Topic: [@Theymos] List of viable ideas to clean up the forum. (Read 1073 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)

These questions are specifically for the Beginners, and help section. If they are "elementary" questions then that's where they belong. So something like "what is mining" gets asked semi frequently, and would belong in Beginners, and help.

Quality over quantity, for sure! There are so many junk posts that offer absolutely nothing to the conversation. When should I sell my crypto? or do you think the market will recover? do nothing but clutter the forum.

There will be people who are new to the crypto world who will ask questions that elementary. Perhaps they should be segregated to a separate forum thread. Judging by the number of posts on these profiles, many are purely spammy posts.

I don't think bounty threads should receive any merit, In fact it is better to divorce merit from bounty promotions. Of course if a bounty poster makes a good post, then he should receive merit, but not if it is about bounties or other spammers topics.

I think something could be done with the way signature campaigns are handled.
In most of them, you can only post a certain number of times in local boards.
That forces non-English speakers to go elsewhere and unfortunately post unreadable or useless stuff in order to reach their weekly minimum.
If they could make all their posts in local boards, that wouldn't happen and we wouldn't have to read them.

And it wouldn't be such a bad thing for projects. As an example, in the French section most people chose a signature that doesn't require them to post elsewhere. As a consequence, everybody has the same signature and many other projects stay unknown to the community.

If BMs could change the way they do things, I believe it could benefit the projects (more exposure) and the forum as well.

It would surely reduce the number of spammers because they have to "think" of what to say. I think what would happen is that a lot of quality posters would be more seen because of the less spam.

For the signature campaigns, it still should be post count because you are advertising it, whatever campaign you agree to. Probably small steps to improve it has already been implemented, the merit system.
I don't think the punishment would be necessary because they can't really do anything when they don't get posts and not getting merit because it would result in no payment (if it's based on the merit)

I think it would be hard considering that it will be the only first seen. I don't think the readers won't understand what the sequence of the discussion with this. Getting more exposure would result in more merits. I think spreading merits would be better.

Preach this! More reports, less spamming.

I have thought of limiting the registrations here in this forum, can that be done without sacrificing what Bitcointalk should be? There are a lot of newbies that just post one-liners just to make their ANN updated or go to the top.

They also have the hard time to get merits because of the possible posting quality that they have. If you think about it, you can get merit relatively fast. It should just relate to the topic and not just keep on repeating what a lot of people have already said.

Thanks for all your contributions.

I think I will keep a list with all interesting and viable propositions that has been made. The goal was to help improving this forum, so this way, we would have some concrete proposals, and Theymos would just have to pick what he thinks might be helpful, or what he wants to implement.

Related to bounty campaign:

• Quality post requirement based on merit instead of quantity post based on numbers of post.
• Reward good bounty managers and/or Punish bad ones.
• Merit requirement to join bounty campaign - in addition to/instead of - rank requirement.

Unrelated to bounty campaign:

• 1 or 2 merits required to become Jr. Member.
  
• Show the merited posts at the top of the thread to get them more exposure.

I didn't speak about the voting system because I don't think it could replace the merit system. But maybe in addition ? 

Please let me know what you think guys, and keep adding ideas, so we can help this forum.

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I'm not sure people would be more stressed to get a couple of merits per week, instead of having to post a whole bunch of post through the week. I mean, the only way to write 15 to 20 posts easily every week, is to write 15 useless one sentence posts. And if you get stressed because of bounty campaign anyway, well, maybe it time to move on to something else !

But I really like your idea to add a merit requirement to join campaign. That would leave aside every bots and multi-accounts.

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That's exactly why I opened this thread here, to have fewer but better replies.

I agree with that, but again, much less posts would make it much much easier.

Many campaigns only allow Members. I am in favour of requiring 1 or 2 merit to be Jr. In 30 posts, you must have been able to post something interesting!

No, not the whole board. Technical Discussion, Serious Discussion, Ivory Tower and Mining are really good with decent discussions. Unless those spammers post in Altcoin Discussion none of them find them useful and merit it. There is literally a lot of merit trading in Altcoin Discussion and we can never report them due to the huge spams generated there. Even good technical questions get buried in Altcoin Discussion within seconds of posting.

Not only Beginners board, Meta is even too crowded nowadays and there is atleast a post on Merit for a day. Spammers just forget the whole idea of Meta. Meta is a place for us to discuss forum issues and not to beg for merits. They create a shit topic and wait for merits but they are slammed for their posts.

If merit is changed to voted system, alt account holders will vote for their accounts and would receive merits easily. If a person is against someone, how good the post is, he would give a thumbs down. Hence, Voting would not work in longer time.

Merit is not a like or thumbs up we give out in other websites. It is just limited in number and will become scarce in upcoming years. Hence Merit Sources and members who received merit would be the only one to give out merits for the quality posts.

Merit is pretty new which cannot be judged now. Everything needs time to be completely implemented and work as intended. Some possibilities which would eventually occur:

*Spammers will force themselves to post high quality posts in order to receive merits.
*Spammers might leave the forum if they feel like they are not getting ranked up for long time. On the contrary, frustrations of not getting ranked up will force them to create multi-accounts and participate in campaigns as Jr.Members which will give them the rates of Legendary Ranks.

P.S : We can save the forum, if every one of us report spam posts, plagiarism posts, alt accounts and try to act like a MOD.

The thing is, you never know if your comment is going to be merited or not.

Many times you make a very simple comment and someone for some reason likes it, and you get a merit, or even more.
In other situations you make a big research and put a lot of effort in a post, many people like and agree with you, but you don't get any merit.

If people are forced to get 1 merit per week to be paid, this will generate a lot of stress and people would be posting to get merits. Soon they would be begging for it.
getting merit does not depends solely on your efforts, you can't login and say "I will get one merit today".

I think merit requirement for joining campaigns is better.
This is why I gave up this idea...



You cannot have a voting system or a democracy when any spammer can make an army of accounts controlled by bots to vote.

I'm fairly new here and I fully agree with everything that's been said. The whole board is just full of spam, and with signature bounties and the merit system, people are just posting for the sake of posting and hoping someone will find their post helpful. There's just an abundance of unnecessary posts, or posts which repeat the same thing.

The merit system I understand, however I think it could've been better. It still in a way forces you to post your thoughts, even if it's just the same thing that someone else has just said, in hopes that someone gives them merit. Then you go to the newbie board and instead of posts asking and helping about learning crypto, it's just full of posts about how to gain merit.

When I first started here I was members of other crypto boards, I still am. This board just really doesn't seem like the place to go to actually learn about crypto, since you really don't need to make a post to learn about something. For you to learn, you need a high concentration of quality, helpful posts, and unfortunately you just can't find that here.

In forums with no incentives for posting, people post because they're genuinely interested in the subject and they're trying to help. The majority of posts end up being helpful, or at least interesting or funny. Here, people need to keep their posts up, they need merit, so they try to pump out as many posts as possible. This results in posts being bland, not interesting, and just a repeat of information easily found with 1 minute of searching. It just feels like everyone is here to make a buck, and the post quality seen throughout the site suffers because of it.

The merit system is interesting, but I feel like it shouldn't be a "one guy sends you merit" kind of thing. In other forums they have a thumbs up/down system where the community decides whether the post is helpful or not. Unfortunately this system is also able to be abused, since it causes people to have a 'hive mind' so they don't say something that goes against the view of the community, getting their posts poorly ranked, but it also helps push up the more quality posts to the top of the thread, so that when you scroll down you first see the higher quality posts. This merit system, where it's up to one guy to decide whether a post is helpful or not, doesn't really do it for me. The merited posts still get lost under the sea of low quality posts, and a lot of posts that receive merit really don't deserve it.

I think the merit system should be changed to a more community-voted system. Where a post needs thumbs up from a certain amount of people to receive merit, and constant thumbs down can make you lose it.

We don't have to invite bike in this case. We already have list of "anti spam" campaign managers
 Overview of Bitcointalk Signature Anti-Spam Campaign Managers - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/overview-of-bitcointalk-signature-anti-spam-campaign-managers-4412712
Offcourse, this list is based on subjective personal opinion, but I think that all users listed there could be approved bounty manager.
How new user can become bounty manager? Well, that's more difficult question. Maybe he would need to report a lot of posts with good accuracy, catch alt accounts, copy pasters and similar abusers and then he would have to apply to become bounty manager.
Before punishing bounty manager maybe mods would have to give him 1 or 2 warnings. If warnings doesn't help, then bounty manager would get some kind of punishment.
Can you tell, how "Don't show users' signatures can help to solve spam problem? Ok, then you wont see signatures, but you still will see shitposts made by these spammers.
You can put spammers on your ignore list manually, but it's not very convenient solution.

Quality over quantity is a good idea, but as someone already said - merits are not indicators of post quality. It would work if the forum had a special built-in machine learning based mechanism that automatically rewards users for quality posts, but with people in the system it wouldn't work as expected.

System isn't perfect yet, it's still pretty new. I saw bounty thread rewarded with like 50 merits. I see people trying maybe too hard to get some, and it doesn't feel like you wanna reward them. I believe that's wrong because someone who tries has as much merit as a legendary who gives a free advice because he has been in crypto for years. I see many legendary with a lot of merits. Of course their posts are above average, but they don't really need it. Maybe merit sources could lower a bit their requirement... Maybe not. Overall, I think it is working quite well, and it wouldn't take much to be an efficient system.
Anyway, I didn't want to mention that, as my point was about contributing a little to improve the forum, and not about complaining 

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Sorry about that. I followed a few topics about merits at the beginning, but there are just too many of them ! I did mentioned it a couple of times, but was too lazy to open a thread about it. You had some interesting contributions already. Maybe it's not necessary to have 2 threads about it.

To me a discussion implies being able to answer each other. But when you get too many answers, with people just giving their opinion one after another without even reading what has already been said, it's hard to keep focus. That's why I chose to post here, where there are less poster. 

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I think it's not an option. Too much traffic and money depends on it. Improvement is the only solution.

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I like your idea about approved BM, but it raises other problems as well. How to become BM at first ? You need to prove yourself to get approved. It's the egg and chicken problem: who came first? And how would they be approved ?
Punish bad BM could help, but it's hard to define the line between: bad / acceptable / didn't know but will improve next time / didn't know but don't care, etc. I think "encourage the good" is a better way than "punishing the bad", even if you always need some kind of both.

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Of course there is nothing wrong replying those threads, but when you realize people just read the title, click "reply" at the bottom of the page, and write the strict minimum they need for their post to count, it feels like a waste of time.
I truly think is it quite hard to write 15 valuable posts per week. It takes lot's of time, and you must have something to say. I don't think it is compatible with quality post.


I agree with that, when you see something often enough, it will get inside your brain one way or another. But this is the point, much less posts doesn't mean that you don't see the signatures anymore. You would still see as many signatures as before, just less diluted.
 

1 merit was just an example, it could be more. I think the important is to make sure it stays accessible to everyone. New members just can't make interesting contribution everyday. Plus it doesn't mean you have to stop posting after getting your merit(s). Those who still have things to say would keep posting while those who don't wouldn't be forced to post useless message.
It's obvious that it would reduce project exposure a bit, but what I'm trying to figure out is: how much exposure would really be lost ? Would it really be that detrimental to ICO project in the end? I doubt that.


When money is involved, moral is forgotten. But they would write interesting stuff anyway, so at least it wouldn't bother anyone !

Not completely. I would argue that ICOs contribute the most to spam, and that's not because of the bounties that they offer, but any investment opportunity get's a lot of hype because people are hoping that it will be the next Bitcoin where they can be early adopters, and earn a little bit of money.


Signature campaign mangers need to be looking at their participates, and only accepting those that are already making that amount of posts. It only makes sense to employ someone who is already making quality posts, and to the amount specified. Yet, they don't because they are lazy, and only care about their payment at the end of the day.

Replying in one of those threads isn't that bad, and I'm sure a lot more veteran members have fallen into the trap too. As long as it's a unique reply, and is adding something new to the thread then I don't see the problem with it. I can understand why signature campaigns rule them out, and rightly so in my opinion. But, that shouldn't stop you from replying to them if you would like to point something out to someone for an example.


Although, it's probably true that more reputable, and helpful members get genuine clicks or exposure than just the average Joe. I don't think they get more exposure than the users which are posting hundreds of posts per day. At the end of the day depending on what is being advertised people will click because the advert has got their attention, and not the individuals post.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in the problem we have today in were low quality members are hired because they bring the best bang for buck. Even if it's detrimental to the forum.

It could work. Although, a lot of people would likely argue that this isn't a guarentted payment, and therefore no one would go for it. However, let's be frank here they would as it's money at the end of the day. 1 Merit isn't going to be hard to earn every week, and I much prefer a system in which there's a on going requirement as opposed to the current system which is implemented that you need x amount over the initial ranks starting merit because all this system proves is that you've made good quality posts in the past, however you may not continue that once you've been hired on a signature campaign. Thus, an on going merit requirement is likely better.


This just isn't going to work. The merit requirement would have to be in conjunction with the existing requirements of post count. There just has to be a certain number of posts made to be beneficial to the advertisers. 1 post unfortunately isn't going to get enough exposure, and wouldn't be worth while to them.

I like the idea of an ongoing merit requirement just because it actually requires you to make good posts. I don't think 1 merit is high enough of a threshold to prove effective though.


The multi account rule is more than likely about morals rather than anything else. Enrolling alt accounts when it's specifically not allowed is just greedy. Signature campaigns can pay well, and I would imagine that there's several users exploiting this with multiple accounts. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain few signature/bounty managers are aware of it.


I think if theymos were to implement a feature where you could filter all replies on a thread by merit, and perhaps only show those that had been merited this might work. But, unfortunately more does mean more money. It's the way our brains work we are pattern recognizing machines, and if we continually see an advert then we will likely either be intrigued by it, remember it when your looking for that specific service or automatically ignore it.

Also, people still read the forum, and every reply in each thread.

The fact is that Bitcoin is actually worth something, but a lot of the ICO payments are made in stakes which the majority of the time result in you being paid pennies.

No this can be the correct section. The OP is looking to discuss the matter, and isn't looking for an input of staff members, but a discussion from the community. It can be in Serious Discussion.

I don't think so. A post doesn't have to be useful in order to receive merit. It doesn't even have to be that impressive either. Maybe I have lower standards than some of the merit sources, and yourself. But, any post which took time, effort, and was thought out is good enough for me to send it merit. It doesn't even have to be 100% right as long as it's on the right tracks. Even if someone is asking a question if it sparks off a thoughtful discussion then I might even send merit to them for that.

There was so many discussions about spam on Bitcointalk already and this thread also belongs to Meta board. Your idea sounds not bad, but I'm not sure that it would really work.
There few solutions how to solve problems mentioned by you:
Ban bounty campaigns completely on Bitcointalk. But I think that theymos wouldn't want to do that because forum would loose a lot traffic.
Punish campaign managers who aren't doing their job properly. We know that many bounty managers accept spammers, copy pasters, users with multiple accounts and people who are posting by using google translate. They aren't checking quality of posts, they are just paying for quantity. Now everyone can become bounty manager. I think that bounty managers should be approved by mods or admin. Similar like merit sources.
I noticed that campaigns which are paying in Bitcoin have less problems with spam. Managers are doing their job much better

I had this same idea few time ago and made this topic. But nobody liked the idea...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3836012.0;topicseen


The correct board for this is meta, not serious discussion.

I would agree to this. It does seem like a better idea to reward quality over quantity.
I don't know what sig campaigns would say about this, but I don't see any apparent drawbacks right away.

You might need a little tweaking with merit system, as it isn't very often to see posts that have merit on them, even if they are useful.
Not a lot of people seem to care and give out merit to every post that is useful. Getting a couple of merits is a rare thing where you need to be a bit impressive, not just useful.

Ideas and propositions to help improve the forum, and reduce the amount of spams, bots, and poor quality posts coming from bounty campaign:

Related to bounty campaign:

• Quality post requirement based on merit instead of quantity post based on numbers of post.
• Reward good bounty managers and/or Punish bad ones.
• Merit requirement to join bounty campaign - in addition to/instead of - rank requirement.
• Allow bounty's posts requirement to be written in local section
• Change bounties incentives: allow rewards to be payed in BTC only (no more tokens rewards)

Unrelated to bounty campaign:

• The Report score: the amount of bad reports you have received when somebody reported you.
• dmerits, sMerits that can be delegated.
• 1 or 2 merits required to become Jr. Member.
• Show the merited posts at the top of the thread to get them more exposure.
• A "report to merit's sources" option to help expose and reward good contributions.
• Specific sections / excluded sections where merit can / can't be given.
• Exclude ANN and services threads from the merit system.
• Disable signature emplacement if no merit has been earned during an amount of time.
• [SCAM PREVENTION]Remove self-moderation for topics within the marketplace!
• Approve user's first post manually to stop spambots.

 

EXTRA: And of course, we can all help by reporting spams and bots. Welsh just made a great [GUIDE] to report effectively. Thanks to him.


Please let me know what you think guys, and keep adding ideas, so we can help this forum. (Do not hesitate to edit your message to make a clear point, or just give me another link if it has already been explained somewhere else.)

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I had this idea... and I would like to have a serious discussion about it, which is why it is here and not in meta !

This forum is full of bad quality posts, multi-accounts, cheaters, etc., and it makes it quite unpleasant to read. Let's be honest, it's all related to bounty campaign, and particularly signature's campaign.

Signature's campaign forces you to write at least 15 to 20 posts per week. It isn't simple to make 15 reasonably interesting posts every weeks ! And because some posts could get deleted, you might be tempted to write a couple more here and there, just in case, in those miserable 100 pages threads that no one has ever read, but where everyone keeps writing that Ethereum will/won't overtake bitcoin. I naively answered a couple of times in those stupid threads... What an idiot ! hahaha

So if no one ever read this kind of topics, it means that no one actually see the signature. Of course, it might still helps the project because your signature will be seen eventually, but no one will click on it after reading a bad quality post, or even something uninteresting.

But now, we have the merit system... So what if, instead of quantity of posts per week, we had quality of posts per week ? What if, instead of 15 posts a week, you had to get 1 merit a week ?

Just think about that for a minute.
It means, you could just write ONE post in a week to get your reward (and merits by the way). That would take you as long, maybe even less time to write it. You would bring some real contribution to this forum, instead of pollution. Now, imagine if we were all doing that... You could just divide instantly the amount of posts on the whole forum by 15 every week ! 15 !!! While increasing the quality a lot. Of course, it would also be MUCH EASIER to moderate the entire forum, which makes it a big double win.
And what about multi-account ? To me, you can write something interesting from whatever account you want. If you want to write 5 interesting posts from 5 accounts or from 1, who cares, at least you are actively contributing now. So you could basically also solve multi account issue at the same time.
Lastly, It would also make BM job easier and faster because they would just have to check your amount of merits every weeks instead of checking every posts from every participants.
(I remember one topic asking the BM to give merit because they were reading post anyway. That isn't what I mean. It's not their job. Merits should be given the way it works now. It should be merited and honestly earned, from other members.)


But what about the signature itself and ICO marketing ? Less signatures makes less audience.
No, it doesn't. Just think it through: with much less posts, people would actually READ the forum, so they would SEE the signatures. And who knows, maybe after reading something interesting from someone, you would even check his signature thinking that he looks smart, so his sig might be juicy...
Plus, I have to admit that when I see a post which has earned merits, I read it. So it is working, and it does attract attention.
And anyway, I am certain that a quality marketing will always be better than a quantity one. There is a balance to find, but polluting the whole forum, and every existing social networks doesn't really reflect good on any project.

Merit was a nice first step, let's keep moving.