Topic: Writing a welcome message - page 4. (Read 16334 times)

I don't know the numbers but I have reported plenty of Copper copy-pasters and they did get banned, e.g:

https://bpip.org/profilearchive.aspx?p=ibiznes

Try it, it's very therapeutic in a schadenfreude kind of way.

Are the abusers buying the Copper memberships and getting banned? Most of the new Copper memberships I have seen appear to be bounty managers.

You'd have more of an idea about that than me - being able to see how many coppers get banned - I'm asking out of curiosity.

I like it. It is some kind of starting point for a new user willing to read a little.   

It's become worse in the last few weeks since the change to the merit system. Shitposters suddenly find themselves in the need of a single merit, but they don't know anything except shitposting. Instead of spending 5 minutes to read a thread and formulate a coherent reply, they generally are just resorting to plagiarism +/- text spinning. We have even seen some legendary members selling a couple of paragraphs of plagiarism to one-line shitposting newbies, who will post them, and then receive a merit from the legendary.

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Edit:


From a thread on Meta earlier today:

Well it shouldn't have to be but it really does need to be pointed out that this isn't acceptable and you can see that from the number of threads from people in Meta asking why they were banned and if they can get a second chance, so people should be made aware of the rules and the punishments for doing this so there's no excuses then.


Sadly I think you're very wrong. Copy and pasting and plagiarism is a huge problem and I'd say this sort of abuse is actually becoming endemic and almost commonplace now. Probably 50+ users a day are being banned for it and many multiples more will be getting away with it. Sure, there will be some times where a few individuals will be responsible for having hundreds if not thousands of accounts botting away, but there also seems to be hundreds of individual 'lone wolves' doing it as well with however many alts they have. I don't know whether there's some website that just suggests people come here and copy and paste posts if they can't speak English very well or people are just telling their friends and family to do so or they're even just actually figuring out how to easily abuse the forum by themselves, but it's mind-blowing how many people are doing it and it's sad to know that the admins don't look into any of it. I'm sure it's only the tip of the shitberg that even I know about and I dread to think of how many people are actually getting away with this on an industrial scale. Banning a few accounts for it when they could have hundreds or even thousands more going behinds the scenes is almost pointless and losing a few accounts a day will probably just become an occupational hazard to farmers. The only change that has been made is that they now require one merit or purchase a Copper Membership but when some of the worst offenders are making tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars from abusing bounties and campaigns they'll just purchase the merit or rank to bypass this. Merits can then easily and quickly be distributed between their alts and that's why I think we should require much more merit before you can start earning here, or at least make them buy a much more expensive Silver or Gold rank.

I don't think Plagiarism is something that needs to be pointed out as being something you can't do. First of all, this is something that people should know they shouldn't do, for a number of reasons, and I believe most people who do this know it is wrong, but do it anyway.

Also, I don't think it is as big of a problem in terms in the number of people getting into trouble doing this. Sure there are very many instances of this happening, however I suspect this is done by a fairly small number of people with a very large number of sockpuppet accounts, and I suspect this is often done via some kind of automation/AI.

Yeah, we don't need to explain everything in explicit detail there as it would be overkill, but that info should be linked to so people can read up on it and we have a couple of guides explaining those in detail. We should probably come up with a list of the most asked questions or things that people are often most confused about here and try work that into the welcome message but things like merit, ranks/activity are always the big ones.


Yeah, I get them a lot as well. I think most people come here straight from google directly to the scam thread after they search for things like "buy netflix accounts or twitter followers" etc so that's why they don't see the sticky or why they don't see the scammers colossal amount of negative feedback because it's not shown unless you're signed up and logged in. Maybe theymos could put a warning at the top in red like we have in the ponzi section and/or implement a redirect notice/landing page when users are taken off-site reminding users to check the url and warning about the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and not using a trusted escrow etc.

Speaking of Omni:


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mastercoin-new-protocol-layer-starting-from-the-exodus-address-265488

If the welcome message is too long, I think the whole "Forum rank" section could be replaced with a link how forum ranks/activity/merit work.

The "Beware of scams" section could be moved up, or written in a font of a different color. Or the headline, at least.

In Digital goods several months ago I pinned EcuaMobi's "Avoid auto-buy links, mainly locked or self moderated. Register before dealing" topic, and I'm still getting PMs pretty much daily from people got conned by a blatant scammer with a glaring red Trust rating.

True, but you could have explained the Trust system a bit.

It seems to be a source of (understandable) confusion amongst new members that there are, in fact, two regulatory bodies on BCT.

One lot has rules it doesn't apply and the other lot applies rules it doesn't have; can be a bit of a head fuck for them.

This a good implementation and great thought from comments so far, I will like to add that the newbies are meant to accept that they have read and understand the all the rules before proceeding further so that when rules are violated and punishment is issued no one will start opening thread asking why this ans why that. 

Welcome messages are like the terms of service... nobody reads them

I think in welcome message  we should advise them to "Read the stickies" in the board in which they are posting/reading. Stickies already have answer to questions that newbies ask.

I created a One Pager   few days ago outlining what can be our main points.

Kudos to theymos by putting a stop for waiting game and lot of good initiatives has been taken since last week. Can we implement following changes also when users got banned because it will reduce a lot of unnecessary threads in Meta  

- Showing the reason of banning when someone login into a banned account
- Showing massage to contact theymos/Cyrus when someone gets banned

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And also the welcome message shall be a concise one as already suggested by others. Ann Wylie, the writer (researcher) highlighted that if the average length in a piece was fewer than eight words long, readers understood the 100% of its content. But sometimes it is still doubtful whether newbies will read the welcome message regardless of its length.

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Oh no that's an easy one since some of them are already knowing the answer. How about this "How much activity needed to become a Legendary?"


 

Don't even need a token, just not let them post until they pass the quiz. 3 questions randomly selected from a pool of ~200 occasionally updated crowd-sourced questions should do the trick. Speaking of which, I could supply the trick ones, like "How much do you need to pay the Legendaries for merit?"

Just need to have a video that they have to watch with the promise of a couple of worthless ERC-20 tokens if they watch the video and answer the questionnaire. (Randomized questions so they cannot cheat)

BCTrules token. Coming to an exchange near you...

EDIT:

Don't hiss at me. It can be an omni token. 

We're already throwing the rulebook at shitposters when they e.g. complain about being banned for plagiarism. And then they often proceed to break other rules (e.g. multiposting) in that same complaint thread, so yeah they don't read the rules even after being banned but telling them "it's your fault for not reading" isn't working well. I'd like to think that part of theymos' goal for the welcome message is reduction of undesirable behavior and if so then we should (sadly) consider catering to (1) the people most likely to behave that way, and (2) the negligible attention span and aversion to reading/learning these users are infamous for.

The message isn't pages long, and is to the point(sorta). If newbies don't read it,then its their issue, they won't be able to complain on not knowing anything this time. The smaller the message gets, the more stupider it'd sound. Its a welcome message, not a summary of bitcointalk. The message would probably be fine, as long as its not an annoying pop-up.

@theymos, you should add links that newbies might find helpful. Like this one.

I'd even go into making bullet points or a checklist. So that its condensed down. I fear that including a checklist would just result in them ticking it like the normal TOS checkboxes that no one ever reads, but at least physically, and away from the internet checklists can be pretty effective.

I couldn't disagree more. All that 3D effects would achieve is to detract from the message.

I agree with the general consensus things should be kept short, simple, to the point, but as mentioned I would advocate for links to all the relevant stickies, or at the very least, a sentence sign-posting where they can find more information. I don't like just stating "There are other rules" without providing some guidance on where to find said other rules.

It's likely that few people are going to read everything, yes, but is better having something exhaustive for those who will actually bother reading it imo.