Topic: User josephliton issue. (Read 2141 times)

I think it could work or would actually be quite effective. Sure they can still operate from outside the forum but losing access to their account is very bad news for them and their business. I would like to think that Campaign Managers will just take the hint and start actually doing their job and get on top of their campaigns or find someone else to do so rather than risk losing access to their account for x amount of time. If people start evading bans then they should just be treated the same as any other ban evaders and it shouldn't be hard to spot.


I don't think we need more moderation, but the campaign managers can do that and that's what they're getting paid to do. I think we certainly need to put some sort of pressure or encouragement on campaign managers to actually do their job and in doing so it cleans up the forum and takes away stress from the staff. Imagine if every campaign manager actually bothered to check the users posts before they allowed them to sign up? The poor-quality poster would have no where to go and be forced to improve their posts and if it becomes common knowledge that people aren't going to get paid for poor contributions then that should have a big impact on the quality of posts, but when users realise they can post whatever they want and get paid automatically for it there's no reason why they would improve.


I think there should also be other measures put in place too and the hide signature button would be good but maybe giving mods or certain staff (Globals or Admins or even dedicated signature mods (which I would happily volunteer for)) the ability to ban/remove a persons signature for x amount of time would be another option. I think that would be better and less harsh than a ban whilst sending them a message that they certainly need to improve their posts which they could do in the meantime. Maybe it might even be a good idea to remove signature and Personal Texts altogether for certain ranks like we do with avatars and any member under Full can't have one because most of the poor quality posts seem to come from newbs/juniors/members who are too young or naive to know what's acceptable here.


If every campaign manager checks before they're accepted, occasionally during the campaign, and, vitally, before they get paid and not pay those who are making poor posts then in theory the problem should solve itself. If people quickly realise they're not going to get paid then they lose the incentive to spam and drastically up their quality or they're just wasting their time otherwise.


This kind of defeats the purpose of the ban to me. It's like somehow 'banning' a spammer but letting him still post in certain sections. We could start leaving negative for campaign managers who don't do their job but I can't really do that now as it would almost certainly be a conflict of interest as I'm offering to run them (and I don't really want to leave negative for such a thing) but hopefully we can get the message across in other ways.

I don't think banning signature campaign managers is the answer. It would not be out of the question for signature campaigns to originate from outside the forum, and there would be nothing to stop someone from spamming with the signature of a campaign when they are not actually enrolled in the campaign. Additionally, it would be possible that someone could be required to send an email to enroll/apply to a signature campaign, so it would be very difficult to know with certainty if someone is actually enrolled in a campaign or not.

The inability to manage a signature campaign to prevent large amounts of spam is essentially someone being bad at their job, and I don't think the forum should punish people for being bad at their job.

I think it would be better to hold the companies that are bankrolling the advertising to be held somehow accountable. I still think that it would be best to publish a transparency report showing how much each company is contributing to paid insubstantial posts. Other options would include negative trust being sent to a company's accounts, bans on the company's accounts and a "spam allegation" sub where people could post that people advertising a specific company's advertisement are spamming the forum. Creating such a subform would also give companies incentives to be transparent about how they accept members and who they have on their "payroll" for advertising as if a claim is made about someone spamming with a particular company's advertisement, then the company could clearly deny that they are participating and such participation could be easily disproven in a transparent way.

All that would need to be done to verify that someone is not banned would be to have the bot PM a user when they are due for a payment and advising them to reply with a PM within a week or otherwise they will lose that payment. Once the PM is received, then the bot will automatically que them for payment.

Bi-weekly or monthly payments would also give people more incentives to not make insubstantial posts because if they are banned then they would end up loosing a greater amount of their income (they can't PM so they can't claim payment).
I think that Bit-x has successfully became a company that is severely associated with spamming the forum, and that if anyone who is advertising for them wishes to remain reputable, they should cease their services to them - at least in the near future.

I think a "soft ban" when someone is prevented from using his signature/avatar/personal text after a "hard ban" (when they cannot post/PM) would be beneficial, especially when there is evidence that such a user has been around for a long time. Such a "soft ban" could, over time be reduced so the user would be able to resume using their signature/avatar/personal text after several months of constructive contributions to the forum.

Another potential solution would be for a list of people who have been banned for insubstantial posts+paid signature (both presently and in the past - moving forward) to be a public record to give incentives for users to put more effort into their posting. These incentives would include:

• The value of the account would be reduced if it was publicly known that it was banned in the past for this reason - out of fairness, these previous bans should not be disclosed as someone could have purchased an account without knowing about it's previous ban history.
• The potential to get accepted in a signature campaign int he future would be reduced as competent campaign managers would first check this list for prior bans before even checking their post history

I think that anything that makes signature campaign advertising ineffective overall is going to be a net negative for Bitcoin, as it is paid signature campaigns that get a "good" number of people interested in bitcoin, and allow them to experiment with bitcoin without having to "invest" their own money.

josephilton's probable alts (based on copy/pasting in the threads quoted in the OP) - if they are not his alts, then they should be banned for similar reasons:

mackbells - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/mackbells-177742 - thank you CoinNut for this spam
Sethtabiah - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/sethtabiah-338893 - thank you Bit-x for this spam
mikaljan  - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/mikaljan-177731 - thank you Bit-x for this spam
^^^these three were found in the McDonalds thread and all three were quoting parts of the same article

kencoles - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/kencoles-177740 - thank you Bit-x for this spam
gobpaul - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/gobpaul-177727 - thank you Bit-x for this spam
^^^these were found in the last ~5 pages of the saving money article and were quoting parts of the same webpage

I think an ignore signature feature would be an alright idea, but that brings up a point from me. So even if we have the ability to block signatures with certain words or tags or whatever, that would be great to hide annoying sig ads, but I'm not sure it would cut down on spamming. I'm sure there would still be users spamming the forums to get their signature campaign payouts, and the signature hiding feature wouldn't stop that. You'd still see the user's spam posts, but not their signature.

This seems like a really tough issue, but I'm sort of leaning towards what hilariousandco suggested - banning users and campaign managers who can't keep their campaign spam under control. A full post and PM ban on a campaign manager probably wouldn't be a great idea, but if they were locked to only being able to post in their signature campaign thread for a week or two, I think that would be a fair punishment. That way they could still manage their campaign, but wouldn't be able to participate in any other area of the website.

@badbear; Could you possibly block a spammer from having signature space at all ? As form of a punishment instead of baning them? maybe for a certain time period, or a permanent one if it's really needed?

Hilariousandco covered a lot of it already but:

No, I'm not going to share user information with you. I've offered you suggestions on how to get around that in the past. Require a pm from the user to collect payment, or require at least one post a week (almost all the bans are at least a week if not more). The first you don't do, would be easy since you use a bot. The second, after I suggested it, you then went to weekly payments, rendering it useless.  

And yes there is a lot you can do, you just don't want to do it. At the very least just look at the threads and put a little time into it (it isn't rocket science), it is your job after all, is it not? If you can't do it, don't you think you should fix that? Do you really think just paying people to post and letting everyone else deal with the garbage that results is going to end well? Do you know what I think when I see Bit-X? I think spammers, the same ones that spam my email with INCREASE YOUR PENIS SIZE NOW!@@LOOK@@.


No, people get banned for insubstantial posts, and other reasons without having sig ads. Difference is, the bans for sig spammers literally cost them money (in some cases, a lot if they have multiple high ranking accounts) by banning them. Getting it reversed would not only allow them to continue posting, but somewhat validate their previous posts as well. Most others get banned? They know why, and they deal with it. Overall, very few of the not related to sig spam bans are ever posted about in meta. The majority of sig spam bans do, though I have seen less of it lately (they don't want their campaigns to know they were banned).


I don't think acting on campaign managers would work, they'll just stop posting here, or use anon accounts. While using anon accounts now would be a red flag for a sig campaign, it would eventually become normal and accepted, similar to how it's the norm to see a one post newbie selling a hero account.

Something definitely needs to change though, this isn't a problem that can be solved with more moderation. For bans to be effective in countering sig spam, the number of bans would have be much greater than it's ever been. Even during the last "ban wave", some of the borderline users I was watching were saying "Well I might get banned but oh well, gotta get paid". The campaigns may not care that users that have been here for years are being banned, some permanently, but I do. I don't want to see that many people banned, ultimately it's not good for anyone. A sig spam ban that removes their ability to use a signature (and avatar, and personal message) would solve the problem of needing to ban users, but it wouldn't solve the sig spam problem.  

I still think an ignore signature button (with filtering to filter all signatures of that type) would be the best option, with an autoignore at a certain threshold. See a lot of spammers with a certain signature? Ignore it, and if enough do then that company has essentially had their signatures removed from the forum.

You should be keeping a closer eye on users before others even notice and if you did this you'd likely be the first person to spot this type of behaviour or spammers. I know you are quick to respond once informed but if you were checking users periodically then this would be less likely to happen. You should also check users before they sign up and before you send payment as it's not enough to just let a bot do all the work. If you're too busy to check users' posts hire someone to do the work for you or cut your campaign down to a manageable size. You really don't need to have everyone on the forum advertising for you and it would be better to have a small group of quality posters who can be trusted not to shit all over the forum and cheat any way they can as opposed to an army full of shit posters.

As for the other users if you go the the threads quoted in the op it should be fairly obvious which are his alts and if you google some of their posts you'll find them lifted from various sources.

I had removed him. Please message me users, I often don't notice these threads until too late.


Could you let me know his alts so that I may ban/remove them? If you can't then I can't do much about it.

While it's manager's job to warn or kick members of the campaign when they are producing spam, there will always be people who will find a way around or try to do so anyways.
It's not healthy to force people only to make posts that are in lenght, because that beats the purpuse of the forum, and kills the conversation sometimes, and it's even worse when people exploit that fact.

When i created this thread, i did so because it was an asshole move from user to copy paste posts from other sites, which is way worse than spamming, it was plagiarizing.

Lots of people get banned for poor posts with or without a sig, but most just don't complain in here about it or go directly to the mods but they'll likely know it's largely futile especially when they know what they've done wrong. And just because people don't currently have a sig whilst they're spamming doesn't mean they're not going to put one in as soon as they can or is feasible. A lot of people try farm accounts without a sig by posting one or two word replies in off topic then join a campaign as soon as they rank up but these people will usually get banned when spotted or reported especially if other accounts belonging to them are found.

Yes i agree with all your points there but i also think that bans happen more often now that there are a lot of signature campaigns than before and not only because theres more people that spam or post insubstantial posts, i remember a year ago when i was using my other account and there were only a few signature campaigns, i never participated in any and i used to post pretty shitty posts without really realizing and sometimes i had my posts deleted, even 10 of them deleted the same week and never got banned and i never saw anyone else getting banned for it, maybe someone if he made waay too many insubstantial posts.

If you have a signature ad now you are more likely to get banned which is kind of stupid, mods should only take in count your posts quality not if you have a signature ad or not, just look at the people that got banned recently and complain here in the meta, 90% of them were banned because of sig ad + insubstantial posts and the others were permabanned for various reasons, i havent seen anyone getting banned for spamming without a signature ad.

I've suggested making campaign managers more responsible for their participants and instead of giving users 1/2/4 week bans we do the same for campaign managers for their 1/2/3 offences of not doing their job properly and keeping an eye on their participants. Of course they should be given a polite warning first that they need to step up their game but if they don't a week ban should come next, then 2 weeks and a month. Maybe a perma ban after that but most should get the idea after their first ban. I think this would give campaign managers the motivation to actually do what they're supposed to because it's going to damage their business if they're banned. For the campaign managers that do their job and check users before they're allowed on the campaign and before they get payment I see next to zero spam like on Rollin, but then you get campaigns like yobit who only kick members off after I tell him about them (and it's annoying having to do this daily when it's not my job) and coinomat who do absolutely nothing at all and because of his apathy and unwillingness to moderate or police his users they quickly notice they can get away with it spam and copy and pastes and abuse until they're caught but in the meantime the damage is done. We maybe should even look at leaving negative feedback on some of the worst campaigns who do next to zero. I've certainly thought about doing it and maybe that will kick start them into actually doing something but it would likely be a conflict of intetest for me now as I'm offering to run campaigns on their behalf but something really needs to be done especially to those who don't even bother replying to my messages about abusers and continue to pay them. If you don't have the time or patience to look after your campaign then you really need to hire someone who will.

I think it is instances like this that make a stronger argument to publish some kind of transparency report regarding signature campaigns and the amount of spam/bans each of them produce. If the forum were to publish for example, how many posts by participants of each signature campaign were banned in the last month, how many posts by people wearing a particular campaign's signature had their posts deleted by moderators, how many threads created by people wearing a particular campaign's signature were moved to the trashcan (and other similar metrics) then it would have an overall positive impact.

• First, it would put pressure on signature campaign managers to to do a better job of not allowing people who consistently make low value posts to continue to participate in their signature campaign, which will get people to put more effort into their posts
• If signature campaign managers put a good amount of effort into minimizing the above stats, then over time the forum will be a more pleasant place to converse and the overall viewing experience will be more pleasant
• If signature campaign managers do not do an effective job of minimizing the above stats, then their company's reputation will suffer, and the company will have incentives to replace the signature campaign manager
• If a signature campaign is associated with a large amount of paid signature related spam, then participants will want to disassociate themselves with that signature campaign in order to avoid being associated wit signature related spam. If this were to happen then additional pressure would be put on both signature campaign managers and companies advertising in order to exaggerate my first and third points

As a result of your posts in this (and other) thread, as well as other similar evidence, I have decided to cease participation in the bit-x signature campaign in approximately 5 days, when I receive my final payment (removing the signature is not as urgent that they have recently scammed, but rather this is because they are associated with large amounts of spam). I would also encourage others to do the same

I have thought about this decision for a while, and I am confident it is the appropriate thing to do. Although this will likely result in less bitcoin related income, this is okay because a) I have a job that pays more then the bills b) I have already earned what I would consider a significant amount of bitcoin from participating in signature campaigns and trading on here c) the amount I am earning from bit-x is very small especially considering how frustratingly low the price of bitcoin is and finally d) because I do not want my reputation to be associated with massive amounts of spam/insubstantial posts, especially considering how much effort I put into my work on here.

I do think that it is sad that the forum has the level of spam related posts that it has because of paid signatures, however I do still think that paid signatures are healthy for both the forum and for Bitcoin in general for a number of reasons. I think the overall paid signature environment went downhill since PrimeDice closed to the public, and I do think that PrimeDice would be the best suited to successfully fight the level of insubstantial posts that we see today.

I think it is pretty clear that you do not like/trust marcotheminer and bit-x (this is directed at BadBear), and I do not disagree with your rationale/conclusion, however I think you should be more transparent with your reasons. I had previously been asked to look into his alts, and have found a good amount of shady/unethical behavior, a lot of which likely plays into your above conclusion. I think that both bit-x and marcotheminer are a major source of spam on the forum and additional transparency would likely reduce that to some extent.

It was 45 days since it's your second ban, and then I noticed your other accounts, changed it to permanent.
You were banned once before, then warned by hilariousandco, and now this.

Just sent him pm.

Probably perma banned, though I can't ban nor am I in charge of bans so you'll have to ask BadBear for clarification.

I am sorry again.

But i just want to how long i will be ban for my fault?

My Profile message showing :  Sorry josephliton, you are banned from posting or sending personal messages on this forum.
Insubstantial posts+sig ad, c/p posts (Never)

Please let me know. @hilariousandco

Yes, you can quote external sources, but there's a difference between that and straight up plagiarising posts whilst trying to pass them off as your own contributions.

But is it not allowed to quote external sources if it has to do with the thread you are answering to? I do it sometimes but i always use " " so people can know its a quote or i tell them.

I would just like to start off this appeal & apology by saying im extremely sorry to all the admins and staff about what i have done in the recent past.I will not break a single rule of this forum.

One question - How long i will be ban?