Topic: Add "Manager" link to signatures - page 2. (Read 518 times)

This can easily be solved with a user script, if enough people show interest, I'll write one.

1. We'll need a map from campaigns to their managers. Like this:

2. Parse signatures to determine to which campaign they belong and get manager's id from the map

3. Add "contact manager" button that takes you right to PM'ing the manager

I was thinking about that but if it's completely voluntary with no enforcement then the worst campaigns just won't do it. Which brings us to:


I think there is some value in having those reports public even if unhandled. I would hope that managers who are not dealing with their crap would eventually get a temp ban or something. Incentivizing low-effort spam is already against the rules, e.g. some users get temp-banned for organizing and participating in giveaways, so it's just a matter of global mods applying it to extremely shitty campaigns as well.

Another option could be some sort of enforcement based on the already existing report-to-mod stats. If a campaign is getting 10%+ of its posts deleted perhaps it should get a timeout for 60 days like Yobit did.

True, although I guess this works both ways. If there's a public thread with all the contact information, and a way for users to report users on that thread then it will all be public. If the campaign managers aren't listening, and are completely ignoring legitimate reports then it could be a reason to investigate their management of the campaign.

If you're a campaign manager you should be doing your job in reviewing participants somewhat regularly. Ideally, before every pay date. If they aren't listening to community reports, then they likely won't be reviewing users either. Which ultimately means they are collecting a pay check, and not doing their job. Unless, their agreement to get paid if simply just escrowing the payments, and sending them off every payment cycle.

I'd be willing to create, and maintain a thread where users can report signature campaign participants publicly, and then compose a message, and include all those that have been reported to the signature campaign manager. 

I think it's a good idea, but I'm not convinced as to how effective/useful it would be.

The Cryptotalk campaign is something of an outlier given that they will recruit anybody, and yahoo gets no say in the recruitment and just has to clean up the mess. I agree your suggestion would be useful here. However, let us consider all other "standard" campaigns for a moment.

A minority of campaigns are run by good managers who pay attention to their participants, and these managers are going to pick up on spam anyway. The majority of campaigns are run by managers who don't give two hoots about who they are recruiting or the amount of nonsense trash their participants are spamming across the forum. We could spend days reporting these users and their posts to their relevant campaign manager, and absolutely nothing would come of it. These poor managers, just like the spammers they recruit, are often just in it for the money and will put in the bare minimum amount of effort. They aren't going to spend hours like yahoo does sifting through reports and post histories, banning the offenders, and then spend more time to recruit new users. If there is no consequence to doing so, then they will just ignore all the reports.

Unless this was also combined with real enforcement of the rules regarding warnings and bans given to both spammers and their managers, which unfortunately theymos doesn't seem keen to pursue, then I think the time spent reporting to managers would be time which could be better spent reporting to moderators.

The first time you think about it, it does make sense, however, I must agree with DiamondCardz. His saying "it should be the signature campaigns adapting to the forum" should be the way to go, instead of theymos adding a button to reach the campaign manager, how about just signatures themselves just having a small text or even a button in the signature itself so that the users may click on it to start a PM or just visit the profile of the manager? While this may reduce the number of characters entered to the signature, it can heavily improve the overall "report count" consequently reducing the number of spammers. Welsh's suggestion on creating a dedicated thread for signature campaigns and their managers make sense, although it would require constant user input and is prone to be "spammed" by the same people. Even though it is heavily mentioned to NOT post off-topic and/or help requests on the Cryptotalk's campaign thread, you should know that there are 17 pages there. And I believe that making it self-moderated won't really help as it requires the campaign manager's input anyway.

I've been saying since last week on both Meta and Turkish forums (we have a section where we discuss signature campaigns, the most famous one is obviously Cryptotalk, at the moment) that the best way to combat the enormous number of spammers is just basically introducing several factors while recruiting to the campaign, it could be X amount of merit earned in Y amount of time or having a minimum Z merit in total to join. While some campaigns had factored Activity before, it seems to be forgotten lately. Activity could actually be a good element to check the user. (their contribution to Bitcointalk, in a roundabout way) Several years ago when signature campaigns were more mainstream and the user count was lower, I can't really say that I have seen any problems. I think the biggest issue we had back then was the usage of alts, instead of obvious spammers.

I guess it would be good if just quote the post from the User when he break the sig rules and post it in the Sig Camp thread so the manager see it .
And i have seen that a few have done that.

This can be used also for just posting the Account name with link into the sig thread so the manager is aware of it and can take action if needed !

If you not sure and fighting with yourself to report the User also it can be done for PM the user directly for it and give a warning , for sure the most User would not agree on the PM maybe !
But nobody can say they dont have known it !

Maybe a list of Camp managers in the More button , just an idea !

I would consider this is as helping the campaigns to adapt to the forum. We can currently report users to campaign managers but in a clunky roundabout way, wasting time trying to figure out who's responsible for the campaign. Making it easier seems like a win for everyone except the shittiest campaigns that would either get swamped with reports or get suspended.

I share the opinion of DiamondCardz in that we shouldn't be implementing features natively into the forum for signature campaigns. Although, having said that this is a good idea in order to encourage users not only to report to the moderators, but also to the signature campaign managers as the forum rules, and signature campaigns rules differ. My suggestion for an alternative would be to create a dedicated thread with all the signature campaigns contact details or creating a userscript in order to report these users to the signature campaign managers.

I'm of the opinion that the forum shouldn't have to adapt to the signature campaigns, it should be the signature campaigns adapting to the forum. If we're at the point where it's bad enough that we have to actually write custom code to make signature campaigns tolerable, then we should just crack down on them entirely.

Note - I don't consider the signature restrictions that were implemented on ranks a long time ago to meet the above criteria as you don't have to be getting paid to have annoying advertisements in your signature. Also note that "crack down" doesn't necessarily mean "ban".

This was inspired by yahoo62278's effort to clean up the Cryptotalk campaign and these responses:



So there are clearly some users who might not be breaking forum rules but are breaking sig campaign rules, or some users may need to be removed from campaigns in addition to being reported to moderators. Unfortunately there is no easy way to report them to the campaign manager. Signatures themselves typically link to something outside the forum and it takes quite a bit of effort to figure out who (if anyone) is managing the campaign.

I suggest to add a "Manager" link to every paid signature, just like we have "Report to Moderator" next to each post. Ideally this would be a new feature and a forum-wide rule, so that any campaigns not carrying that link could be suspended, and the link itself wouldn't take up signature space. Personal / non-commercial signatures would be exempt. Reporting signatures without the "Manager" link would take place via the usual "Report to Moderator" channels.

Setting the "Manager" URL could be done in a separate box on user profile, or using a special bbcode tag (that way users wouldn't have to worry about it, managers would provide it as part of the signature bbcode). The link could be shown similar to how e.g. "AdChoices" is shown under (some) ad banners.

The link itself should lead to the campaign thread or a separate thread specifically for reports. It would allow to check the campaign rules and report users if needed.

Would this prevent campaign spam? Obviously not. But it's a relatively small and simple change that would encourage some vigilance and perhaps serve as a reminder to managers that they're responsible for their campaigns.

I'm sure there is plenty of negatives that I'm not thinking of so bring it on.