Quote from: flowers5 on September 18, 2018, 06:46:11 PM

Quote from: Initscri on September 18, 2018, 06:22:06 PM

I'd probably recommend an increase of more than just 1 merit (due to abusers as mentioned above), but I'm glad to see at least further requirements of merit for levelling up.

If users aren't willing to even try and get 1 merit point, they shouldn't be on this forum.
Glad to hear Theymos, hopefully this does something to help w/ spam. Thanks!

This. I feel like by simply raising this limit to 3 your going to make it immensely more difficult on the spam for cash poster. Hell even the worst of the worst poster can get lucky with a single post and a generous merit giver. They may try post after post trying to get that 1 merit. Needing 1 gives you hope. Needing 3 gives you butt hurt. I really hope the leadership will consider this.

Not to mention it's somewhat easy to abuse merit and give 1 point using an alt. It's just simply not as obvious, and hard to detect.

Switching to a more random number would be better. Sending 3 merits on the same date, that abuse would be a bit more obvious.

I've been working and I'm going to be working on scripts/bots to detect spam, I would be able to pickup abuse of 3 merits easier than 1 merit.

I noticed the mention of the idea of buying Junior membership. There's only 1 way I like that idea:
If the funds collected from the purchasing of junior membership is funnelled into the mods and developers contracted on behalf of BitcoinTalk to create scripts/bots which detect spam and try to prevent future spam. I'm currently working on some bots/scripts on my own time volunteer wise, but if BitcoinTalk was able to hire developers to create these spam prevention methods, I know a lot of good developers would join in and help (myself included, I'd be able to put a lot more time towards it). Doesn't have to be a hiring procedure, could be a bounty ("First developer to create a way to prevent xyz gets X.XX BTC)

This almost creates sort of a task force against spam, through advanced detection. It would make it easier on moderators, and make it less worth creating spam accounts.

And believe me, I'm not just saying this because I'm a developer. While I'd definitely bid to help, I'm going to be creating scripts/bots to detect against this regardless. I just think the motivation of developers to help out would be greatly increased. Sort of like the BountySource effect.

The nice thing about bots/scripts that scrape BitcoinTalk is that they don't require admin access. And it could be a really cool system. For example: BitcoinTalk could give out a API for reporting of spam (obviously to only select contractors). The amount collected by Junior memberships would be divided by this project/mods. The amount (hereby called "the pot") would be up for grabs by the developers creating these scripts. The amount of successful spam reports by these bots/scripts would give them a stake of "the pot" on a per weekly basis (or other timeframe)

IDK, just a thought. I think it'd be a cool way to promote developers to fight the spam on BitcoinTalk using computing power, even if it is a minimal amount.