Topic: Add "Manager" link to signatures (Read 518 times)

Great idea, it will really significantly reduce the numbet of bad posts and also people won't say everytime "ban signatures" and something similar. Along with merit, this will be a great combination and double win.
But it will take some work from theymos, idk how he will act but another great idea will be: When you click on report moderator, let this message to be sent to campaign manager. This way there won't be need of clicking on report to moderator and manager seperately. I think it won't be hard. Take one sig code - set managet's link on that. Idk whether it's easy to do something with forum's cms but hope it's possible and not hard.

That's more or less forum guidelines though. If you break a rule you'll likely get a warning whether that's through a personal message or deleted posts. Warnings can also be temporary bans.

The only signature campaign guidelines there are is this: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/signature-campaign-guidelines-read-this-before-starting-or-joining-a-campaign-1684035 which are somewhat common sense except for the ban duration, and a lot of it is just advice.  Anyway, this doesn't necessarily have to be a restriction from the forum, but could be something which the campaign managers try to enforce. If the campaign managers require from their employer to include their contact details within the signature then that could prove to be beneficial to the community.

Do we not already place restrictions on them already? There are requirements that they have to follow to be allowed to operate, involving removing spammers, so on and so forth, and there are written processes which can be followed by Global Moderators in order to warn them to improve and ban them if they do not.

The problem is that Cryptotalk's advertising plan is to just get as much exposure as possible, good or bad - they don't care about quality I think. Which makes sense - they are trying to attract as many users as possible to their forum irrespective of who they are.

Its a tool which should be used in conjunction with other factors. Its an aid, and not a be, and end all solution. The tools exist, but only a few managers are utilizing them effectively.

I don't know about the community consensus, but the way I look at it is the signature campaign process shouldn't be a guaranteed payout every week. What I mean by that is participants should be under constant review, and these borderline cases are the ones that should be considered for removal for better users. Thus, the signature campaign would always be evolving to include the best of the best posters that have applied, and possibly keep certain users in a queue so that once you have determined these borderline cases these users in the queue could be sent a message to see if they would be interested in joining the campaign still, and then removing these borderline cases.  Note, that these users wouldn't be banned from the campaign per say, but removed for a better poster at that time. They could apply again after a certain period of time has passed which would be determined by the manager. This would hopefully encourage users to always be thinking, and posting substantial posts rather than getting into a campaign, and then letting their posting habits drop once they're receiving their weekly payments.

Signature campaigns should not be black, and white; so just because a user is deemed borderline doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking to improve the quality of users, and therefore promoting more effective advertising by replacing them with better posters at the time.


I think we are far more likely to see signature campaigns completely banned outright rather than placing restrictions that signature campaigns have to abide by to operate on Bitcointalk.

I mean, I'm on that list @Deathwing, and I'm certainly not posting just to hit my campaign target. I post a lot on the forums when I actively use it regardless - generally in the range of 5 to 15 posts a day.

I would agree though that most likely most of the people on that list are just posting to hit requirements. Personally I think we are far too lax on what constitutes a low-quality post. People know the requirements now and write just enough to allow themselves to evade bans and exclusions from campaigns. I believe you or someone else called these "borderline cases" and it's a very apt term.

The problem is, if we remove the posts where they look substantial but the moderator believes there's little meaning, the danger is that removal becomes more of a subjective process. That's why it absolutely is down to managers to sort it out because they should be subjective about their campaigns. I'll reiterate that Cryptotalk needs to have more than one manager.

To tie this in a little bit more to the OP - I think the best way to satisfy everyone re: reporting to managers is by making it mandatory for all signature campaigns to include a link to the campaign manager's profile in their signature BBCode.

This is definitely something that I would consider as a campaign manager, but it wouldn't be the only determining factor of course. When used in conjunction with other behavioral habits then it can be a vital tool.  From the point of view of the signature campaign manager, and those that are hiring the manager to then hire users to advertise for them. You'd be expecting users to be active in the community already, providing substantial posts which are likely to be recognized by a good amount of users, and have decent exposure through other means.

That decent exposure from other means could come from merit received, and other sites which are displaying how many merits was sent one week, and to who. It shouldn't all be based on posts alone. It seems the correlation with users who are posting the maximum amount, and then stop posting completely are the ones with the generic low quality posts. Of course, this isn't always the case, but is definitely something worth looking at when reviewing participants.

At least 85% of this list. (I did a manual check, might be mistaken) are members of Cryptotalk signature campaign and they were posting a lot in the past few days, as soon as the 10 posts/per day rule was introduced, this is what their 24-hour posting record looks like. (Thanks @LoyceV for the tool) Give or take 40 to 50 members all posting 10 or so posts because of this change, as I mentioned previously, however, there might be some exceptions as I had to go through all profiles and their recent posts manually to inspect. If the thread similar to SMAS were to be a thing, I believe things like this should be checked as well. If a person is posting on the forums just so that they can reach the maximum payment amount of their signature campaign, I believe that they are not being honest whatsoever. This list is long, even longer than what is shown in the picture. There are some people who deliberately post an extra or two or people who deliberately leave their post count lower than the maximum paid posts.

Its a lot of work, but I'd estimate collecting, archiving, and sending would only take around an hour or two every Sunday. This doesn't necessarily have to be managed by one person either. The thread manager is simply organizing the thread, and composing it in a readable way to the individual campaign managers. Plus, we would already be expecting the signature campaign managers to be doing this, but that's not always the case.

Those great project, and thank you posts not only break the forum rules, but likely break any respectful signature campaigns rules. When I'm dealing with reports (this week I've been ill so rather slow dealing with them) for forum issues then I tend to not even look at if the user is wearing a signature or not. That injects bias, and can lead to being more harsh than you would have without seeing it. I might pick that up subconsciously, and maybe its a good idea for me to nullify that by enabling "Don't show users' signatures." when I'm dealing with reports.

The spam posts are highly subjective like you say, however I'd encourage anyone who thinks a post is spam to report it in that post. The thread manager will not be rejecting reports, but simply compiling them, and sending them off to the appropriate signature manager. Therefore, when the signature manager reviews them he's the only one making the decision whether its a valid report or not, and can manage those reports per the signature guidelines.

In the perfect world all signature managers would be doing this themselves, but despite them receiving a nice little paycheck to do this they just don't. Of course, there are some noteworthy managers which are reviewing every post, but even then mistakes can be made, and the odd missed user might occasionally happen.

It is definitely a solid idea regarding both userscript and thread/list working hand-in-hand, however, doesn't the second part of your suggestion requires too much work? Especially for the thread manager to constantly receive reports, list and archive them and then send them to the necessary person for each campaign every single week. On top of that, there is one huge thing that we, or pretty much anyone can't agree upon. What determines if a post is spam, shitpost or not? I've seen 2 paragraph texts in some categories where the reply of the user does not even make any sense in comparison to the thread. Some people just say "Good work, thanks." by writing "I have reviewed your reply and have liked it exponentially. This is one of the very best and concise works I have seen. I would like to thank you for sharing this bit of information and allow oneself to indulge in this pool of knowledge." just so that they can get paid from the signature campaign and avoid being banned for short posts.

TLDR; The idea of having a thread manager and userscript as an optional form of reporting is good. However, there has to be a person without any social life, checking the thread all the time, making lists and archives of the posts. (for evidence purposes) On top of that, spammy posts are heavily subjective. Some spammers are getting good at spam, even though it contributes absolutely nothing to the thread (not even an opinion) they are able to write long texts which can escape anyone's eyes. Even on top of that, some people may post what seems to be a constructive answer but with a hollow meaning.

My stance would be trying to cover this from as many angles as possible if we are to do it properly without adding it as a core natively into the forum software. Creating a userscript would be beneficial to those that are willing to use it, however many users will stay away from userscripts, and therefore we might lose out on a few reporters. Having both a userscript, and an alternative such as a thread which is available to anyone would mean anyone willing to put effort in will be able to report.

Eventually, we could form a unified spammers list which all campaign managers use, and agree on (like SMAS). However, that would likely prove difficult as these are largely subjective cases when excluding users. Thus, the thread would provide users a platform to publicly report users, and the thread owner could send that list off every week or so to the campaign manager. Obviously, getting permission to send the messages regularly to the campaign managers.

We cover the spamming issue with signature campaign users as much as possible from a forum moderation point of view, but that probably just means that they get their post deleted, unless they're an exceptionally ban poster, and they may run into a temporary ban. However, these issues are separate to signature campaign guidelines, and in many cases the signature campaign rules are more defined, and comprehensive. Therefore, what might require deletion from a forum stand point of view, might well warrant removal from the campaign from a signature campaign managers point of view, but these are definitely not mutually inclusive.

Understand it from this angle, the forum is arguing the managers to take their job (moderating the campaigns) seriously with this suggestion and also encouraging forum users to report abusers to the campaign manager.. Let's look at spamming as an example, merit was introduced to tackle that problem same thing can be said about the suggestion by the OP.

Sure everyone can easily know who's managing a campaign but when the forum shows concern towards solving a problems it give the forum users more reason to work towards ensuring that problem get solved/reduced. If this suggestion by the OP was to be implemented with a thread explaining the new feature I bet you, more and more report about users abusing signature campaigns will be recorded and probably reduced the rate at which signature privileges is been abused.

I don't think that the forum and community members need addtional links or names of managers.

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Months ago, as I remembered, someone already proposed that idea in Overview of Bitcointalk Signature-Ad Campaigns [Last update: 19-Oct-2019]. That user proposed to add links to managers' profile pages, but @Mitchell rejected with the given reason that it is very easy for people (only several seconds) to click on links to campaigns' ANN threads to see who are managers of campaigns.

Personally, I felt that explanation makes sense.

What I discussed is for bitcoin-paid campaigns, not bounties or signature campaigns that paid in altcoins or tokens which mostly managed my bought accounts or strange users (not prominent managers).

I think this will not work the way we wanted it to work. If suppose we have  8 - 10 Managers here, then for sure it will be a great way to get them notified about the spam there users might be creating but we are talking about 100+ Managers as every 2nd altcoins campaigns are managed by its own Newbie Managers and this list is never ending.

Those Managers will not pay any attention no matter what comes to their inboxes and the good ones are already taking care of everything with their own responsibility.

An user script is a good idea. I am not a tech guy but I have this doubt. Let's say all campaigns which are existing now are mapped and a userscript is created. What happens when  new campaigns come, Will you be updating the userscript with new mappings on a daily basis? Because a lot of altcoin campaigns pop-up on a daily basis. Just wondering.

That's a fair point, and I would agree. Perhaps this could work similarly then - if we present theymos with data on just how bad the worst campaigns are, along with proof that the relevant managers have been alerted abut are doing nothing, he might step in as he did before.

If this were to be a thread as Welsh suggested, users would need to quote relevant spammy posts rather than just report users by names, as I'm still going to be reporting these posts to moderators for deletion as well as reporting the user to the manager. That would be a huge amount of work though, to manually quote and copy each post in to a thread, and would slow own my reporting speed massively. A second button as suggested in the OP would be a neater solution.

You are right. Should consider recent posts made.
For example the ratio of number of deleted posts that had been made in the past 10 days to number of total posts that have been made in the past 10 days.

Generally, I think it's good if signature is disappeared for a certain period of time. If such a penalty is considered, then the criteria can be discussed.  

It would have to be a bit more robust than simply X. I'm sure someone could easily find X crappy posts in my 17000-post history if they wanted to get me kicked out. But in general some sort of signature ban penalty would be nice to have as a softer alternative to regular bans, which appear to be very very hard to earn even for the most egregious spammers.


I'd like to think that the public discussion about Yobit spam played a large part in that penalty and it ended the way it ended because Yobit didn't want to do anything about it then, but their second attempt is now more civilized. So I hope that more public info and discussion about crappy campaigns would help to clean them up. But I'm known to fluctuate wildly between pitifully naive and contemptuously cynical so I don't really know anymore what would help here. Sticks, carrots, or some yet-undiscovered combination thereof.

The idea is good and it's possible to do it but there is one huge problem. It requires a third party app/extension, considering it's not always possible to use those on mobile and probably a fair amount of users actually use their mobile phones to post on the site, it might not be feasible.

Campaigns have not some specific rules. The main rule of all of them is "Do Not Spam" (Burst-posting is also kind of spamming) and it's a good idea to report spammers to managers. Because it can cause spammers to no longer earn money via their posts if managers ban them.

There are two types of signature campaigns.
1. Those that you should apply for them and you need to be accepted by the manager. (usually bitcoin-paying campaigns except Cryptotalk)
2. Those that you join them once you fill the registration form (usually altcoins-paying campaign and cryptotalk)

The main problem is the second type.

In Crytotalk campaign, there were many participants reported to Yahoo62278 and were banned if they were bad posters. But I am sure this is not going to happen in other second type campaigns even if bad posters are reported to managers.

I think it is still better to report spams to moderators and the number of recent deleted posts of each user is shown in their profile. If the number of recent deleted posts exceeds X, the signature disappears for a certain period of time. Then spammers will be removed from the campaigns.

Agreed, but we both know there are many out there who don't.

That's what's supposed to happen now, as per hilarious' sticky thread in the Services board, but it isn't enforced. We also already have stats on the worst offending campaigns and those with the most posts being deleted thanks to yourself. A public database might help to name and shame the worst managers, but unless we start enforcing temp bans on users and managers and temp bans on entire campaigns (as theymos did with YoBit), then I don't think much will change.

I do like the idea, and think it could work well, but we would need some input from admins or global mods to say that they will act on the data collected, otherwise it seems like a waste of time to collect it.

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.