Topic: This is what I call spam feeders (Read 914 times)

I checked on that and it was an April fool post although there is nothing serious there but definitely not going to work here.

Sorry for that, but I got the meaning now..

I believe most reputed members who cares about their privacy wouldn't want to jeopardized their documents passing kyc here, maybe if such people had gain enough funds all these while or were early bitcoin holders they wouldn't care if kyc is implemented or not, and if implemented they take their leave without considering any amount being paid in signature campaigns. 

Clamping down on spam means re-thinking the approach to signature campaigns (not KYC) as that is the driving factor for the vast majority to be members here. On a serious note, I suppose the saying never say never has to apply but KYC will never be implemented in the forum unless it becomes a legal requirement from the government that either the servers are based in or where the website is registered.

If KYC were to be implemented, most members will leave immediately whereas some may try to (or will) upload data that is fake or probably belongs to other people in order to keep posting for their campaign as those funds would be the only lure to keep them here.

I think you missed the sarcasm in my post:

The idea and code are in place to use.
KYC now required

If theymos wants to deploy it as a new requirement of the forum on all users, he will not need too much time for deployment. theymos did not want to do it, because his vision is toward freedom and privacy. Moreover, KYC won't stop spam.

I don't also think theymos is everly ready to implement kyc here in the forum. Maybe he can only make it more restrictive to an account found or caught regularly creating topics feeding the spammers. For real users, he has it own ways of separating them, let say reputable members like you guys can be exempted from kyc implementation only if he noticed there is no changes between the account operations.

If having an alt-account falls within the rules, some members will definitely use that opportunity for any purpose they deem appropriate but having one account per IP will not work as there are many members here that either a VPN or Tor (or both).

We all know the forum has become a magnet for account farmers that want to enrol as many of their accounts as possible across as many signature campaigns as possible in order to maximise their income and there is not much that can be done to counter that.

Though to some varying degree they suffered setbacks after some of their accounts or activities were exposed, as a community we did not get to root of the account farmers that controlled the figmentofmyass and borovichok accounts respectively. I am sure many account farmers operating on an industrial scale are replacing their tagged accounts as soon as possible in their attempt to maximise their income potential.

It is something that will not go away until/unless something drastic changes.

That'll happen right after KYC gets implemented. It won't stop spam, but it will bug real users.

Honestly, what's their goal? What could they be possibly gaining with unnecessary spam posts? I asked this question myself a dozen of times but never really got an answer. I would have understood if they/he were getting paid for posting, but he doesn't, nor is he promoting anything, nor part of any signature campaign, nor any altcoin bounty, nothing at all. Just wasting time. What are they trying to achieve here, 11 merits and 445 posts, dud! What an achievement, lol  . Some people would do anything for money, if they tell you to eat shit, he will eat shit. But for these ignored users, I can't think of any reasons at all.
 
Message to those alts: "Man, get a life, don't you have better things to do?".

I don't think theymos would do that. Well, not until the forum floods with massive spams and everything goes out of control.

It would be great if it were as you say. But you see at maximum two users; I think no more. And all the rest are their alternative accounts that moderators cannot ban because there is no direct evidence. However, their writing style is very well-defined and has many similarities. This is an example of exactly this kind of behavior when dozens of alternative accounts harm the forum, and maybe it would make sense for them to allow one account per IP.

Fortunately for me, if I recall correctly all but one of the threads I reported over the past few months for being a waste were locked. There are many patterns but the most prominent one is when a pointless or unnecessary  thread is created by possible alt-accounts and farmed accounts with the hope/expectation of receiving merits and whether that happens or not, the OP moves on to create other threads recycling the same process.

If a picture or photo ever spoke a thousand words, this really has to be it. The situation will only continue to decline unless drastic action is taken.

The OP of those topics is ignored. I like that gray font, it helps avoid wasting time on useless topics.

The gray out users are on your ignore list? I didn't realize it appears like that. I don't have that many people on my ignore list. I thought posts from ignored users simply don't show up or disappear. Like it never existed.  

It’s quite an imaginative thought, but it’s worth considering. To simplify, let’s base our judgments on the forum rules rather than personal opinions. What OP raised is a valid concern: if users keep creating excessive threads beyond normal, it exacerbates spam issues. This can become overwhelming for mods, who are outnumbered compared to the millions of forum users. Even a small percentage of active members can lead to significant problems if not managed well.

If that’s really the issue with the OP, it shouldn’t be part of the discussion here because forum rules apply to everyone, regardless of personal circumstances. After all, we are anonymous here, so we don’t know what each person is going through. Even if someone is facing challenges, it doesn’t excuse not following the rules and standards.

I could be wrong, and there could be some ulterior motive behind those who you call "spam feeders". To me, we are talking about people who unfortunately suffer from some psychological and mental problems, which have not been addressed by professionals yet. So they come to this forum in order to vent what they feel, that being the case of Fullbear2222.
It is also quite noticeable how many of the topics of these people are quite nihilistic in nature and always talk about future, politics and society in a very dark and hopeless way.

Going beyond the fact they could be affecting the quality of the content within the forum, I can only hope they get the help they need eventually and turn their life around, for the best.
It is quite interesting and disturbing, what do people with serious mental illnesses can do/say on the internet when they are not under supervision whatsoever.

Over the year you find many relatively accounts ranging from newbie/relatively new accounts to higher ranked that have done the same thing. The most prominent trait they have in common is that they (in most part) do not return to the thread after they created it and that is probably down to them not receiving any merits. They probably concluded they will not receive any merits for subsequent posts if they did not receive any for the OP.

What happens next is that signature spammers end up taking over those threads. I have reported many of those types of threads and thankfully nearly all of them were locked.

These tools are indeed a coin toss as, it doesn’t accurately relate it to a source since there are none and just use the writing style or figure of speech amongst others to arrive at a conclusion. What makes it even more difficult to accept is the fact that, all available tools aren’t agreeable and that’s why you find reports on these not being handled as would have been expected.

Something that is worth looking at though is, just how some users especially in the first case of Fullbear2222 would make 450posts and 242 of those are topics. This person is literally not interested in anything else on the forum, not even in the threads they create. There have got to be a place for these kind of users!

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I knew I had sometime ago said something about this user and once I saw the style of write up, it clicked. I had to go dig that up and the user was already been talked about in the reputation board with some alt related suspicion.

I mean, yeah, and I get what you're saying. I guess, my objection would be that your description is how you'd like it to work: "all it does is give the user an indication of the user's post quality", but, in reality, that's not all it would do, frequently (I think) it would also mark users that people just don't like, or people that have views that many people can't tolerate, and whatnot, completely divorced from the idea of whether or not they're putting thought into their posts. I see this often with merit distribution: a lot of people seem to think they should merit posts that they agree with, and starve posts/posters of merit when they disagree. I expect the same thing would happen with any kind of "mark of shame" thing: people would get them just for posting controversial/annoying/upsetting ideas [1].

Of course, you could argue that the same thing will inevitably happen with the scheme I currently have in mind, but, the difference there is that there's no default component to it, so even if a user has made it onto a very-subscribed-to ignore list, from the point of view of someone that doesn't subscribe to that same ignore list, there'd be no outward sign that those user's posts should be taken less seriously than any other user's.

[1] I mean, that's basically what the trust system seems to often get used for. Honestly, if it were up to me, I'd completely dismantle DefaultTrust. I think it's actually caused more harm to the user base than good.

Isn't that the beauty of a glowing button? It doesn't force anything, all it does is give the user an indication of the user's post quality. And a reminder to click it when he agrees it's not worth reading.

Yep, I'm aware of that. (Only because I've bumped into posts about that accidentally; my reverse-reading of Meta hasn't got me there yet.)

I've always kind of liked the idea of giving users the tools they need to reliably keep shitposters from getting a foothold, and if this were my forum, I would totally experiment with all kinds of different schemes, but, in the end, I think most people (even the top users merit-wise) probably can't be trusted with such tools...

The thing is, if the trust system is anything to go by, then (by far) most users don't have the ability to be objective when it comes to rating each other. So, I expect any system that gives people the power to suppress other users will end up being used unfairly and for things way beyond their intended purpose.

That's why my current thinking revolves around pull mechanics rather than push mechanics. I'd like to give users the ability to basically nuke anything they don't like, but those decisions should only affect their own view of the forum, and the only mechanism for those decisions to spread and have a wider effect should be by allowing other users to voluntarily subscribe to some subset of another user's curation-related judgment calls.

Have you read about the "glowing" Ignore button? It was before my time here, and supposedly the Ignore button would become brighter once more users have the user on Ignore. I think this feature was removed because it can be abused.
It may be possible to implement it again, and base someone's Ignore power on the Merits he's earned. Kinda like how the bump power works, but maybe minus something based on how many Merits the user earned.
While typing this, I realize this works in my favour. But most of the "glow power" should come from multiple users ignoring someone.

It's not the fault of the mods that members contribute less and less when it comes to reports - but if you need to report someone dozens of times due to plagiarism and using AI to get a permanent ban, then part of the blame lies with them.


It's very easy, if every day you report only 5 posts due to spam, plagiarism, use of AI and everything else (see the unofficial rules of the forum), that means you will have 150 reports during the month - if only 10 members participate in the same way, that means 1500 reports each month.

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By the way, the last part of the post you quoted does not belong to me - a little more attention to such things is always desirable

Quit unfortunate that some of us think the privilege to write what we wanted is relatedly equivalent to social lives where misbehaviors is seem as content creations just in creating awareness of existence without undermining credibility.
These users must be ignorant pertaining their goals to the forum while flooded their profile walls with helpless Posts unremorsefuly. I think they need some breaks to stay stil and just have enough time reading across the forum in other to readjust else they are timely spreading worthless poster.
The number of merits earned has really not been a point to stress on because earning merits has not been too common after all I have been trying my best and has only earned 4 merits after creating 11 Topics and total of 60 Replies.
I don't want to see my current merit earn as mock by users or debunking on me.

This guy would surely return sooner or later with another trash to spread in the forum putting more work for mods. Maybe this guy has some mental problems if not them I am wrong. If there's no merit being implemented them I wonder what this person would have done. We can only report the post since not all spam posts are being reported and some sre being missed being reported.

I'm afraid, but if it persist, then they'll definitely be no choice for the companies passing time around... The truth is, they've got representatives in here... The statistics are constantly evaluated to know if they're actually making the desired traffic and profits or not.

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I don't wanna blame the MODs directly -- it ain't even easy to do their jobs, but what exactly do we all want for this forum at a long run? You and i, everyone else? Shall we all sit and watch a great community of intellectual people like this getting rubbed in the mud like it's nothing?

This wasn't about me, but I'm guilty! I really need to sit up and do what I'm supposed to do.
It's sad that that could only be ^1/3 of the reasons why we've got old knowledge members falling out... Remember, alot of stories have been left unrevealed about sudden disappearance of well-known members.

When was the last time you reported a post that you considered spam? Moderators on the forum act almost exclusively on the basis of reports, if there are none or there are relatively few of them, then it is clear that the majority of spam is not sanctioned, which means that it passes under the radar.

In other words, all the rules of this world are in vain if there are not those who point out their violation, and then those who impose punishments based on that.


There are probably those members who have left the forum because they are dissatisfied with how things work, and the diminishing quality of posts and discussions certainly plays a role in that. If you start putting board after board on ignore and if you see that nothing changes for the better, then it is not strange that one day someone decides that there is nothing here for him anymore.

Although I would dare to say that the disappearance of sig campaigns that paid more than twice as much as the case today influenced some to leave the forum.

This is a good point, we shouldn't be that cruel and threads mustn't attract merits before it is good though those guys need to work more on their writing skills. I do not see a serious offence committed in most of the threads, we can't be writing well and be creative the same way. Some people might want to genuinely participate in forums like this, it's not nice to ignore them but to put them through the right path by warning them. I believe moderators are already getting at them with some of the posts moved to Off-topic, regardless, many of the posts are still valid. Whether they constructed it perfectly or not, so far as the gist is made, they are still good, they should only reduce the frequency of opening new topics and construct the subsequent ones better.

Yep, and I think Lucius is aware of all that (he did say "some kind of freedom of expression").

And therein lies the rub: the laudably permissive and even-minded moderation policy means that there's a ton of stuff the moderators can't really do anything about...

One thought I've had about this is to beef-up/renovate the ignore system (so that you can completely hide people, topics or even just individual posts) and, while doing that, add the ability to have multiple ignore lists, some of which are private, and some of which could be published for others to view and subscribe to.

It's tricky to see, but, that's just about all the groundwork that's needed for members to easily clean up the forum themselves without having to beg and plead with the mods or argue about rule interpretation or freedom of expression.

For example, nutildah might maintain one such list called "AI shitbirds" or something, containing borderline cases that the mods won't act on, which I'd happily subscribe to. There are a handful of other members (10 or so) that I'd personally feel comfortable "outsourcing" different curation-related decisions to. I'd probably subscribe to certain lists that identify accounts that have changed hands, or accounts that just troll or post low-value things non-stop [1], stuff like that.

The dark side of a system like this is that a lot of people will inevitably isolate themselves into narrow views of the forum that don't represent the whole, but, all things considered, that's a small price to pay, and anyway, it's really nobody's business how any given user decides to control their own information diet.

[1] I mean, I've been reading ~2011-era Meta recently, so, I can practically hear theymos' retort in my head, saying: "If someone is just trolling and/or posting low-value things non-stop, then report them.", but, as someone that has now spent ~2300 hours of my precious time on this planet digesting almost uniformly shitty Bitcointalk posts, I think I've come to the conclusion that sensible/neutral centralized moderation just can't raise the signal-to-noise ratio much beyond where it's at, no matter how enthusiastically people might report things.

I checked on the two accounts to see their respective ranks and i discover that one is a member rank and the other a newbie, then this caught my attention on thinking whether they have no idea on how to make posts or whether they are just doing this shits on purpose, but irrespective of what may be behind this, what is not good is not good at all, most of them were doing this on purpose to either get noticed and shill their spam post contents.

I don't think "freedom of expression" is ever absolute, anywhere, nor do I think Theymos thinks it should be on bitcointalk (as evidenced by some of the rules, the presence of moderators, and even his banning of the last Yobit campaign).  If there was absolute freedom, then spamming would be allowed--and it's not, and I think common sense would dictate that there are limits to how shitty posts/threads can be before they get deleted.  Otherwise it's just a set up for the implosion of this forum, a scenario where there's nothing but AI-written crap and sig shitposters driving away all of the good members.

And I wonder why a lot of those good members of old did go away.  Some of them we know the reasons for, but I have a feeling some left because the level of discussion quality here has deteriorated and it's become tedious to see the same thread topics come up over and over again.  I'd really, really like to know Theymos's thoughts on this, but I don't suspect he'll give his opinion anytime soon.

Obviously, there are too few of us who think long-term, but this is simply the reality we have fallen into and it will be difficult to get out. Unfortunately, we have lost some very important members of the forum over the years, whether they were extremely high-quality posters or members who worked in the background fighting spam and scammers. I still find good members and their posts that are worth paying attention to, but the truth is that we lose quality much faster than we manage to make up for it.


I had to check what "enema" means because it's not a word I've come across - and I have to admit that I somewhat share your opinion, but it's hard for something like that to happen on a forum where some kind of freedom of expression is guaranteed, even if it meant that in this freedom also includes spam.

Will that stop those spammers? The answer is "no" because the spammers won't stop spamming no matter if such spam feeding accounts are listed in a thread and actually most members of the forum may not visit the thread often only to see if someone is a spammer or not.

I agree with you that such people create threads often to get attention and some of the spammers might post in those threads as well to complete their weekly post quota but that doesn't mean in any way that genuine members who don't spam may not post in those threads.

Actually, most members don't really care if someone who created the topic is a spam feeder or a genuine person, in fact they try their best to help out with their knowledge or share their opinion when needed. I know that creating list of some members might be a good step but who knows if it will help spamming and spammers or not.

I'm not sure how these things work, but doesn't that seem like horrible detection capability to you?  It's a coin flip, and I'm hoping that isn't the best these tools can do in detecting AI-generated content....but again, I don't know much about this stuff yet.


Ah, but you're thinking past the immediate gratification of payment-for-shitposts, whereas the knuckle-dragging fools who are currently ruining the quality of our beloved forum can't see any possible negative outcomes like that or worse, they just don't give a shit.  It's no wonder my post count has dropped in the past year.  I thought it was me being typically torpid, but then I look at all of the crap threads in the sections I normally post in and there just hasn't been all that many that are original or can even hold my attention for 30 seconds. 

This place needs a hot lead enema.

Well observed, I had no doubt at all that he would return very soon with a new account. I've made 2 reports so far, so we'll see how long it will last this time, and given that he's a newbie, maybe not that long.

This account already violates the rules in that it had an alternative account, which was banned with great difficulty by Lucius.


And now its worthless topics appear again; the behavior is typical for the first account.



We can start counting down how long it will take for the moderators to run out of patience and ban it again.

Boards are falling one after the other, just look at what 1 or 2 users have done with the Press board and nobody cares. We have more and more spammers, those who plagiarize and use AI, and we literally have a record low number of reports - from this we can only draw the conclusion that most members instead of trying to solve problems, push them under the carpet.

In the long term, it will backfire on everyone, because advertisers will not pay to advertise on a forum where most of the posts will be so bad that no one will read them anymore.

This occurrence also happens on Press board for many years. If you ignore user "chmod755" (who SEO spamming bitcoin[dot]com) and "CoinTürk" (who SEO spamming coin-turk[dot]com and bitcoinhaber[dot]net), you'll realize that all recent threads on it is being ignored. So if those two users aren't nuked until now, i don't expect user mentioned by OP will be banned/nuked either.

Did they actually focused on reading or they focused on creating random topic? Because as I know, someone who is learning here should be doing more readings and replies than putting efforts creating topics with no meaning. I don't know but I believe most of them are being introduced here by someone and they should give them proper orientation on how to go about with this forum, from my looks most of them thinks creating continuous topic fetch them merits since many newbies doesn't have patient over this merits of a thing. Perhaps, creating topics seems something natural to them and could fetched them the merits needed instead without knowing they are putting themselves at the tight corner or being ignored by most users..

I try to check both of them on report plagiarism and report AI post thread, but I found nothing, so it means no one had report them.

For Fullbear2222 he's has his own writing style, it's hard to detect AI generated or not.

While the another one, I use four AI detectors, 2 say using AI and another two say it's human text.

Yeah it's hard to find a genuine newbie, either they're using AI, low quality poster, spammer or merit hunter.


Copyleaks - This is human text.
Hivemoderation - not likely to contain AI Generated Text
sapling.ai - Fake: 100.0%
Zerogpt - Your Text is AI/GPT Generated

It would be better to ask why people rush to answer such topics. He creates topics daily, and as Poker Player correctly noted, this person's behavior raises questions about normality. He does not answer his topics and does not support conversations (although I completely ignore him on all his accounts; I am not sure that this is so). But here the question arises about the need to create such topics where you do not conduct a discussion. He does not need merits; it is noticeable; he needs attention. Perhaps this person does not have loved ones, is lonely, and splashes out his entire stream of thoughts on the forum. And the one who answers his topics similarly highlights himself by simply fulfilling his signature quota, nothing more. If you disagree with the issues, and they are not interesting to you, just ignore him. The moderators have not noticed him for a long time, apparently ignoring him as well.

Today, the economics section has acquired this appearance, and all this is because of one spammer.


The situation is getting even worse.

Not everyone do the same and advises are only advises. It's up to each forum member to do their decision and take action.

Some members will not care about it, no ignore, no report.
Some members will click on Ignore and move on.
Some members will report these posts, threads but don't Ignore.
Some members will do both, report and ignore the user.

Generally garbage threads need massive clean-ups and continuous spammers with AI-generated posts, plagiarism need to be banned.

Instead of encouraging everyone to put them in ignore list which isn't realistic, why not consider a situation we report such users to moderators and moderators will enforce a punishment like "inability to start a topic for the next 7 days". This kind of measures could curtail or slow the spam feeders as you called them.

If someone falls victim to making a comment under a post that's created by a scammer, does that automatically make those users who replied there a spammer too? 
 
How about if it's a spam topic interest that the OP just lacks the proper information or it's being blinded by its spamming content and other members who reply either to correct the OP or warn the OP of his or her spamming behaviour? Are those members automatically spam feeders? 

Let's take this his thread, for instance. Topic: Can this happen with price resets and cryptocurrency? The post has about 5 replies. Will you consider everyone there as spam feeders? 

How did I know, before I even looked at that dude's post history, that those threads would be in the Economics section? 

Economics was a great place to read up until about 2-3 years ago, maybe less.  Now it's just become a cesspool of shitposters and it's almost as bad as Bitcoin Discussion--and that's a fucking shame.  Why is this guy creating so many threads?  Can't be sure, but I'd venture it's for the same reason random, unknown members have been creating the same "gold vs. bitcoin" type of topics for years now, so that their alt accounts, friends, and whoever else can jump in and make some money.

I'm so tired of it, too.  The quality of writing and importance of the content within posts/threads has dropped off a cliff on bitcointalk.  I doubt I'm the only one who's noticed this, but I'm not sure what can be done about it except to keep hitting the ignore button--but that's not a solution for the forum, just the individuals who don't mind ignoring a bunch of morons.


Is anyone checking to see if posts are being made or helped by AI?  Every single time I come across a post made by a newbie in decent English, red flags start going off.  I doubt the percentage of newly-registered members who can write well and contribute something even close to substantial is <1%, and that's been true for years.

@Synchronice, from what we can see, all these meaningless topics are the work of one man, I think he performed under the name polo (something like that) in the past. The man literally destroyed that board and you can literally do nothing to him except to try report topics, but I think it would be a long-term mission with little success.

I personally do not support any such discussion, and the question is why some others do not do the same - maybe a person would give up if he saw that no one is interested.

Accounts created these topics can use those accounts as tools to feed spammers that can be their own accounts too. I don't know but there are similar topics created in Gambling board with many boring questions which I believe unnecessary to ask because answers can be very clear.

In months, there were complains why these boring topics in Gambling board were moved to Off-topic board and spam feeding can be a reason or one of reasons.

You can report these topics that can be trashed or moved to Off-topic board or ignore those topic authors.

Honestly they're not that bad, as long as they didn't use AI or commit plagiarism, they're better than plagiarists.

Although sometime they discuss about absurd and bizarre thing which we never thought including the stupid one, but we shouldn't limit our ideas especially this forum is supporting free speech.

In this case, it seems not.

It's easy to spot a merit hunter, I don't see the "merit hunting" sign here.

Yeah you have a point. It's high time we start taking out plagiarist and spammers. sometimes there are too many low quality posts. As for sequencial posting, it's not against the rules of the forum . Posting very frequently isn't a wrong thing to do the problem is when you post frequently and the post are just plagiarised articles, or AI generated or just too low in quality. Also A newbie creating do many topics though isn't really a big deal if similarly those topics are of quality or the op was simply asking a couple of important questions.

I probably haven't really come across these users before or probably I have but didn't take note. Spam still occurs on the forum but it affects some boards and not all boards. Boards like technical discussions hardly get spams and I've noticed the moderator there deletes generic posts ASAP.

The best thing to do is to report these post when you spot them. It helps the moderators notice them on time.

This is a nice observation and I hope the mods can do the needful. 242 topics and 11 merits is a confirmation that the topics are not worth being topics here which is just spam. I wonder why people rush to create topics when they have nothing new to bring to the forum. I also noticed that most of the people who are eager to create topic do not even follow the discussion in their topics. Maybe they were advised that creating topics is how merits are earned in the forum. Some of them will learn the heard way because they are not willing to learn.

He is a known troll/shitposter that operated under other accounts as well.


Good luck with getting everyone on board.  

There's simply too many spammers that will use every single opportunity to dump their weekly post quota for that list to be effective.

He probably has some mental problem. I talked about him and his many alts on this thread:

Likely low quality poster alts.

Some of us have ignored him and his alts but:

Simply have a look at this user: Fullbear2222. 11 merits and 450 posts from which 242 are topics. Can you imagine? 242 topics.
What's his point? Nothing. He simply created new topics and feeds spammers.
Another one here: UTON Blockchain. 10 posts (8 topics).

What about to make the list of spam feeders in this thread? Everyone should put these people on ignore list. These people create topics, then bunch of spammers post in their thread and spam grows on this forum and that's bad.