Topic: Truth about bitcointalk users 2.0 (Read 935 times)

There is no real way of telling that someone has alts without them actually telling it.



When you are done scraping, if you are not up for analyzing  the data in respect to member rank ans activity. Let me know , I would be interested to take a look.

I'd be interested to see some stats about the alt structure here. This account is a Jet Cash alt, and it was set up to sell crypto domain names. Jet Cash has three other alts of member status, and one protective registration. Hopefully they are all contributiing to the forum in some way.

I don't have a goal, it's something Pffrt asked about.

Fair enough.

BTW what is your goal with information of the 20 last posts?

I don't want to do that, as the "1 request per second" limitation is set up for a reason.

The forum has three versions of rank system, so I think it is more correctly to differentiate forum users into three categories:
- Bitcointalk users 1.0 (November 22, 2009 - January 22, 2018: Without activity requirements)
- Bitcointalk users 2.0 (June 18, 2013 - January 23, 2018: Activity requirements)
- Bitcointalk users 3.0 (January 24, 2018 - by now: Activity requirements + Merit requirements)
Read more here: History of bitcointalk.org's rank system

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I am one of them, and I have been a Hero member since the last days of July.
I am on the way to Hero Member rank. Within less than 2 years from register day
I am on my way to that rank, that I did not think of it in January 2018. But now, from what I achieved (with 524 merits received so far), I do belief that I will make it again in next one year and jump to the top of member ranks. It is possible, from my experience. My next target for next 12 months are: Legendary, and one position in top 50 of most merit profiles, according to BPIP.
People who can make it will become highly competitive (especially) than part of old-era Legendary members - whom still kept posting shitposts and have not received merits recent months.
Like this guy, whom posted in early pages in the Merit announcement thread, stucked by now.
If we notice, recent months, we have not seen users complained like that "Damn it, with merit system, I will never rank up to Legendary? What the hell is this? blah blah blah"

You got that right.  There are a few members who are outstanding contributors to the forum and have earned enough merits to get to Legendary once they get enough activity, but they are certainly rare cases.  Members who are just registering an account now are going to have a hell of a time just ranking up to Sr. Member.

Wow, I thought there might have been more than that but I guess it shouldn't surprise me the number is that low.

Makes me wonder if Legendary members are a dying breed, i.e., if the extinction rate is going to exceed the growth rate.  Accounts going inactive and/or getting banned leads to fewer accounts of that rank, and we know damn well that there aren't many members ranking up that high since the merit system was introduced, so....

It seems that you added all the ranks excluding " Brand new" and tought that they are active users.
In this case, you are far from truth.
First, this analysis at the time was done for only 1million of the users. Second, not all the users are active.

The last thing i did was - analyzed the activity much deeper. and by scraping 2,37 million users with their last post time, the result was that.


Lately have not had the time to scrape the forum. In order to scrape it faster you could use multiple virtual machines, it took me less than a week to scrape those 2,37 million.  I did scrape the time of the last post not the 20 posts . I dont think that you will be able to get much more information regarding activity with those 20 posts than with the last one.

In either case it would be fun to see how the activity has changed over this time.

Isn't that what signature campaigns managed by strict campaign managers do?

If I'd have a list of active accounts, I could scrape the last page of each user's post history (20 posts) to check this. I've been scraping all new posts from my VPS since 2 weeks now. In a couple of months, I could use that to get a list of active users to start from.

Over 165 thousand active members is quite a healthy community base. Is rhere a way that we can encourage an increase in posting by the high end of this asset?

Only if they are good posters and received enough merits. There are not too many users nowadays can rank up with merit system, especially to earn 500 merits (if they start from Brandnew/ Newbie); or even if they start from Senior Member rank, they have to earn 250 more merits to get Hero Member rank. That is a difficult task for shitposters.
I don't count, but from the list of ranked up users here, they are not too many
Forum chronicle - UP Rank List (statistics, trust, who is who) - I get this list of Hero members.
And, this image is from Bitcointalk Merit Dashboard.
There are 70 ranked up Hero members (from the image, but real figure likely higher a little bit); and 11 of them are totally self-made Hero members. They are counted for 15.7 % of total ranked up Hero members since merit system born in 2018.

When did you do the timestamp of this result?

From 11 05 2017 to the date of this thread 11-07-2019 we had 113 weeks.

You can have a max activity for users registered on 1st week of this range of (113-1)/2*14= 784

Since the legendary rank requires 1000 merits and 775 activity if you are lucky, only the users registered on the week of the11-05-2017 could be legendary on 11/07/2019.


This is very close to 0%.


For Hero ranks, if I read correctly your considerations, your numbers are incorrect.

I'm the user number 1339716 and I'm Hero, as for me, few more people with id 1xxxxxx are Hero now.

It would be interesting to filter with one more entity. Out of those 165,148 how much users are not posting any social media report? Anyway to filter it out? That would find out the actual number of people joining here.[/list]

That number has risen to over 70% now.  A more detailed analysis could show more evidence of spam waves.

• 2,656,378
  Largest profile on Bitcointalk
• 16,117
  Deleted Profiles
• 1,915,785
  Archived Profiles
• 575,445
  Inactive Profiles
  
• 165,148
  Active Profiles
  

The reason is stated in the OP: Dates of analysed accounts registered between 2017/05/11 and 2018/04/03. That rules out Legendries and Heroes since those accounts have not had enough time to rank-up (at the time of the analysis).

Nevertheless @mazdafunsun has a more complete and recent topic (the OP is partial) here, with data for all ranks: The real activity of bitcointalk.org + full stats.

In addition, you can take a look at Analysis - Bitcointalk Accounts – Date of Register vs Last Active per Rank to get additional insights of created and dropped accounts per year and rank.

Why legendary rank was not included? I was also thinking about how many users with this rank because I have seen many legendary users in this forum. I wish to see this post to be updated with it if OP would consider the request. Anyway, Jr. member rank down to newbie and brandnew users had the greatest number of users registered. This maybe because the bitcoin market price hype on 2017 made this possible.

I think @EternityFirs's explanation above will account for the largest chunk of these. They don't get to know about the evil IP until after the account has been created. So the spambots will just keep making new accounts and when they can't post they just try again with another IP address and repeat until they get one they can use. From Vod's numbers over 50% of all accounts have never posted.


There's probably some of that as well.

You are right, i have scraped 2million users so far.  
I will defintely think of what can i do to show information you suggested, it would be interesting. It seems that there is big interest to see more on "new account" statistics.


My apolgies if I came across as not welcoming.
I learned something new from your post, thanks for your input

I meant an automated system: when a user gets banned, the Rank gets changed to "banned". That shouldn't be too much work to implement.

Too much work for the staff - we used to have the Scammer rank.

That would be stepping backwards from the trust system to a centralized one.

Many of them are just "prepared" to start a spam session, I see many Newbies spammers who didn't register recently.

I'd love to have a full list of all banned userIDs! I've asked to add a "Rank: Banned" before, but it was never implemented.

That percentage is unlikely to be only nuked accounts however nuked accounts likely make up a decent chunk of “brand new” accounts.

I suspect that a very large percentage of those accounts are inaccessible to their owner for one reason or another. If someone is proxy banned they may create a new account on a different IP instead of paying the fee, someone might have forgotten their password and just created a new account.

Great statistics. It is enough good. But for merit system next time it will not be possible for next 11 month. On next 11 month there will be all brand new, newbie and jr. member. There might have less than 1% off all higher than jr. member.

That wold be interesting, totally agree about number of posts. Although, there are new accounts of old members who are thying to restore their main accs. I`m assuming, as soon as they get restored, Newbie accounts get abandoned after few posts.

Hi! I got that, I just thought if we want to get a fair statistics - we should exclude number of IP banned accounts, because, as for me, most of them (who are real users, not bots) could create new one`s and therefore we are counting same people several times. If you don`t like this suggestion - OK, It was your own initiative to get this nubmers anyway. It just seemed, that old forum users may not got the whole picture so I took a shot on explaining some specailties.

Good job and interesting infirmation, by the way.

I'm assuming you’ve scrapped most of the user profile of those 2M account. If so, it could be interesting to see a few other things with just that information, without having to cross the files with anything else. Things such as distributions by:

-Number of posts: for example ->  0,1,2,3,4,5,5-10, more. This is rather more specific for the immense amount of newbie accounts, and would allow us to see when they stop (after how many posts).

- Last Active :grouped by some sort of criteria  such as -> last 30 days, 30-90, 90-180, 180-365, > 365.  That would give us an idea, for each rank, how many are active. The “active” measure with this definition is not of a Boolean nature, but rather more like a “state”.

Of course, that is your prerogative if you see it fit and think it can throw-in some more information.

Thanks for the info so far. I’ve already referenced it twice today on separate posts to strengthen my point of view on two different matters.

Thanks for clearing out evli IP mechanism 
I think somewhere about South-Eastern Esia and Africa this problem is big too. But professional acc breeders (don`t know if there is a special term for such peolpe  ) can resolve their difficalties easily and average users - not so much. But again, if you are interested in future technologies, you should be able to solve such problems and if you`re not  - pay a fee and be happy. That is the logic, I think. It may not feel nice to be obliged to pay for somebody`s bad moves, though.

The research as you call it, is not mean to analyse activity of these users.
My goal was just to show the distrubution of positions and yes the mojority are " Brand new " users, from which a good part is spambots another part are banned users and if i have to guess - almost all of them are not activ memebers.

There is potential for deeper analysis here.

The evil IP works by giving a score to IP addresses. Every time an account is banned the IP address used gains some evil points and all addresses near that address also get a smaller number of points added. Once the score gets to a certain value a fee is required, the higher the score the higher the fee.

I'm only guessing about how much of this is due to botnets but they are prevalent in Eastern Europe (Russia and Ukraine in particular) so I think they'll account for a large part of this and also will have affected innocent users of the same ISPs.

Yes, that`s exactly what I mean. And it`s not necessary botnets (though it may be one of reasons), real new users are getting banned too. As I understand it`s aboun dynamic IPs that most providers use in Eastern Europe, for example. Whole node get marked as evil one if even one user uses TOR or trying to make some troubles.

Do you mean they only find out about the evil IP after the account has been created? If so that would explain the numbers as the botnets would have created most of those accounts and never been able to use them.

It seems to me, you, peolpe, overloocking one substantional circumstance in you research regarding Brand New members. Thing is, you often can`t register and not get a ban at once even from you own IP adress, espesially if you are a TOR user. But sometimes (as was in my case) you just randomly get some point of evel (like, about 10 or smth) and can`t post a thing till you pay some fee, less than comission. So, naturally most of new users don`t know about IP ban feature untill they try to register and in most cases, unsuccessfully. So, here comes another acc or two or three, and most of them are pictured green in that diagram. They`re just dead accounts, nobody will ever post from `em, that`s why this number of Brand News.
If you want real numbers, you should get a quantity of IP banned accs and exclude such ones from calculations.

I am thinking that i willl make a post with full position distrubution from id 1 to date some time in future .
I will make a better representation regarding the positions who actualy contrubute to the forum, but the " Brand New" postion and perecentage also should be noted since it is a huge part of statistcs.


I agree, this could indeed be interesting to see.
At this point i think that best I can do is how many of Brand New positions are banned and how many are spam accounts.

That's a decent sample size. I guess the exact date isn't that important, I was just interested in what sort of percentage of new accounts do get nuked in recent times as opposed to years ago.

It goes back to 2016/12/13 thanks to taptoshi, who is no longer active on the forum.  

Unfortunately the modlog has no dates.   I can start collecting the date now when I scrape it from the log file, but past records are not timestamped.  I could guesstimate the date range based on the ID number like the OP though.

That would be interesting. Does your data go back to 2017/05/11 as that's what the OP was using?

Ah dishonest Quicksy...  

Speaking as someone who actually knows what they are talking about, most of the new users have not made any posts at all, and have not been banned or nuked.

I could pull up exact figures as needed, since I maintain a full list of the modlog.

That is quite some stat in itself, 73.35% of new accounts got nuked.

I agree that the other percentages would give a better representation with those having been removed from the figures first.

You should exclude the brand new users from your stats. They are likely to be spam bots that are banned.

In this post I have done position analysis on Bitcointalk users in range from id=1'000'000 to id=2'000'000. Users with this range of id's were registered from 2017/05/11 to 2018/04/03.

Without further ado, Here is the distrubution of postions of second million bitcointalk users

• Brand New   733503   73,35%
• Newbie         212864   21,28%
• Jr. Member    33395     3,34%
• Member        13682     1,36%
• Full Member  6334       0,63%
• Sr.Member     222        0,02%
• Hero               0            0%
• Legendary      0            0%

How we can see there is no Hero and Legendary users, this is not surprising since these positions requires high level of activity .

P.s. If you have any ideas on what kind of information you would like to see, let me know.

Here is the link to first part: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.34863787