Topic: A radical idea to partially clean up sig spamming. (Read 428 times)

I completely agree with you. I'd say we should implement another unwritten standard that outlaws signature campaigns from having a "minimum post" requirement and only adhere to pay-per-post standards, but then you're eliminating a lot of genuine companies who don't have budgets that are as high as the big dogs on the forums. I think it all comes down to the campaign managers. Maybe we could suggest having one overall campaign manager 'moderator', if you will, that all signature campaign managers have to check-in with before launching any kind of signature campaign here? This would essentially create less work than having a bunch of moderators try to control signature campaign requirements, but it also mean that another paid moderator position needs to be introduced to the staff roster.

Maybe it would be worth it, however, to help eliminate the onslaught of shitposting campaigns that are introduced on a daily basis, though... Just a thought.

We could also award someone with bitcoin upon achieving a certain amount of merit, however bitcoin payments were only happening in the sig camp, and I doubt anyone has a spare btc to someone. a lost bitcoin is a donation to everyone :-D

All day we spend our time to make the community a good place and new ranking system was introduced, hence the possibility of spammers in this community will be lessen in a year.

Just putting in the requirement of +10 merit, or something like that, to signature campaigns will decrease the number of people that are eligible and with that will decrease the spamming. Since signature campaigns are playing the huge part of this forum, in terms of why people are staying/coming.

The merit system already addresses the member incentives underlying signature spam. I think a bigger problem is the "minimum post" requirements that campaigns have. I think requiring a minimum of 25-30+ posts per week absolutely incentivizes spam. Managers like it because it makes post counting easier (no need to thoroughly check posts to determine exact number of qualifying posts). Advertisers like it because they are guaranteed a minimum number of spots that will likely be exceeded.

But the forum staff should dislike it because it turns people into spammers. I see otherwise good posters padding their post counts to reach their minimums all the time. If it were me, and I already made 25 good posts but was 5 short of my minimum with a deadline approaching? I would churn out some crap to make sure I got paid. I wouldn't do that in a pay-per-post campaign because struggling to produce shitty content isn't worth upping my pay 17%. It is worth it if I lose 100% of my pay for not reaching the minimum.

It creates a situation where the problem is not only spammers, but the fact that most campaign managers are exacerbating the problem rather than reigning it in. Props to Chipmixer, Coinroll, YOLOdice and others who aren't part of the problem.

I think it's just a matter of time. While we do have thousands and thousands of members here with existing ranks to be able to participate in signature campaigns, the new accounts that are created for the sole purpose of ranking up to (a)join a signature campaign and (b)farm ranked users will become less and less common. I think in due time, signature campaigns will have fewer selection of participants to choose from, especially as the existing pool stops posting because they find it too difficult to rank up their accounts.

Yes, there's an underlying problem with signature campaign managers who manage these campaigns to low standards, so may I propose that we unofficially set a standard system to only allow acceptance of users with a minimum level of merit? This system can be enforced at a later time (after fair warning is given) by having several DT users place a red tag on the profiles of signature campaign managers who do not adhere to this new policy. It can be removed at a later time, but it may be an easy way to identify which campaign managers obviously don't give a shit about the level of quality of the campaign's participants' posts.

Yes, this is a bit of work to enforce, but it's a hell of a lot less than trying to monitor URL types from any given user's signature.

FYI, this is the disclaimer below every paid forum ad:

Requires too much manual work -- the same goes for any curated whitelist. Any policy should be automatic. Any manual whitelisting, etc. takes too much time. I also don't like the privacy implications of such a policy.

Members can disable signatures. Higher-ranked members can disable forum ads. I'm not overly concerned with lurkers who can't be bothered to create a throwaway account for tailored viewing.

    I couldn't agree with you less on this. I think this individual approach will be a better option. It's then left for the user to decide for themselves if they want signature to show on their pages then they leave it on and if they don't want, they turn it off.

That is a failure of moderation.

Interestingly, sometimes I find something good discussed on alt board, given that all Bitcoin only related board also spammed with posting about alt, disabling alt would fairly bring small changes without significantly moderating the board itself manually, what we can do is give users selection to turn off sig at some seriously need high mental concentration board discussion so users can selectively choose how they experience their stay here, but OP concern is about first time Guest visitor perception, so that can only be done by turning sig off sitewide by default or put small link for Guest to click once to turn off sig from their view.

Merit do promote Quality post but did not stop spamming post on every board the main concern bring forward by OP. Probably incentive greater than risk of having rank slow down, even informative website owns by the user have adsense on it that incentivise posting fairly low Quality post to bring some traffic to their site

No doubt such actions (ban signatures and alts) would drasticaly reduce the activity. But that's the point. Quality simply can't go hand in hand with quantity.

Personaly would be much happier to see less active forum full of knowledge and quality informative posts than some ultra active forum full of crap.
On the other hand I fully understand that's not what admin would like to have so he's trying to find more suitable solution to raise quality not affecting the traffic (must say introduction of the merit system impressed me and it seems to be working well given all the complains I saw so far).

 

Most of the campaign specifically want the post to be at certain board only and avoid violating forum rules to be counted, I think this forum will have significantly less participation if it is stopped, just look at Technical Support Board or Project Development Board very few post everyday I check there, reply also mostly under 10, most developer discuss about issues at github directly and rarely post anything here. except for wallet and website developer sometime do discuss things here.

Simply close Alternate Cryptocurrencies will stop most of this

Apparently misunderstood the meaning. Just replace word bees with wasp or hornet ...  and you'll get it.

What a stupid thing to say. If there were no bees, ther would be virualy no food in the world. Honey is one of nature's great health foods as well.

We need more bees here, and fewer of the incompetents spraying verbal pesticides on them.

I second that.
Problem are campaigns requiring users to make given number of posts a week (or in general encouraging them to make more posts). That's the source. Baning or reporting/redmarking users does not help at all (they go and buy another account and all repeats).

Killing bees leads nowhere. What we need is to burn the hive and kill the queen.

Site admin have that option but they do not turn it off not sure why
Probably the best is communicate with them and ask, because all of us here do not have that access

Turn off sig and avatar at specific board, like Meta for example so everyone at Meta won't see any spam or any signature at all

The cluttering spam is not the signature, it's the crap that has the signature hanging on its coat tails.

I do tutn them off, I use the ignore button. Unfortunately, non-members don't have that option, so they are faced with a load of semi-literate drivel when they visit the forum. Then they go off to another forum, and report on the low grade content on Bitcoin Talk.

The merit system is starting to make a difference in my opinion, but there is no single solution to the problem of increasing world unemployment, and the resulting attention that Bitcoin Talk aand other "money for doing nothing" projects seem to be getting.

This forum is rendered according to that user profile setting, once you set it to turn off displaying sig, you won't see that link/spam but other user who want to see it they can set it on, their forum experience will be cluttered with link/spam.


There is global sitewide option to turn it off but staff already decided that user should choose what their forum should look and feel

I guess what you say is

So far this is not working because you see lots of spam cluttered your experience, try turn it off and see what your experience feels like.


Whether spammer put link on their signature field or not will not determine it got display or not on other guess visitor or user's browser

I think you are missing the point. It isn't the displaying of the signatures that is the problem. It's the scamcoins that pay semi-literate posters to pollute the boards with garbled messages that are/were destroying the forum.

The problem isn’t that signatures would be annoying or seductive. The problem is that the opportunity to advertise in the signature leads spammers to spew garbage posts that clutter up the forum, making it less useful and less enjoyable.

I have an even more radical idea,



Simply disable everyone's signatures if they're of such great annoyance to you, (or if you're easily seduced by what people are offering through them).

Why would/should the administrators (which in this case comes down to theymos) scan EVERYONE's signature just to make sure some dumbass doesn't buy a product through a user's signature that turns out to be a scam? Where did everyone's common sense go?

The forum currently allows the posting of HYIP sites, there's even a dedicated board for it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=207.0, and what i'm trying to say with that is; who's to determine what's a scam, and what is not?

One could argue that the product i'm advertising is used for money-laundering, while others could argue that it is a great tool to enhance your privacy (me!). What stance should the forum take? This will ultimately lead to the forum being biased towards certain products/services, which is something i personally really wouldn't want to see.

blogspot you can add meta tags but need to edit the template, this is just an idea probably there is some other better method can be employed to do this


Put small link for user to click once to report problematic pages with redirects and pop up, probably will not weed out everything but can help controlling it.

Going back to first step, Why need such radical moderation ? if it is to prevent lurker viewing unwanted links and spams, better turn off sig and personal text to Guest visitor from SMF, manually checking sig probably very time consuming and would not as effective because user will add link all the time 24 hours, staff doing checks needs to work around the clock


Sounds overkill, can be accomplish with few lines of code if not already available on SMF

Sorry to shoot down everything, but these solutions cause issues for users who don’t have access to the file system or who aren’t even able to put arbitrary meta tags in their pages. Think blog platforms.

On the other hand, proficient users can deploy redirects, links, intermediary pages and similar techniques to send the visitor from their compliant site to the intended target site.

It is one of the best solutions to oversee forums from spammers who provide useless links. Yes there are some forums that have been moderated automatically so that when there is a user who made a post and the link is included to the list in the block then the link will not be displayed. There must be a big change that can make the forum much better, manual checking can actually be done, but it takes time and also the resources are not small. If we want to optimally then integrate with AI which is currently already being used and applied in various things including the website.

The use of increasingly advanced technology will help us develop this forum, as time goes by the technology must be renewed and we can not just stand still. Technology is running and we have to keep up with it.

Set Guest view by default to no sig and no personal text, only logged in User can turn on or off sig and personal text view, change some SMF config and its done sitewide
Otherwise staff will have to do lots of manual work that probably much better use for other things

It isn't so much the members who are at risk - I use ignore more and more frequently these days. It's the lurkers and other visitors who don't have any control over viewing. Bad or scammy links give a very bad image to the forum, and this is reflected in the comments on some other forums.

Google ask for a simple text file that they provide to be left in the root directory of the site. I suspect they check this regularly.

Again who will compile and verify the blacklist   I believe after using the forum for sometime we will be able to shoot our attention directly to the juicy part of the post and able to avoid landing our eye to the sig.

One way is, giving each user setting to filter or turn off sig on his view so he will be able to have clean slate view of the discussion text/image only, without any sig and personal text maybe.
That way we don't have to go hostile towards Newbie that probably in later time will contribute to the wealth of discussion



Ask user to embed their BTC address on the their webiste metadata, therefore we know he owns the website if it match with the BTC address mention on their profile.

OK - I accept that.

How about a blacklist of sites then?

The staff don't have enough time to verify that the website is owned by the user, and would take a lot to verify that they actually own it too. If signature campaigns only accept high merited users then that should exclude a lot of the spammers that we see. Anyway, some signatures have some awesome unheard of websites and by introducing a centralized list of websites which are allowed in signatures could stop these niche websites from getting noticed.

There's been many in the past, but take Vod's signature for example. Again, if we did have a list of websites that were allowed in signatures then this would have to be approved by staff members and they likely don't have enough time for that.

Not going to happen in the crypto currency world, where no one uses their real name. Hell, even bitcointalk.org is registered to 'WhoisGuard Protected' in Panama

A lot of the problems seem to come from throwaway accounts spamming questionable products. My suggestion is that links in signatures should be restricted to two categories.

- A domain that is owned and hosted by the poster, and proof of ownership should be provided if requested.
- A website that is on an acceptable list that is monitored by a forum admin.

Obviously there are several ways to "play" the restrictions, but I think it would be another way to pick up some of the alt spammers, and it may restrict some of the fly posting links.