Topic: [@Theymos] List of viable ideas to clean up the forum. (Read 1069 times)

I think if you enter to the forum rules to participate in the bounty your signatures of certain conditions, the spam will be much less. I'm not the first to talk about it, but I'm sure it will greatly reduce the number of participants and raise the level of quality of messages. So farting.
Each participant must have additional Merit, except those that are set by default

Member           :10  +5 Smerit
Full Member      :100 +10 Smerit
Sr. Member   :250 +15 Smerit
Hero Member   :500 +20 Smerit
Legendary         :1000 +25 Smerit

If signature campaign generating big % of shitposting due to participants. in that case, Can forum's admins and bounty managers restrict every Junior members to join any signature campaign?
and top of that can BM restrict every old member who still in their starting merit slots like.

Member            :10
Full Member      :100
Sr. Member   :250
Hero Member   :500
Legendary         :1000

Because the way I see it following old members are not getting any merit due to some valid reason such as spamming or shitposting. few exceptions are always there for sure.

I would like to see Bitcointalk ported to some kind of platform like Steem. I know application layers for forums already exist. I am not sure about scalability though. It would be pretty amazing for privacy and distribution though.

Just a small update here, in case some missed it : Theymos just implemented some new rules for newbie/junior members. Newbies now need 1 merit to become a Jr Member. Here is the link :
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/enhanced-newbie-restrictions-requirements-5030366

Hopefully, this will reduce spams bot a lot ! He also added 36 new merit sources.

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Also, hilariousetc opened a similar topic in meta section, which seems more appropriate.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/community-generated-suggestions-to-improve-the-forum-eventual-voting-on-them-4893744

Thanks for that. I will take a look and update the OP.

That's what we call hoppers, they just roam around without knowing the basic and fundamentals, sometimes i figure out that bitcoin discussion board is less effective when it comes to information compared to beginners and help, some doesn't even know where to post correctly in a right section,  and most thread are speculation(s) about bitcoin that is posted in bitcoin discussion, even politics and society,  you can see as well,  that there are godly threads right there being tackled that some doesn't know that this is a forum where every section is connected to the idea of cryptocurrency and not out of bounds. 

Stricter rules and to enforce them. This forum seems to be moderated as a huge libertarian love fest where almost anything goes and mods rarely step in. Shitposters shitpost, bounty hunters hunt, and scammers scam and the mods are no where to be seen. I think that should change. I don't think mods should rule with an authoritarian iron fist and would be against overly harsh moderation, but some of the threads that are created here are embarrassing. I could create a thread titled "I'm going to scam you please send money here" and that thread is A-OK by the rules of the board. There needs to be some minimum standards and if they don't meet that then moderation should enforce quality controls. The obvious root of the problem and the "cancer" here are signature campaigns and bounty hunters so something needs to happen with them. If you just let everyone do what they want then of course there will be abuses. Imagine a society with no rules. It would be total anarchy and not in a good libertarian way. Criminals and the power hungry always rise to the top and where there's money to be made greed overpowers everything and that's when things start to crumble. The forum is on shakey ground. It's almost impossible to have a decent discussion here and is just spammers trying to move up the ranks and hit their monthly sig quotas in the process.

Of course, I meant on average. But thanks for the tip.

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Again, I don't disagree. On the contrary, that's why I started this thread in the first place. Not to complain, but to discuss and find concrete proposals that could help this forum and admins/modos, so it could stay a pleasant place to gain knowledge about bitcoin and cryptos. Things aren't ok, so I am trying to figure out how to help. It doesn't feel like burying my head in the sand.
So what would it take, from your view, to cure this cancer? 

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I will keep the proposal's list up to date with interesting topics found in meta and seems relevant to me.

Some say pessimism, I say realism and brutal honesty. I would disagree that it doesn't help either. Burying your head in the sand and pretending things are A-OK only makes things worse and they get much worse the longer you don't treat a wound. You really don't cure a cancer just by hoping it goes away. Left untreated it spreads to other parts and then kills you slowly. Things really do need to change by rules begin put into place. This forum has become a free for all because there a few rules here and the ones that are are seemingly rarely enforced. I think if the administration here said "enough is enough" and didn't allow certain things like spammy ICO campaigns then the issue would clear up.

The people who throw away their merit using them as mere likes will soon run out of them. They are likely not merit sources who have a replenished source every month so they're just wasting them at the end of they day but they probably don't really care too much in the first place.

People like you should never be awarded with merits. If you are not good at English, why don't you contribute some meaningful posts in your local language which can earn you merit. I am not in a way to complain you, but you signed up last year and you still can't even receive a single merit. This means that your post is neither helpful to even one single member of the forum nor it doesn't contribute anything meaningful. All your posts are just one liners, altcoin shit replies or long fb and Twitter reports. Why do you need merit? In order to rank up and receive higher stakes for your bounty campaigns right? Work hard and start contributing to the community, eventually you will receive merit from someone.

I was a newbie like you who started off in this forum with 0 merits. But I have received over 103 merits with around 240 posts in the span of 6 months. Not all my 240+ posts are meaningful or constructive. During my early days in this forum I was slammed by many senior members for shitposting in spam mega threads. I do post a lot in Altcoin Discussion where there are technical  topics with 0 replies.

Some possible suggestions for you to receive merit with poor English

1. Read a lot of technical topics on crypto and help your local community by educating them on cryptocurrency, how they work etc
2. If you are good in your Filipino language, stick to it and contribute as much as you can.
3. Never reply to mega spam threads and reply only to 0 reply topic in Altcoin Discussion which may fetch you at least a single merit.
4. Stop complaining about merit

No, there are certain higher ranked members who don't even know the basics of crypto. Teaching them and replying to their topics will earn us a handful of merits (maybe 2-5). This happened in my case

I didn't answer your first post because as much truth as it contains, it is kind of a pessimist vision and it isn't helping much. It even kind of crush my motivation !

- The "thanks merit" could be solve easily if we exclude bounty and announcement board from the merit system. There will always be a few "thanks merit" between people helping each other, but helping each other seems positive to me, and so, merited. Just not related to marketing, ICO, or worth scam. Again, merit and marketing don't fit together. It's a payed job and it doesn't need merit on top of it.

- The "like merit" is much more difficult to solve because it's all about merit's sources objectivity. They must try to reward every interesting post, no matter if they agree or not. I believe they should also reward every noobs who has spent a couple of hours to write a post, even if it feels forced, because there is an actual merit in the action of trying. And otherwise, they will never try again.

Anyway, we come back discussing the merit system while we should find some solution to improve the quality of the forum. No one will waste all his time cleaning the toilets for free, but maybe if we all spend a little time, that would do the trick.

People seen to be using the merit function as a 'thanks' button instead of for posts that are actually meritous (not sure if that's a word but you get what I mean). I think merits hold more value than essentially a facebook 'like' and shouldn't be given as liberally or just as a 'thanks' or +1 and of course bounty hunters are going to want to give thanks for yet another bounty the can bleed dry, but it's unnecessary. Give the merits to somebody who deserves them and will benefit from them as I'm sure there are plenty of users who's posts are going unmerited around the forum.   

I don't think we should mix merit and marketing. ANN and bounty thread are payed job already, it doesn't deserve any merit to me. Or it's a way to reward (to pay) someone to do the job and it comes back to the merit trading problem. 
But as you said, with every one running out of merit, it should be back to normal soon.


The thing is: it's hard to tell someone how he should give his merit. It's up to every one, plus people tend to give them to their friends, ... But begging is not the way to go if you hope to get some. Guide and useful thread are often well rewarded, but you need to find something you are good at in order to write something useful to the community. You certainly won't be able to teach much about crypto to the legendary and old forum member, so you've got to find another way.

those on higher ranks with overflowing with merits should start to share their merit to those people being active here in bitcointalk forum. Its not fair because long time ago people gaining ranks without merit. And they are enjoying it nowadays and they dont care us(newbies ) are being active here in bitcointalk are begging merit everyday.We dont know when we can get merit. I am not an english speaker and not that good in making pharagraph topic here but atleast im contributing the community by participating some topics here.I hope more people can get merit as they are active here and following the rules.

I have observed that some people merit ANN threads (I did it once, 1 merit). I think that it could be the natural thing to do to give a small award to the manager, unfortunately it has been abused over the first months of the merit systems, but I also believe it will be back to normal.

Amazing idea and article on the forum, All the suggestion  should be considered the team of operation

Think of bitcointalk like an office building where you're allowed to run your business for free. When you open up your doors and allow anyone to occupy it it's just going to be taken advantage of by the dregs of society and when you let people do what they want with no laws or penalties it just turns into complete anarchy. Do you really think those people who are working here for free are going to waste time cleaning the toilets and scrubbing the graffiti off the walls. Nope. They don't care as long as the money is coming in constantly. They'll set up business, trash the place, leave shit all over and continue to run their scams from here until the place crumbles into dust and when it does they'll leave and move onto the next place they can exploit. If you don't want that to happen then there needs to be some rules or laws here. From what I gather pretty much anyone can post an ICO here for any pipe dream they've spent five minutes thinking about and you can get unlimited amounts of desperate bounty hunters to promote it for pennies or even free and that's the crux of the issue it seems to me.

So I read the first topic that was open by bitmover about this idea. There are mostly 3 issues that were raised against a "quality over quantity" system:

1/ Merit doesn't come easy. Sometimes you don't get merit for a while. Sometimes I just can't understand why some posts get so much merits. I don't think ANN and bounty thread should earn merits at all. Those are marketing, not valuable information for the community. There is clearly an improvement that must be made about merit's distribution, but again, the system is quite new, and I believe it is possible to make it work.
What about specific section of the forum where merit could be earned ? Maybe we could just exclude ANN and bounty section from merit distribution section ? Seems easy enough, and that could limit the problem. We could also limit the number of merit per post per person ? 50 merits from 1 person for 1 post seems ridiculous to me. Anyway, there are plenty of things we can do to improve it. And it always come back to the same thing: much less posts would make it easier to read and to reward interesting posts. Plus in proportion, there would be more merits per post, so it should be easier to earn.

2/ It will encourage merit trading. I don't think this would be a big issue, because cheaters will run out of merit. In a matter of fact, they already do. Unless of course there is a merit's source involved. So we just have to check the way merit's source distribute merit. And even if it comes to merit trading because some can't earn their merits honestly, I believe the price could quickly become high enough to dissuade cheaters anyway.

3/ Less exposure for startup. Again, to me this is a fake problem. If we talk about bots, so yeah, they will read less posts overall, and record less signatures. But if we speak about humans, then no, it wouldn't change a bit. Here is the thing: 1 merit per week would reduce drastically the amount of (bad)posts on the forum.
So let's say for example, right now you write 10 posts a week for a campaign, out of a hundred posts on the whole forum. Your signature is exposed on 10% of the forum's posts.
Now, you write only one good post, and get your merit. 1 post out of 10 posts on the whole forum. Your signature is still exposed 10% of the time.
So, not only the exposure on average stays more or less the same, but peoples would also READ the forum (not just scroll down), because post would be interesting, and accessible (read not lost in 50 pages of bad posts).
This is a very simple example, but I am pretty convince that it wouldn't hurt ICO marketing in anyway.

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I think it's difficult to limit registrations. But as Paxmao said, a 1 merit requirement to become Jr. member could help a lot.

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That's a very good point. Added to the list.

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What I'm saying is: In order to get your stakes every week, you would have to earn 1 merit per week instead of having to write 15 posts per week. So, no you wouldn't automatically get merit, but I believe it would be easier to get some, while improving this forum A LOT at the same time.


People would keep on posting, because there is money involved. As simple as that. You wouldn't be forced to write lot's of useless posts, but a few interesting posts instead.


I saw you've got some pros & cons on your topic. But I like the idea. Some merit's source might find it convenient to go through a list of potentially "rewardable" posts. Added to the list.

 

I can't clearly understand the red part, correct me if I'm wrong; If a bounty participant is a signature wearer, all he have to do is make a constructive post in a week and he will automatically get one merit? If this is will be implemented, I won't be complaining because all I wanted to be is someone who could wear an avatar, being a full member will be enough for me.

But if we have to get one merit from a random user, there would likely be 2 options for a bounty participant:
1. Keep on posting.
2. Stop joining signature campaigns. - this will likely be my option, I will only stick to social media campaigns.

If merit is an additional requirement to rank up, why not add something more. If there will be an option like this - "Show the merited posts at the top of the thread to get them more exposure", there should also be an easy way to see a topic created that gained so much merit.

Here is the last post that i made before I locked my thread, I can't write it all here cause it might be considered as double posting. - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.40555278

Like the main threads just about a bounty? I have searched the bounty threads and had a hard time to see what threads where there are merits. I don't know why they have to give that. Anyways, it's not going to be easy to clean posts that exponentially increases (spam and exaggeration)