Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 20, 2024, 03:13:50 PM

~snip~
Aside from the disruption to forum, this is the issue of letting an exchange like Bitget get away with shilling and treated with a soft touch, it encourages others to do so the same if they see that it yields good results. Only when these campaign managers acknoledge that it has the potential to do more harm than good (tarnish the reputation of an exchange) will they stop doing this.

I hate to repeat myself (and I don't know if it makes sense), but with the soft way of approaching the problem, we can hardly hope to turn things in our favor.

The "soft approach" is over, it didn't work as shills simply ignored warnings and continued shilling regardless, as they have nothing to lose apart from an account they don't care about or value. It also went against the recommended manner to deal with shills, such as giving the appropriate badge as well as the original strategy of having posts moderated (under misbhehaving group).

For those who do this, it is not a problem to be marked as shills and to receive strikes, because when they assess that that profile is no longer usable, they simply create a new one and start all over again.

This is something we can do very little about, if users ditch the account to create a new account then we just have to catch the new accounts. It's always a cat and mouse game.

Their strength is in numbers, and until stricter measures are taken, we are spinning in a vicious circle.

This is otherwise the current mod strategy I'm using and have recommended to others:

1st offence: +20% warning*
2nd offence: Add shill badge and 1st strike
3rd offence: Add to misbehaving and 2nd strike
4th offence: 3 strikes

*Unless 100% of posts are shilling, then can receive shill tag immediately

To clarify:
- The shill tag is not a real punishment, it's just an accurate and appropriate label
- The strikes are the punishments (costs $5/10/25 to remove)
- Misbehaving means all posts require approval from mods
- 3 strikes means posts require approval by admin

Worth noting that the shill badge has so far led to most shills not shilling anymore, but only time will tell. Once they end up in misbehaving then they nearly always give up, as mods simply won't approve posts from shills that are still shilling, and instead more likely to give negative karma (or mods get -karma themselves if they approve shill posts).

Currently, NFTs are going through a tough period as the trend is no longer attracting attention and capital from investors. As a result, we've seen a decline in trading volume on NFT marketplaces and the disappearance of NFT news from crypto media, a stark contrast to the excitement and popularity this trend once had in 2021. I don't think they've failed, but they are disappointing investors, especially as they're skeptical about the return of NFTs in this bullrun.

It's true they are definitely disappointing investors, especially since crypto has largely recovered from the bear market, or at least stopped losing value and more or less bottomed out.

If anything it reminds me of cryptopunks in 2019, which is the only comparison to really go by I think, as one of the only collections that has had more than one proper bull/bear market cycle already. This was when the crypto market was having it's major recovery, similar to 2023, and in the meantime these nfts were struggling to get above $200 after becoming completely worthless post 2017 bull market. Ironically it took until about late 2020 before price stabilised around 1 ETH and the NFT bull market began, so depending where we are in the 4-year-cycle, if the market is still in a cycle that is, then it'd still be a bit early for NFTs to be doing much else than struggling to keep up right now. I'd say it otherwise looks like cryptopunks as finally bottomed out at around 20 ETH where there was previous consolidation  in 2021, and have since increased by 50% (for the first time since 2022), so it is possible signal that they might be making a comeback sooner rather than later.

I guess we should have allowed each user to choose 3 names to avoid such a huge difference in votes.

Without wanting to say I told you so, I definitely recommended this in the first place but was overruled

While I agree that a 3rd place run off makes sense, we already decided to elect the 3 candidates with the most votes.

To change the decision now would just be bad form by anyone in a position of power...

@admin with voting over it seems Jokers, bitmover and examplens are the elected candidates.

Congrats to new senators 

Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 18, 2024, 04:51:35 PM

As an update have sent warnings to half a dozen users, some received the badge and strikes as had already been warned and naturally ignoring advise to use IP section, a few of them multiple times already. Was a bit disappointed to see some users warned multiple times and still not tagged or given strikes, as most of the users could have been tagged sometime ago already based on previous warnings.

I have already expressed before that there are simply too many "warnings" which unfortunately, as we can see, do not change anything. All those who came to this forum because of shilling will continue to do so until you permanently ban them, and then they will create a new profile and continue where they left off.

This is not wrong, and it turns out after reviewing this topic again that most of the users that received a tag or strike because they continued shilling were your reports from before. It's also correct that they will continue shilling until punished, usually a tag or strike is enough for them to ditch the account and create a new one, rather than needing to be banned in fairness. But otherwise users will give up reporting users if all that occurs is warnings which are ignored, so there is a need for more aggressive moderation.  The annoying thing is it doesn't solve the problem either, instead new accounts will spring up to shill again. Will be requesting admin support on this so that IPs can be tracked when accounts become inactive.

Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 18, 2024, 04:51:35 PM

~snip~
The reality is 95% of users who are discussing Bitget are shilling it. Not all, some respectable members are also discussing, but the reality is the discussion is 99% of the time is raised by shills who are posting primarily about Bitget and not much else. So if you want to help keep the forum clean, when you see a newer user casually discussing Bitget, check their recent posts and see if that what they're doing most of the time. Then report them here and let mods do the rest: https://www.altcoinstalks.com/index.php?topic=112178.0

This is visible to anyone who wants to see, but as you can see for yourself, instead of reporting such behavior, a good part of forum users will engage in a discussion that was created only with the reason to shill that company. Whether someone likes it or not, in this way they participate in shilling, the only question remains whether consciously or unconsciously.

Indeed those who feed the shills are part of the problem, whether they are aware or not. This is exactly what the shilling is intended for, to create the false impression of organic discussion around the exchange by respected members, which in itself is more effective than the shilling itself. It gives it credibility and respected members should no better.

Will recommend to admin that the IP section isn't public, and only for members of the forum. Potentially this would help to discourage shilling here.

Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 18, 2024, 04:51:35 PM

It might otherwise seem that this is just one of the most popular exchanges like Binance and OKX. This is exactly the deceptive trickery of the innovative ways in which these shill have been promoting the exchange. The reality is the exchange is only as popular as Kucoin and MEXC, which you hear much less about on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if this exchange reached this level of popularity primarily because of shilling which is a worrying reality.

I have no doubt that their tactics brought them very good results with literally minimal costs. Given that shilling is against the rules of the forum and given that we know that it happens in an organized manner, I would again suggest that the administration consider blacklisting the keyword (Bitget) or at least making it impossible for anyone below a certain rank to post it.

It's not a bad idea, especially the idea of being say blacklisted for lower ranks, as the shilling is coming from lower ranks. Hopefully shills would simply be deterred by more aggressive moderation, but I realise that's being a bit too optimistic. From experience with previous shill campaigns such as Veil, as long as they are being paid, they will continue to create new accounts in order to shill.

I have also already suggested to check who gives all of them +karma, because I believe that they have at least one teleported acc from BTT which is Senior+ rank. When I first started researching these accounts, I was surprised that most of them had +5 or even +10 karma, which is completely illogical to me then and now.

I'd checked karma before as Jokers mentioned it in mod section, and generally they have been received from a variety of respectable members, presumably (hopefully) for posts that weren't shilling the exchange. The reality is after before warned for shilling BG in 100% of their posts, they will often do so in only 50%, in order to try and disguise the shilling and pretend to be respectable members of the forum. This also doesn't reduce the shilling, but instead doubles the number of posts from these shills, and shouldn't be excusable either.

Edited

I see some senators give their votes.

As far as I understand, senators can't vote. Even we vote, it won't be counted.

CMIIW

Quote from: Freemind on September 11, 2024, 08:15:47 PM

These senators will remain senators, therefore votes towards these senators will not be counted.

Is senator vote valid, @Freemind @dragononcrypto?

I moved your post to this thread... per the quote, votes towards senators will not be counted. Votes from senators are fine.

This was intended to simply clarify that if users voted for senators it would be a wasted vote, as they will remain senators anyway.

Edit:

If this means people cannot vote the current senators, surely people don't need to vote them since they are senators already.

You'd hope that voters would understand this, but this is an internet forum after all 

Vote count updated. Not many hours left for voting before poll will close so last chance to vote if you haven't already.

Still close between examplens and PX-Z for 3rd senator seat, a single vote could change the result...

Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 17, 2024, 09:17:15 PM

~snip

Since hugeblack withdraw to continue his studies, I will vote for Bitmover instead.

This vote was otherwise moved to the vote thread.

Quote from: dragononcrypto on September 17, 2024, 06:05:50 PM

The main reason to avoid open karma logs is to avoid more retaliatory abuse of karma. As for the original proposal I don't really see the benefit.

Now, with the increased membership, I think it's challenging for admins and mods to detect all karma system abusers.

As I said, it's really not. The logs are pretty straightforward to analyse, smiting much less difficult also as not that much of it, but I don't expect you to take my word for it either.

Making the karma log public would deter abusers, as they'd know everyone can see their activity.

Again as a mod not interested in deterring abusers, because those who want to abuse the system generally want to abuse the forum rules as well, and they more often than not will find a way to do so without easily being detected. Allowing them to abuse the system means they can be caught much easier and quicker, as they are more likely to think that they can get away with it without karma logs being public.

If members can see who sends and receives karma, it would Encourage quality posts.if I receive karma for a post, I'll create more engaging content on that topic.Public logs would help identify and address negative karma abuse.

This comes back to an alternative proposal of identifying posts that have received positive or negative karma, without identifying the issuer, which I am all in favour of, and was something admin was previously working on. We don't need to know who issued the karma to know that a post was considered useful or otherwise a post was considered spam.

I'm not criticizing the admin or moderators; they're doing their best.

You're otherwise welcome to criticise admin or mods