Topic: [WTF] I reported a post for plagiarism and my accuracy rate went DOWN!?! (Read 392 times)

Right. As usual, I failed to consider the "malicious actor" situation...

Whilst it becomes pretty obvious who is paying for these services if it becomes common knowledge that campaigns get banned for utilising them trolls or competitors could maliciously abuse them to take out innocent parties. I think those cases would be rare but it could happen. Sadly, there's just not a right lot we can do about it other than nuking the spammer accounts as spotted.

Another tactic would be to temp-ban the OP of the thread on the presumption they paid for the service. That is a bit more heavy-handed, I'll admit, so a lesser penalty would be "The Scarlet Letter" approach: temporarily lock the thread with a notice that it was done because of paid thread-bumping. The bad PR from that should vastly outweigh whatever (questionable) benefit might be derived from keeping a shitcoin's thread on the first page.

Indeed, it looks like a bumping service spammer. If you click JonhSunny224's post, you'll see many more posts from Newbies with 14 Activity on the same page. All registered on May 10, some with more than 10 posts already.

I read this today:
Thread bumping/spamming is starting to look like an industry, earning thousands of dollars per month! Bitcointalk should end this, maybe reject all Newbies and if needed Jr. Members too from those boards?
Or, as I suggested elsewhere: sell sticky spots for spam-free campaigns on those boards. If they're willing to pay 0.42BTC per month to be on top, let them pay it to the forum.

These sorts of posts that tend to be what the paid bumping services make. Just enough to make it look like a genuine question and not just fake spam but still a mostly hollow question that's sole purpose is to keep the thread at the top. Check their other posts and if they're all the same or similar report them and they'll be looked into. Often patterns can be spotted like same email address and sign up dates etc.

In the past 5 days, I count 322 different Newbie accounts posting "nice project" (case insensitive, it may or may not be part of a larger post) . For "great project", I count 574 accounts.
And these are just the Newbies, I can't easily check higher ranks. Most of them should be nuked, some try to make posts longer, like this one:
If I search for "This is a great project", I end up with 12 Newbies posting it in 5 days. One of them in a quote, which is a false positive when I search this way.

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It is quite rewarding to see long lists of accounts nuked after I turn them in

Holy mother of Crisco, that's way more than what the google site search turned up! In other news, I received a PM saying I've been whitelisted by a mod; I have a feeling this will get filed under, "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished"...  



Fighting the spammers is definitely a Sisyphean task, so if viewed as work then it would soon become demoralizing. Much like The Pharmacist, however, I see this as a game/therapeutic, so even though most of the spammers are going to slip past me, every one that I spot who then gets nuked is eminently rewarding.

Hundreds per thread a day. I would say well over a 1000 a day bombarding the altcoin section. Almost all of them are either copy and pasted garbage or generic responses like the "nice project" ones. Plus these one that combine several different compliments to make it appear more constructive at first glance.

The sad thing is this will just be the tip of the Iceberg. There are numerous people farming dozens if not hundred of accounts this way just by posting "nice project" or "waiting for bounty/airdrop" or whatever.

We're also currently being spammed by a new wave of bots that copy a random post and paste it in another random thread. They're pretty easy to spot as the posts are way off topic but there's seemingly hundreds of them. Must have nuked going on 50 already since yesterday.

The chain you found, OP, resulted in 2k+ deletions. And I just nuked another ~30 accounts behaving similarly, posting minor variations of the same thing hundreds of times. Really annoying. If anyone sees more of this nonsense, please report it.

As far as I know, accuracy is calculated this way:
good/(good+bad)*100%
The result is rounded, and it works for me.

Mods/admins , does the accuracy of reports go down if the reports are unhandled? I seem to be in a little confusion here, my accuracy went down by like 9-11% when I reported a few posts(a few days ago - I assumed they were bad reports) but according to the new report page, I only have 2 bad reports and 11 unhandled reports.

I just saw the new stats when I reported a post for spam and I like the changes! Now I know I have 2 reports marked bad (the one that prompted this thread appears to have been reversed) and 8 that are unhandled. I also saw @iasenko's thread about this so I'll probably register my approval over there, but all in all I think this is an excellent change.

Well, as I type this the report page is being changed up a little bit. It now gives you how many good reports, bad reports, and unhandled. The percentage is still there at the moment.

Along with a nice little message too:

Oh, I don't get upset at all if the mods don't agree with my assessment of posts reported for spam or shitposting because that's a much more subjective thing; it's only when reports for plagiarism get tossed out that I blow a fuse because there shouldn't be any question that a violation occurred.



Hmm, I'm GenX so I don't need a participation trophy or a safe space to be happy... 

I also don't want to see the percent accuracy stat go away - in fact, I want to see which posts didn't make the cut so I can get better at aligning my reporting with what the mods think should be reported. Your other suggestion to move the accuracy stat somewhere else is fine, but I suspect it was put where it is now to discourage people from "revenge reporting" or the like.

At any rate, when I report plagiarism in the future I will provide a link to just one of the duplicate posts in the comment box rather than the google search phrase to avoid the issue that hilariousandco ran into.

This is just fine. Although it seems that the new generation always want to be the first, always want to make 100% (or even higher) and don't like criticism at all
This is why it's hard to accept that after a hard work, the result is worst than before...
Do we need that % to show up when we report a post? I could live without it, that was the reason I've also stopped reporting posts because the % became lower and lower.... working hard to decrease the accuracy...
So maybe the easiest option would be to remove the accuracy % from where people report the posts and if they really care about it, they could have a look at it somewhere in the profile, but I won't search for it...
Just an idea... and removing that part requires only little coding...

My advice is don't worry so much about report accuracy, and just keep reporting plagiarism and anything else you can find. 

I've had my accuracy go down after a long delay, and I attributed it to a backlog of reports that the mods finally got to, and I'm not concerned in the least.  Reporting posts is like a mental health affirmation for me, like therapy almost.  If I get 'em wrong sometimes, oh well.  Keep doing what you're doing, because it's the right thing to do.

In the "You can't make shit like this up," department, I just reported yet another post for plagiarism, this time in the merit and new rank requirements thread. This post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/merit-new-rank-requirements-2818350

had the distinct odor of shitpost and is totally off-topic, so I ran it through the google machine and sure enough some other shitposter already posted it here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.34795524

This time I included the link to the original post in my mod report so hopefully it doesn't get tossed out because my results couldn't be duplicated using google site search.

Thanks for looking into this, even if nothing comes of it. At least I feel like I might have given others another tool to find plagiarism which has got to be the most insidious form of shitposting around.

Either order works fine. Sometimes site search doesn't return all the results for some reason, but it doesn't depend on the order of the arguments.

I banned the ones I posted above but there's four pages of hits for 'swimming'. An admin should be looking into this as there's probably hundreds but they almost certainly won't, sadly.

I thought you had to do,

Site:bitcointalk.org THAN what you wanted to search?

Yes, very bot-like, especially since the number of identical posts is increasing.

@hilariousandco - I offset the exact search term used in google with dashes to make it clear that you have to include the double quotation marks. The actual command I typed into google's search bar was:


This is the general scheme I use to ferret out plagiarism - I find a phrase with unique or a "statistically improbable" sequence of words to plug into a google site search and if more than one hit is returned I report the post.

The only hit I got with quotation marks was this thread.

I searched 'Swimming' in the Alt coin section and got a lot of hits. All accounts are registered between 1-3 of April:

Did you search including apostrophes (')? Try surrounding the text with quotation marks (") to get an exact match from Google.

Example:

Spambots? I've checked a few: registered around the same time, posting around the same time about swimming pools.

Update: I love seeing this in modlog:

Hmm... I'm getting loads of hits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22mining+and+swimming+pool%22+site%3Abitcointalk.org&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-ab

The post hasn't been deleted:


I can't find any of the same in that thread. 'mining and swimming pool' doesn't get any hits on google for me either.

Yesterday I reported a post in the altcoins announcement subform for plagiarism because of a curious phrase that seemed familiar - "mining and swimming pool" - and a google site search did, indeed, turn up a whole bunch of posts that were identical... 110, to be exact. I explained in the comment to use google site search of the key phrase to find the other offenders and it looked like the post I reported was deleted (though today there are now 118 posts with that same phrase, so clearly that bot has not been deterred).

This morning I spotted another blatant bit of plagiarism in the same thread and when I went to report that post I saw my accuracy had declined from 95% to 92%!? So my accuracy went DOWN after reporting PLAGIARISM... WTF, mods? I gave you 110 identical posts for free and my thanks is a ding to my reporting accuracy? I would be much less upset if this was from reporting spam or shitposting, but plagiarism is a clear cut, unambiguous violation of the rules which is supposed to result in a permaban. Plagiarism also takes more work to hunt down and verify for those making the report, so it's even more demotivating when such a report is ignored, much less tossed out.

Frankly, with the amount of shitposting and plagiarism that persists despite 3+ months of the merit system the mods could use all the help they can get from those members who care enough to report posts in the first place. Don't demotivate us into giving up, as I have seen @Jet Cash lament most recently.