemented on Bitcointalk, but campaign managers might go down this route.
I don't see why KYC would actually help the spam issue really.
This is my main point we can still improve: every bounty manager should run less campaigns but do more research about the participants joining his campaigns. There are lots of things we can improve regarding bounty management, so only a short conclusion:
- less but more meanigful comments per week for signature campaigns
- stakes distribution only if a certain amount of merit is reached during the campaign
- check connected accounts and weed out signature cheaters / excessive shitposters
- check carefully if the translations are original or from a Google-Translate-cheater (therefore I’ve created a thread in the German section to prevent and report this, translation cheating seems to be a big problem in the Altcoin section)
- a blacklist of cheaters (valid for every section of the bounty like content, social media…) used by every bounty manager (difficult to implement, but quite effective I think
- less but more meanigful comments per week for signature campaigns
- stakes distribution only if a certain amount of merit is reached during the campaign
- check connected accounts and weed out signature cheaters / excessive shitposters
- check carefully if the translations are original or from a Google-Translate-cheater (therefore I’ve created a thread in the German section to prevent and report this, translation cheating seems to be a big problem in the Altcoin section)
- a blacklist of cheaters (valid for every section of the bounty like content, social media…) used by every bounty manager (difficult to implement, but quite effective I think
1/2. Ideally posts would be restricted to a merit system which you would be required to earn a certain amount of merits per period. However, I understand that many great posts don't receive merit so this could be an issue as it's then based on RNG especially given that some of the payment periods are 1/2 weeks.
3. Probably hard to do if they haven't already been tagged. Quite frankly most campaign managers don't do any research into their participants other than looking at their first page of history.
4. This is very difficult if you don't speak that language yourself. It can be easy to spot Google translations now, and again. But, sometimes Google translations can be surprisingly accurate as well. You would have to speak the language yourself or have someone on your team able to speak it which kind of defeats the point of hiring someone to translate posts then. Translations are based on trust which unfortunately gets abused due to it being difficult for the non speaker to verify if the translation is accurate.
5. Several lists exist. The fact of the matter being is campaign managers don't care about who they employ to spread their name as long as it's happening. To them the more the merrier.
Why? More than one account doesn't have to mean spam. There are people here who have more than 1 account and are not making any money on it. At the same time there are people here with more than one account and only one in a campaign. Don't put them all in one basket with newbies who come here hoping for a good and easy gain.
Making sure each person has only 1 account would reduce spam for sure, but how would you enforce it? Confirmation links would be an improvement but you can make a new mailbox almost instantly. A phone maybe? But what about those who have a couple numbers? I think it can't be done.
Every system that's imposed to prevent those from registering multiple accounts will be bypassed. It's simply to hard to determine whether an account is connected if the proper measures are taken. Plus, I don't see the problem with alternate accounts. Many people have alternate accounts for many different reasons. I'll give a few examples; 1. Bot accounts to scrape data from the forum, or post charts. 2. To access the forum on a insecure connection/device. 3. Separate their personal opinions from that of their business. Making sure each person has only 1 account would reduce spam for sure, but how would you enforce it? Confirmation links would be an improvement but you can make a new mailbox almost instantly. A phone maybe? But what about those who have a couple numbers? I think it can't be done.
There's probably many more reasons to have alternate accounts that I'm not listing here. Alt accounts fundamentally aren't malicious.
