Ideas how to reduce spam and scam attempts in chat rooms

[HenrikJannsen]

A user posted:

I agree that over the past weeks/months the chat rooms got more populated with potential scam attempts and we should try to keep the experience specially for newbies safe, clean and friendly.

The suggestion to only allow users with reputation is IMO too limiting and would exclude most buyers.

I share here some rough ideas, not suggesting to implement those, just sharing for maybe additional idea development.

We could add a "soft-ban" feature, which would affect only the ability to post text messages (offers and trades can be made) and might be limited for a certain time.
When down-voting a message from another user, a negative score would get accumulated based on the reputation score of the down-voter. This would ensure that it cannot be easily abused by small investments in reputation. We could also limit the type of reputation used for that, as reputation from Bisq 1 (account signing/age) is harder to artificially create for abuse.
If a user negative score (accumulated over all his messages) would exceed a threshold, his public chat messages would get hidden, lets say for 2 weeks. The negative score might decrease over time but slowly, so in case he would quickly start again after that 2 weeks, a small amount of reputation score from a down-voter would be sufficient to ban him again.

Lets see how the health of the chat rooms develops over the next weeks when 2.1.6 is enforced and the zero reputation sellers are gone. Maybe no action is needed, but if we see too much obvious scam attempts we should consider some steps.

Another option is to make the chat rules more strict and for instance disallow posting of external trade options (telegram) and apply ban to users who violate that.

[suddenwhipvapor]

I find such a "soft reputation" system fascinating, yet at the same time it sounds really complex system where you need then to manually fine tune parameters. I am a proponent of the open market, because there is already a report feature in the chats, if someone does something which annoys someone else they would get reported.

Ruling out advertisements for selling through other channels is something I personally thought about as well, and while on one side that could be appropriate (users can and should go to any other existing chat to promote themselves, instead of abusing the Bisq brand) it would also give Bisq the image of a platform which fears/dislikes competition. But in this last matter, I am more prone to making outside-of-platform-trades advertisements disallowed.

[HenrikJannsen]

...sounds really complex system

Not that much. The security manager factors we have for other things. The only concern here is that we don't want to use it too much to not make that role to central, but its a minor feature and I think the ability to adjust on demand outweights the concerns here.

The accumulation of negative score would require some time to figure out how to implement it best. But I doubt its a major effort. Might be a good task for a talented new dev.

...platform which fears/dislikes competition.

I don't think that is a real concern. You also dont put up an ad in a restaurant for the competition restaurant. Also those external trade options are usually terrible insecure and its justified that we don't let our newbie users run into the knifes of those scammers.

making outside-of-platform-trades advertisements disallowed.

I guess we should do that for next release.

[suddenwhipvapor]

There is probably no hard need to wait for a next release to disallow advertisement of trades on different platforms, or in chat/DM with no reputation score, a network-wide announcement could be sent right now to share this information, and then moderators will do their job.
Something like

In order to eliminate the risk of future scams connected to Bisq2, any advertisement of off-platform or no-reputation trading is disallowed from the chats.

[HenrikJannsen]

There is probably no hard need to wait for a next release to disallow advertisement of trades on different platforms, or in chat/DM with no reputation score, a network-wide announcement could be sent right now to share this information, and then moderators will do their job.

I would prefer to use those announcements rarely. But I think best is to PM such users telling them to remove that message and if not in 24h removed to ban them.