Topic: @theymos, we want those sections back to us, new moderators? Updated. (Read 1195 times)

I've updated the OP in hope to get a feedback sometime in the near future.

Keep reporting spam and abuse for almost a year. I am here almost 7 years on BTT from 2012 (my first account was hacked after 2 years) but was afraid to report because my first reports were bad and I got low accuracy.

Lately, the amount of spam grows so much that I just couldn't ignore this anymore.
I like to read this forum and I couldn't because sometimes to find one page with a quality discussion I had to read 4 pages of "great project" kind of posts. Slowly I learned how to report correctly and after some time I had hundreds of reports with 100% accuracy. Actually, I have almost 2,5k posts reported with 100% accuracy and only 14 bad (which I get at the start).

I will suggest adding volunteers to boards which need to be cleaned.
They should be supervised by an established moderator and first report posts for a few days or even weeks in this boards. Moderator will check their reports and if they are correct then assign them for a patrol, junior, ghost or even full moderator. I just think that the abilities of every member who applies for a moderator should be checked first to avoid abuse later.

I would be glad to help but from what I see there is no way to apply for this task only one has to be chosen by staff members.

I think there should be a thread where members can apply for such tasks.
This would be fairer. There are a lot of members like me which are not so popular but here a few years long, know a lot about crypto, post quality content, fight spam and abuse but don't have friends between forum staff members and don't post on every thread in meta, reputation or scam section to be recognized and gain popularity or just to butter up.

I'll try to update the OP tomorrow with all the suggestions.

I think we should also take into consideration of adding another mod in the Trading Discussion section. Because a considerable amount of members here are creating threads not related to the section itself. They often post here topics related to Trading in terms of Buying and Selling cryptocurrencies not trading in the sense of what this section is meant for. Also the topics of trading (buying and selling cryptos, investing in cryptos) already have a childboard under Economy which is the Speculation section.

He's not even on staff any more like MiningBuddy, but neither of them have been removed by theymos from there.


That board has served its purpose long ago and should be locked or archived, or at the very least a thread stickied there that only notable sources are allowed (and by notable I mean no bitcoin-related sources). It's just used as promotion tool for ICOs and people's crappy bitcoin websites and many others just use it as a legalised way to get away with copy and pasting.

This would be the ideal solution, if you want genuine and constructive discussion to start.
Since from what theymos was saying, bounty cannot be cut out completely, as they necessary for the sustainment of the forum, at least they could be restricted to certain boards.

Add the following boards to your list:

- Bitcoin > "Project Development"

- And for Local >

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This:

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I'm pretty sure that's the norm...

Press board should definitely be added to the list. It has assigned moderator, jgarzik who was inactive for a long time and came back just to participate in his own altcoin's thread.

If I understand the purpose of that board correctly - posting press hits from mainstream media about Bitcoin - then most of the content is pure spam: non-bitcoin or even non-crypto related links, links to crypto-related news sites (what's the point?) or some niche blog posts, hardly anyone is sticking to the advised format + there's a spam even in sticky posts.

It's not quite like that - 10k accounts would cost the spammers time and possibly money (what with evil IPs etc). But there are definitely some relatively simple changes that could replace the work of (or remove the need to hire) a few moderators. Newbie whitelisting mentioned somewhere in another thread should be quite effective. There are probably some moderation workflow improvements that could help - I think hilarious mentioned that all mod reports go to all global mods, which sounds like a massive internal spam fest on its own.

I think that the increase in the number of moderators can help the community but I do not think it will change much, even if we add 100 moderators, the spammers can make themselves in a few minutes even 10,000 accounts and spam, so in the end we are in the same situation where a user must report a spam and a moderator must delete the message.

So to conclude with more realistic numbers even if you add 5 moderators we are in the exact same situation.

I sent you a PM regarding an issue with your signature.

Theymos is really like a unicorn, mysterious.
I don't know what he is doing for living, but I'm sure the forum is more like a hobby, and if he is a young man in his late twenties than for sure he has more important things to think of right now because the forum is a big time consumer and responsibility but you cannot give up from your whole career and development just because satoshi choose you to be the admin.

You can't be 100% sure he seen it, but if he's been online he's probably been in Meta and seen a thread that directly addresses him in the title. Theymos' comments are becoming about as rare as unicorn sightings though  .


It needs more than just more mods. Without fundamental changes here nothing much will change despite how much manpower your throw at it. You could have an entire office consisting of mods trying to clean up spam and it still probably wouldn't be enough because there's thousands of spammers spamming and hundreds more probably sign up per day. I agree we do need more mods, but we also need to start punishing those who are paying for the spam in the first place. Tackle the problem at the source.

No there's no setting like that. It's was probably assumed that theymos was online and was answering other threads, so he must have seen this too.

And Bounties? The board consists from posts alike "interesting project". Aren't we tired from this? The forum definitely needs more mods to control spammers and shitposters.

How you can see that theymos was here?
Is there any setting in the forum to check back later who has viewed the topic/post?
I thought it's not possible, but I don't know all the features of this forum....

I see theymos was here but didn't answer the request.
Hope we get a feedback soon.

Off-topic :
@hilariousetc I sent you a PM with a small issue I saw.

Well it's one more thing he would have to deal with and I guess he doesn't have the time to do so.
How about having the current mods do the hiring and rewarding (whichever way it's done) of the new ones ? We would have mods and super mods.

Staff members are volunteers but do get paid also. The issue isn't money as theymos has said numerous times that the forum has more than enough money in reserves, so much so that he's even contemplated getting rid of the forum ad slot which is pretty much the forum's only source of income (which I don't think he should do). There are probably several long-standing and fairly trusted members of the community that could step up and would make great mods and those amongst the highest reporters with several thousands of accurate reports would be on a worthy shortlist. You could also promote some of the existing staff members to dedicated sub board mods but doing both would be more effective.

Mods have to be paid, that might be the issue here. You could find volunteers yes, but volunteers might get overzealous if they don't have the right motivations.

How about making new mods rank up instead of paying them ? And if they do a shitty job, you just fire them and move them back to their former rank.

@hilariousetc thanks for the great analysis. I found some free time to read it all and I'm completely agree with your postion.

I'll just say that theymos is trying to reduce the bad consequences from every move he makes but considering the current forum situation I don't really see how the things can get worse even if you make not so good decisions.

Of course some moves will trigger another problems but with those we can deal later again. There's no miracle solution to all the problems no matter how long you think over the things.

And soon actions will be needed

The entire board is terrible and the longer we leave things the worse it gets and exponentially so. Signature spam has always been an issue here even back when I signed up, but it was never like it is now. The spam was tolerable and few and far between with only a handful of users that over-stepped the mark and when they did they were usually temp banned by BadBear. Now the signature spam is completely embarrassing with it being endemic and spam being the norm consisting mostly of barely comprehensible generic one or two liners made by people who don't even care about bitcoin and can't speak English very well and are only doing so for payment and likely over many multiple accounts. It's become unmanageable, but the people who need to be punished are the ICOs that are paying them to do this. If you go in Bitcoin Discussion probably eight out of every ten posts are mostly generic nonsense churned out by someone who's on an ICO campaign and doesn't really know what they're talking about. As theymos himself says, this forum shouldn't be a welfare system for people, but that's what it mostly is now. There are ways we can stop this, or at least drastically curb it, but doing nothing is only going to make it worse.

I get that theymos is busy and appreciate coding things takes time and he is probably under incredible stress with all the issues he has to deal with being the defacto executive here and there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that most people probably don't even consider (accounting, dealing with lawyers, the taxman, and all the other issues this forum has which he is probably doing most of by himself), but that's why he should delegate as many things as he can here to others. I get that it's not always easy handing off things that require a lot of trust but there are plenty of things theymos can do in the meantime that will help clean the board up and all it probably takes is a few clicks and minutes of his time and then others can do the work without bothering him and the forum benefits in the process. Theymos must get annoyed at all the PMs he gets about various issues so why not do things that will solve some of the many issues here and cut down the need for users pestering him which will then free up his time to do the more important things behind the scenes that only he can do? I don't even like messaging him about things these days because he rarely replies and I don't want him to get annoyed at me, but should I just give up? If that happens then the worse things get. I messaged him about adding a mod for Bitcoin Discussion on August 7th and got a response the same day with a list of the top reporters there but he never replied to me after that despite sending about 4 or 5 messages about it every week or so. krishnapramod was the top reporter there and he also busts a lot of copy and pasters so he would probably be good choice for a patroller at least (unless theymos knows something about him I don't). He's also apparently Indian so if that Local board needs another mod then that's another good reason.

If theymos or cyrus don't have the time and/or energy to restore accounts, add more mods, add merit sources or even run the forum ad auctions then that should be stuff that gets delegated to others. Adding more mods or assigning sub board mods should have been done years ago and it doesn't take much of theymos' time do so so and that's one less thing he has to worry about and the forum improves at least a little bit in the process. Also, even if theymos does implement the automatic account recovery process eventually there's still going to be people who won't be able to use it or need further investigation so another admin is probably going to be needed anyway, and at least they can help restore accounts in the meantime until that system goes live. There's also all the account and bot farming issues that need to be looked into like this. Theymos himself said more mods and admins (or demi-admins) are probably a good idea, so why not do these things now instead of putting them off?


There may or may not be trust issues with adding more admins, but there's ways you can limit the power you give people to minimise the risk of potential abuse, but putting off doing things just because of potential abuse doesn't help and in fact makes things worse. If there's no one trustable here to do certain things then look at alternative ways. Hire someone externally like he has mentioned or try get BadBear back since we know at least he can be trusted to be an admin.


Such drastic measure like this shouldn't be a first option, but doing this would just push those spammers to other boards where signatures are shown. It doesn't solve the problem but just sweeps the rubbish into a different part of the house.


Well I would say keep reporting, but there are users with thousands upon thousands of reports that are not yet mods. I don't think anyone who does just report a shitload of posts should be automatically made a mod, but I definitely think there are some good candidates amongst those that do (unless theymos knows something about them that I don't).

Here is the possible answer...

PS: Sorry that I did not even care to read rest of the responses on this topic since all these suggestions and stuffs are going to be a waste eventually if theymos do not change his views.

Since Flying Hellfish became a Mod on Politics & Society, that board is in a better state now than Bitcoin Discussion.
I barely go to Bitcoin Discussion because of the spam. There are a few threads I follow, but most of the bumps result in me reporting that post or getting the user banned for plagiarism.

With the current level of spam, it's not very difficult to report more posts than you make by yourself. Just report all the useless posts you see, it helps the forum.
I started reporting much more after seeing the report stats from other users. It made me realize I don't have to be restrictive with reports.

Good to know, I didn't follow the case but I knew it was a problem few weeks ago, I'll cross out this one then.

If there are more problematic local borads I'll include them.

@Don Pedro, I'm not 100% sure that only the report score is important but maybe you are right. It's no problem to apply I guess, but first let's see if we get a feedback from theymos.

The French section got a mod and things are starting to pick up now. All is not lost, yet

Check out this thread: Merit source application (French local board)

I'd like to help moderating the Economics section but I think theymos wants for moderators people who massively report, and I don’t. I’ve only reported 85 times in one year.

I see you point but what I do is to start from the low effort tasks from the Community generated suggestions where not much of a coding and time is involved.

All the points listed with OK are possible to be implemented but we have to take it one by one. Everyone is complaining from theymos and nobody do anything /except a few guys here like h&co/ just sit and wait something to happen.

During my not so long experience with the life I've learned that If don't do anything there will never be changes, no matter if you live in democracy or tyranny it's the same.

I don't really want to be the black sheep here, always pushing for some changes, suggesting, etc. probably many people don't really like me already /that's their problem tho/ but I can't just sit and wait like /almost/ everyone else.

I'm not doing it for profit or any personal interests, only for the prosperity of the forum and because of the feeling of injustice for all those abusing the forum one way or another.

Bitcointalk forum has been so much popular nowadays.  Where moderator of this forum play a great role to control each and every matter here. As my opinion when a forum member see any activities of forum moderators its influence him/her to work impressively. Honestly its a special feeling for me to see active moderators on forum.
so I believe we need more active moderators to make our forum much popular.

New moderators are needed but I don’t think we are focusing the right way. Moderators and mass reporting seem to me like trying to put out the fire with water from one side, while you know on the other side there is a guy fueling the fire with petrol.

The solution is not to throw more water, or to have more people throwing water, it is to kill the guy who is pouring petrol, or at least to take the petrol away from him.

If I get a positive answer here I'll take the responsibility to open a thread with list for volunteers for each section and theymos can decide later which one to pick.

We'll try to make it as lower effort as possible for theymos.

I'll include to the OP the local sections too.

Real time and perfect suggestions. Especially about moderators. Really need replace moderators who are inactive from long time or add more moderators instead of replace. It's look some mod are on vacation mode those are inactive. Theymos , please wake up and consider that OP had mentioned.

Maybe he has these issues on the past. That's why even if it's hard for him, he doesn't bother hiring other people for this tasks.
Anyways, what may be the reason, we are still in need of new moderators that must take place for those mods who aren't active.

We should treat theymos for a drink here , maybe after this he will definitely do something

I think volunteerism is not enough to be appointed as a moderator. Some people only shows an act of volunteerism in order to gain reputation and later behaves like a scumbag. There should have a screening tool maybe when appointing a moderator just like becoming of a merit source.

And let's not forget the Indian sub-board as well.

I mean come on! I come online to check whats new with Indian supreme court vs Bitcoin case and I get to see this??

A YouTuber girl looking for viewers and subscribers !!
Like seriously?

Bring back Benson in charge or bring in someone else new temporarily at least.

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More like 10 seconds..

The altcoin subforum also needs more moderators. Everyone go there and try refreshing the page. The spam bumps are too much. If I start a new thread, it will be buried to the next page 1 minute after.

I can agree here, the demand for new mods is inevitable. The last weeks I've seen a lot of voluntary work like Spambot hunting or other ones like Merit abuse hunting or Plagiarism hunting.

This is very vital, contributes a lot to the forum and it's much better than without. However, such reported posts need to be reviewed and deleted if the accusation is proven right. This requires additional moderator time and I'm very sure if people here are engaged is using time for this voluntary work they would also take the time to do this in moderator position. About the rights of them because of trust issues I think there shoud be no problem because the most participants of these voluntary campaigns are trustworthy and I don't think they are using this new position to abuse it. It can be helpful to give them only the right to delete spam posts and ban Newbie / Jr. Member accounts if there should be doubts of trust.

But by doing so it's possible to reduce spam step by step, the Merit System was a beginning to stop ranking up for spam bots / good project-posters and new employments of additional 'limited' moderators would be the next step!
By introducing 'limited' moderators some of those voluntary members can delete the posts immediately if they notice some and ban or warn the users. This will save time and speed up the entire spam hunting. 

I think it could have more moderators levels with different functions. For example:

It could have a ghost moderator who could just hide a certain topic or post. If anyone still wanted to read the content of that topic or post, he could still click on it. Thus the number of these moderators could be higher and the recruitment simpler. The hidden post could then be deleted or moved by a moderator with more powers if needed.

Maybe it is a trust matters because handing a new man an authority to be near admin level means there is risk for some things, maybe like account security, etc, but i dont know for sure about that. Maybe, just maybe, hiring accountants and professionals means that Theymos must make this forum as a company and listed it under a law which stated bitcointalk is a company, and there can be more regulation incoming like tax, etc.

Correct me if i am wrong.

The economics board is terrible too.

Almost all topics here are created by spammers for spammers.
Like this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-is-the-best-cryptocurrency-to-invest-3165456

What's he best cryptocurrency to invest?

More than 30 pages of spam


There are some good discussions that get lost very quickly.
I don't know how can this situation be controlled. I tried to report here, did about 100-200 reports there, which got deleted... But it's hard to fight against spam

God have mercy on whoever gets the task of patrolling the off topic section.

I still don't understand why theymos is being like the One-person company. And he lives in the US. 

Why should there be trust issues for hiring accountants and professionals? Does it have anything to do with slickage not delivering the new forum as expected or what? And there are people here on this forum who wouldn't run away with a few hundred dollars.

Dear theymos, let us start to cross out some of the suggestions marked as OK in the community suggested changes which do not take a lot of effort from your side.

Let us start with this:


Let's cut the crap and strength to the point.

We need Mods for those sections / more sections could be added but those are most affected by spamers/:
 
- Bitcoin Discussion - no mod
- Project Development ^new
- Beginners & Help - MiningBuddy is offline since April.
- Economics - no mod
- Off Topic - no mod

Local sections :
- Indian
- French - they got a mod already
- Hrvatski (Croatian) ^new
- 한국어 (Korean) ^new
- Skandinavisk ^new


If you agree I'll make a list with volunteers for each section
where we can vote and you will pick the ones you like.

I know it will add more calculations for the taxation but we are also desperate to clean this place.
We have to start from somewhere and take it step-by-step.

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My personal opinion is that there's not so much communication between you and the active crowd here /the valuable members/.

   sorry, I couldn't resist

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Dear theymos,
The community want to interact with you, can you spare some time for us like, one/ two hours once in a month to discuss the all those hot topics in the forum?
I clearly understand that you are very busy man, and probably loosing motivation while facing more and more problems each day and this is completely normal. But big part of the crowd here feels left out with all those cries for help that are not heard /or at least not answered/. The community is here to help each other, right.
Please, don’t feel like you need to report to anyone, this request is not for that, it’s just to give a hope to the others that the things will change here, because people want change, even if it takes years.