Topic: Time to cut the altcoins sections loose. (Read 406 times)

There is thing called shadow ban in gaming for hackers, meaning when hackers are shadow banned they go against the hackers, causing no disturbance to legit player lobbies.

How is it relevant?

If you gonna remove altcoin board, they will just start to spam on other boards. Easiest solution is just to ignore those boards.

And we would lose Doge. Much sad.

It would also probably cut into the revenue the board makes from advertisers.
How many hits would be lost if you cut them loose. 10's of thousands per week? 100's of thousands? millions?

Looking at the ad stats: https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

There were about 23 million ad displays in 11 days.
How many are from the altcoin boards?
Out of those how many were clicked?

Just a thought.

Stay safe.

-Dave

Similar proposals were made years ago by other people, including me. Now it's probably too late to make a business out of charging altcoiners for dedicated altcoin boards as other venues (telegram, slack, discord, twitter, reddit, dedicated forums) are more popular, but it's not like the forum suffers from a lack of funding.

Newbies already have their accounts heavily restricted compared to the past (the days of Newbie jail excepted). I just 'randomly' picked 3 topics in two altcoin sections (announcements and the one for general discussions), on the most recent pages of these topics most users posting weren't Newbies, they don't seem that much of a problem.

As much as a shitshow as it is I don't think we should get rid of the alt coin board(s). I barely go in that section and you don't have to either as it's quarantined away from everything else. Besides, where would we put the HoweyCoins thread? 

No altcoin section=no bumpers, as nothing really to bump, altcoin projects are the ones that usually hire them. And they won't spam mindlessly for free. No bounty campaigns too, so way less spam as well. But it would affect traffic on the forum though, therefore BTC signature campaigns too, and I'm not so sure that many would be in favor of that.

By removing altcoin section completely some other forum would probably take the piece of bitcointalk cake (altcointalk maybe), at least here the most obvious scams are regularly busted.

It is true that signal-to-noise ratio on that part of the forum ain't good, but I don't think that removing it completely is realistic.

The amount of reports within the altcoin section, has fallen massively ever since the new bump changes were implemented. I'd love to clean the section up as much as the next guy, but we over at the altcoin section are two dedicated sets of eyes which aren't going to stumble across everything (Of course patrollers, and global moderators also lend in a hand). I've been wanting to step up the moderation in the Altcoin section for a while, but have lacked time recently with everything going on. However, I don't want to be so aggressive that it stops users wanting to partipate. There is good discussion within the altcoin sections, and some of it is actually quite enjoyable to read. However, there is a lot of noise within the section, as we all know. Although, I think its quite possible with our current resources to tackle the issue, it would be nice if we could get some help from fellow reporters. A few months ago, I was waking up to 1000s of reports in my report queue, now I'm waking up to on average 50, and I am a patroller so some of those are not even within the altcoin sections.

I disagree that the site is "bitcointalk", and that's all it should contain as its evolved over the years to much more than that. This is the forum that everyone knows of to come, and discuss about Bitcoin as well as cryptocurrencies in general. I'm not sure about you guys, but I find the concepts of cryptocurrencies interesting, and not just Bitcoin. Although, a little disclaimer I'm not invested or involved in any other cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, but I still enjoy reading about various projects. Having said that, there are a lot of scams within the section, and a lot of those scams are getting increasily good at hiding themselves or appearing legit through unverifiable means. I think the solution to the scam issue is informing those within the sections of the downfalls of altcoins, and the possible indications of scams. I think a very indepth guide could probably be written within the section, and stickied.

Also, if you guys get rid of the altcoin section you put ol' Welshy out of a "job" . In all seriousness, you could see this reply of mine as a biased point of view due to my role within that section, but I genuniely believe the things I've said, and I believe before even coming a moderator of the section I stated multiple times that it can be a home to constructive conversation. However, that hasn't always been true. In my early to mid days I avoided that section like the plague, and shared similar opinions to those within this thread, I do believe I even had it on ignore. However, our opinions, interests, and roles change in life, and I know there's a large portion of substantial users within the community that partipate in the altcoin sections, and if that were removed there would be no current "good" alternative source.


The altcoin section has, and always has been a problem I don't dispute that fact, and there probably needs to be a little more actions being taken within the section, but just because you remove that section doesn't mean that those same users that were spamming wouldn't leak into other sections. We've seen this with the low quality replies leaking into Project Development, and Service announcements on the main Bitcoin sections.

Agree with that, but let me imagine what will happen if this forum turns into on only bitcoin discussion place, there will be no more bounty spammers because they are getting paid from new projects so no new projects mean no spams but it will lead to a huge decrease in the activity of bitcointalk. I am not sure that forum wants such kind of less activity by nuking altcoin boards.

It was a great experiment and stuff was learned, but was it worth the millions of bitcoins that flowed to big vern and CZ and Evan and zooko and Vitalik and Roger and the EOS serial thief/dev guy, mostly donated by newbs? None of these guys have been shunned and shamed, they're encouraged.

You dn't just chop off an arm because it itches you all the time. The board is like one big bag of spammers and they keep doing there thing because no much watchful eyes are interested in the board.
We know that tons on fake coins are present but good or average coin are available too.
Can't the board be restricted and only proven coin discussion are available then a small child board for other altcoins be made under off topics.

It looks sort of hidden medicine and many users don't know it and the efficacy of that therapy is not good.

Months ago, I saw a proposal that developers should be charged a fees to create ANN threads or bounty threads on the forum; or force them to pay for participants in Bitcoin only, but it did not catch attention of theymos; or he does not have intention to make more restrictions on newbies, new projects. The forum is opened for all, but bad guys will be punished when break rules and detected.

5 out of 10 boards with the most posts on bitcointalk are altcoin boards. You should have voiced your opinions about altcoins when the first section was created, or when additional boards and child-boards were being added. Now they're like an incurable disease, they're here to stay. With good medicine, however, the disease isn't fatal.

Fine. If people want to wank off about grin or monerp like half you ledge's secretly do, go behind the bikeshed to do it like a civilised person, or use a tiny subsection somewhere. Meanwhile, yes open a million scam threads.

Currently there are 7107 coins listed on the coingecko. Should we open scam accusations to 7106 coins? 

Lol, I love the sentiment, but I seriously doubt your suggestion will be implemented.  I agree that altcoins are scams.  Certainly the vast majority, but maybe not all.  Howey Coin seems pretty legit.  

Well the forum accepts payments in an altcoin (grin) so it is recognized to an extent. Also, quite a number of members here hold a couple of altcoins in their portfolio and would need a place to discuss issues regarding it.
Admittedly, the section has a lot of low quality posts and spam mega threads, so also does the Bitcoin discussion board. Removing a whole section would not put an end to spam, rather it would increase the workload on moderators of other boards as spammers transition to those sections.

Right, so, even more sweeping changes.
No alts, bounties or signature campaigns.
Moderators to blitz all remaining boards much more assiduously with the help of all us volunteers.
We can't let these spammers prolong the scams, can we?

Yep, that's the first thing I thought.  I would also argue that there is at least some good discussion going on in certain sub-sections of the altcoin board, though it's pretty rare that you find a decent thread that goes on for more than a few days before getting buried underneath a mountain of crap. 

I've got all of those sections on ignore, so it wouldn't bother me if they were nuked--but it is also true that the spammers aren't going to just disappear from bitcointalk as long as bounties and sig campaigns exist.  Thus I'd have to disagree with OP's suggestion just on that basis.  The potential for the rest of the forum to get spam-bombed is too great to risk it.

Some of them are really low quality poster & not many sig campaigns will take them hence why they resort to bounty hunting. If they’re not getting paid then most of them probably would bugger off.

And where will spammers go? Spammers will not stop because you deleted their board. They will just move to another board. After all, they are receiving money to spam.

Bitcoin discussion, Economics, Gambling are like 80% spam already... I think moderation should be harder on those boards and let spammers spam all they want in altcoins boards.

I think a 100% spam board may be interesting, so the other boards of the forum can be spam free (like beginners & Help, technical discussion and few others)