Topic: BAN ALL SIG CAMPAIGNS (Read 5693 times)

Its just a spammer and not the sig campaign. Some are just construct their post theres a lot that would be affected if they banned it.

Because the level of spam coming from signature campaigns is unmanageable. You need to tackle the problem at the source. It's no good cutting the heads off a field full of weeds when they'll just spring right back. You need to nuke the entire field with weed killer. You need to destroy the root of the problem and that is currently lazy campaigns paying spammers. This is wholly the campaigns fault because if they didn't pay for shitposts nobody would be making them so if they continue to do this they need to go.

Why don't you just ask to ban all of the spammer instead of asking to stop all of the signature campaigns,
Or are you mad because some manager didn't accept you in their campaign?

Don't you guys have online meetings to discuss the issues at hand? If Theymos is so liberal and doesn't want to interfere, he should at least support democracy and let his staff decide. I mean it isn't that difficult to give warnings to campaign managers that allow mass spam and account farming, or is it?

Yes Iagree with this statement.

It seems to be that the Bitmixer campaign does really well due to the amount of time Lauda is able to put in. I see that Lauda also runs other campaigns very well and other services.

Maybe Lauda can run a course on how to be a good campaign manager, and maybe if someone wants to be a campaign manager they need to learn through a course before they are allowed to run a campaign. One can dream, but it would be a nice thing Ithink, if people had to pay 20 bucks of BTC to get some lessons and are "certified" or someting. Would help cut down on spam and posts quality go up

@iluvpie60

You definitely have a point when it comes to people that should be kicked off the campaign way sooner, but in order to make a significant impact, managers (I understand it's time intensive) should not accept anyone automatically in the first place. In case of Bitmixer it's fully automated, which will likely not change, but the positive aspect here is that Lauda will kick the spammers off anyway. Another thing I noticed is that when certain people do join Bitmixer, their post quality changes drastically (in a positive way) due to the strict and authoritative managing style of Lauda.

If we look at the main source of the flood of spammers, then there should be far more time and attention invested in altcoin and ico campaigns. Nowadays the majority of the gibberish posted comes from people related to these campaigns....

Instead of banning signature campaigns, there should be more rules in place about it.

I think the best way to combat it would be to make the campaign manager more responsible for checking post quality of the sig campaign members. For example, instead of waiting a whole week to kick someone frorm a campaign, they shoould be kicked for spam within 3 days days.

Say they get a warning the first day, and if their post quality does not improve by the 3rd day they are kicked.

I think waiting a week to kick someone is what makes it seem like there is too much spam floating around. To me it seems like it would take the same amount of time for managing the campaign, you just have to look at it more often.

Not sure specfically how it would go or what number of days is good, but what I am ultimately saying is campaign managers sohuld kick people faster than they are(though some do but not most). Then leave a person negative feedback and put how their post quality is bad(or maybe nuetral feedback).

No, that's not what he did.

Thanks for telling me this, I was certainly not aware of someone getting promoted to an admin when I was a staff member. When it comes to making new policies and whatnot, Cyrus is useless. He is there for account recovery and some complex cases which outrank hilariousandco. He is most certainly not managing this forum.

I agree and like grue's Greasemonkey script

That's what he did actually because if not then he would be the one and only admin out there. Cyrus is promoted to be the co-admin because he knows that he doesn't have time for that or just simply he don't care much.

That's a big IF with the current state of affairs.

I would not be able to say no to that.

You can literally scam millions of dollars is what you've wanted to say.

It doesn't look like theymos keeps anyone in the loop anymore. If he doesn't care or doesn't have the time, he should let this place get managed by someone else.

No, I don't think it should be banned.
People have their own selfish desires.
Well basically I've learned about this forum because of my friend's experience with signature campaign.
I myself intend to earn while talking about something informative.
We earn while we learn so it's two birds in one stone.

I've learned a lot in this forum too

Sometimes I just read here when I have financial problems.
Surprisingly there are threads here related to it.

So, i dont agree on banning all signature campaigns..
It's our bread and butter.

It's disheartening though that people are abusing such feature.
Well if you see one just report them..
Or ignore?

Theymos is the boss. I'm not about to start a mutiny especially for something that is just going to up my workload and cause me nothing but stress and headaches. I can't do anything without his help anyway because it's futile trashing threads or banning accounts when they'll just run the campaigns off site hence why their signatures need to be blacklisted.

If I may ask, why don't you have your way?

I don't think that this proposal is something controversial, especially considering that these campaigns are incentivising people to break the rules of the forum.
When those of a higher power have shown by lack of action that they couldn't care less about this, does it not then fall to the responsibility of the next in power (yourself and other global moderators/staff members) to take action?

If I had my way any problem campaign would be given a warning and would have few days to clean up their campaign and PM me a list of removed users. If people were still spamming/copying and pasting etc all their bounty and announcement threads would be trashed and their accounts would be banned. Their campaign signatures would also need to be blacklisted but getting theymos to do that seems unlikely as I've requested several be removed but no action was taken. Banning spammers is utterly futile when there's literally hundreds on each campaign just churning out utter shite or even worse copying and pasting (and you ban one account and they just keep on evading on their half dozen other ones). Several new campaigns pop up every month and this is going to get worse the more people realise you can literally get paid millions of dollars for nothing but coming up with a half-assed Ann thread.


Most campaigns don't care. If there's no repercussions why would they? If shitcoin campaigns started having their threads here trashed and accounts banned I'm sure they'd soon change their ways because it would severely restrict their cash cow. These scam ICOs are regularly taking in millions of dollars in funding and it's all promoted by spammers destroying the forum in the process.


I have no idea either. He either doesn't really care, doesn't have time or would rather let the forum/community largely run itself (straight into the ground).

That's an Utopian dream. How do you force campaigns to hire managers that are good, or how do you force campaigns to even hire managers at all? Take the Waves campaign as an example. It is full of illiterate, account farming, filth. I had requested a list of enrolled participants and offered to clean it up for free. After talking to the manager(s?), I was supposed to get this list. Eventually they just went dark and I've never heard back from them.

---

Up until today, even after discussing issues with theymos for (a total of) several hours in the last year or so, I can't understand his stance/view on this issue.

The weeds have taken over the yard. There is almost no grass left. Is it still practical to cut off every root one by one?

In most cases the more experienced campaign managers are doing a great job, so that's not an issue here. Problem however is that not all campaigns are managed by capable managers.

It's insane how certain spammers constantly get approved by managers running a signature campaign (mostly ICO related), and thus completely fail to enforce any sort of proper rules.

It might partly be due to the price that has gone up significantly, which attracts new users, but the level of spam and gibberish on this forum has literally exploded in the last months.

Best thing about the world is......a VPS is cheap, I think(without looking down), this is Small Machines Forums and that is free software and a domain can be had for a very small amount, so anyone that is not happy with the way that this forum is run by its owners can leave and start their own within an hour.  There are people that love to tell others how to run their businesses and yet they do not own or run anything more than a cheap wallet account and a handful of nothing.
I think the Mods and devs of this forum and the Signature campaigns managers, together all are doing great job and giving great effort to make this forum the most successful and productive one.

It will be a bad idea to ban signature campaigns a few users are making decent income with that and you want to spoil their meal ?

If you want to remove weeds, you must cut off their roots. Like hilariousandco and few other mentioned, as long as managers are doing their work by banning spammers from their campaign, spam can be reduced by a large margin.

Signature campaigns is the source of income in most users in this forum and this campaigns is the reason why the forum is active also the forum is making money with this campaign and good traffic for the site to rank up. So why take it away when it's also doing so much good for the site and it's users, sig campaigns was meant to adverstise the owners site or product,good and services. It is the spammers and sold accounts should be banned not this campaigns.

Always remember that 'Money talks crazy". It's all about money money.

I don't really get it on why you have to focus on the group instead of the individual doing it. By banning the signature campaigns, you are most likely trying to destroy the community here. Since these signature campaigns are one of the most popular way of earning extra income, banning it will greatly affect the people who are trying to support their families or relatives. I am a student myself and due to these campaign signatures, I am able to contribute to my family by using my own money to buy what I need instead of them spending.

U see until now i no do any signature campaign.
i watch some above said...signature campaign no have any relationship with rewards, it is marketing tools of webmaster.
And also a good and free deal from bitcointalk (maybe admin can charge them for charity too xd)

I no hate the ppl with campaign as it is a revenue but some of them really sucks, they tell 100% good to the website, nahh....
and sometimes i see their post why so fast increase...ohh is like that.
like faucet abuser, signature campaign can be abused too.

However, banned is quite impossible here as many ppl are include.
The only can do is let bitcointalk user know some post from signature campaign towards their boss is got marketing tactics here .

If the user really don't know the things is true or not can ask the ppl which dont have any signature campaign like me.

Its not possible to ban all signature campaigns. I agree because of signature campaigns there are a lot of unwanted posts.But there are some meaningful posts also and  its a good advertisement for the sites .

It makes the pirates feel better about raping and pillaging to know that the people being beaten to death are suffering along the way, it is kind of like one of those "how are we doing" surveys, I am sure that the advocates for the sig camps appreciate it.

It is funny to hear so many people complain about something that is never going to change.  There is simply not enough people and power behind the issue to make a difference

I think banning the signature campaigns would not stop dr spammy posts around ! Would definitely decrease them though. For me signature campaigns is a great think in this forum, makes them unique. For me is, while reading several posts around found that it actually clear some of mine bitcoin related doubts, so even if the signature campaigns would not exist, I would happily contribute and continue learning from this forum

In my opinion you are wrong , members from bitcoin talk when they do a post on this forum , most of them are checked by moderators and admins . They are not a spamm , maybe just in off topic yeah you can find spamm , but most of posts are real opinions , not spamm
Also i participate always in a signature campaign . I like to help people and get helped with another crypto currency . I l like to keep my tokens earned from campaigns and keep them for a long time .Tthis is not a pathetic ammount of bitcoin , i heard people who earned 3 btc from a campaign . This is not a pathetic ammount and you are very wrong to ban sig campaigns

Those ICOs and companies on the signature links of campaign participants help this forum makes this forum busy. In the process, these signature campaigns help everyone here int he forum so lets get along together. The investors stays in this forum for news which is why developers advertise here.

Well said, they keep telling to obey this rule, obey that and everything they want to implement.
But at the end they are really the one who are doing the dirty works which is just for their own benefit. Damn selfish morons.

I have been to a lot of forums and there they would love to have people who are posting and comments all over the threads. While here they want to kick out everyone and what? Elite people will be the one left?
They should've made a rule that idiots cant enter and they cannot get any knowledge from this forum and opinions are not allowed.
Funny people here. Even made an SMAS to what? To avoid spam? What spam? Those who can't type the very perfect English or not really good at it?
They should've made a US base forum only. 

You do realize that this forum is not only about technical stuff? There are sections for trading, lending, gambling, and so on. What you find unimportant shitposting, other users benefit from. This is a free market. If there's a demand for signature advertising there are people who provide it. Why would you want to interfere and ban anything?
It's funny because this forum is full of liberals and anarchists and the same people who complain about government restrictions are asking for bans. You don't like the police, but you'd like to play its role here.

Geez. I dunno. Hopefully someone only contributes when they have something technically useful to say. I'm over it.

You can add "Any bounty Dev?" to the list too! Half the posts in "altcoin announcement" are like this.

When I get annoyed by spam, I now try to collect enough evidence against the spammers to get them banned.
Example: Users lhmrij and xca900174 are copy/pasting, please permban. Once  hilariousandco digs in he starts banning many more connected accounts.

I agree there are too many shit posters who can't even write proper English, It just gets annoying for me, Just to go through all the crappy posts and make sense of them all, Some of them don't even bother reading the replies and most of the replies are same as before, Also the managers managing their campaigns are crap themselves. SMAS is a right direction in my opinion.

This forum already bans spammers and already has a shitpost patrol...and still the problem is worse than ever.  I've never seen an english language forum with more non english speakers on it, and that's only part of the problem.   There's way too much noise and way too little signal.   Though I'm obviously benefiting from sig campaigns, it wouldn't bother me at all if they were banned.  But as I've said,  the owner derives too much income from it and cares too little to do that.

Can we ban the "RESERVE FOR TRANSLATION" comments too while we are at it? Seriously though bitcointalk is mostly advertisement for altcoins and spamming FUD. But I rather have people doing and saying what they want than being censor.

It is amazing the amount of hatred that people can put together when they really try.  Everyone always thinks that there opinions are the end all and be all of the world and that no one that thinks differently than them can ever have a valid point.

Banning Signature campaigns is banning also the potential income that every participants is getting from it.

It helps new business to be known by others and at the same time giving an opportunity of earning a little bit of bitcoins with this forum then why not ban the spammers or ovbuse nonsense posters instead of raging to ban it all.

better to start a group of hunters for this members that is taking advantage of it.

I do not agree. It's a nice way to make some extra money and share your knowledge at the same time.
Ofcourse some people only post trash, but a lot of people (like me) try to make something decent out of their posts.

It's like saying "Hey, that American guy started doing terrorism, so they all start doing terrorism, so we gotta kill all Americans!"
Is that fair?

I think not! I think we should just stick to the Signature Campaigns 

Regards,
Trump

Ban all sig campaigns. I was surprised to come back after all of these years and realize it was a "thing". It is noise and is a long stretch from the original intent of this forum.

i agree to ban the signature campaign if their rules are explicitly encouraging spamming and trash posts. however, some of the people really need to rely on  certain works in order to make their own lives. some of the signature campaign operators have been allying to deal with those spams IIRC.

Crap quality posters are being taken care of in the SMAS thread it's not the fault of the sig campaign that the forum is being flood by crappy post but by the participants who posts them. How can a campaign manager monitor all their participants if there thousands of em or, 1000-2000 members unless they have some bots to monitor those low quality post like Waves campaign. Sig campaign is not the problem here but rather the lack of understanding to the problem. The devs could develop a software that could automatically delete those crappy post from sig campaign member. You're asking to remove the one reason why the users and forum are earning of your so called crappy sig campaigns, only rich people says that.

Ok, maybe bitcointalk have to ban all altcoin signature campaigns, because their participants makes high part of crap posts and managers doesn't care much about quality of posts in general.
Another idea, I don't know, is it good or not, but I try to share it: Forum need for centralized list of best campaign managers and only they will have right to manage campaigns. Something similar to SMAS, but bigger and mandatory.

Many people were posting here before the era of signatures begun and are still posting (some of them with sigs), why shouldn't they?
If you're doing something anyway and someone offers to pay you for that you'd be stupid not to agree. Campaigns won't be banned because people are free to pay for advertising and free to advertise. This forum is all about freedoms and choices, if you don't like sigs you can disable them, report spamming users, or leave the forum and move to reddit.

Admin of site should make the option

Put a price to buyout ALL signatures on the forum. Maybe I would buy it for fun

Because we all love money obviously. What else do you think we are posting here for? Chit chat?  I wonder what will happen when the business for the more industrialized posters dries up. World famine and mass exodus from the forum?

No one's asking to ban all the signature campaigns,the want to limit the quantity of the participants to be only of high quality posters and maybe establish a rule or  threshold to restrict the participation.

And also this

It's funny how everyone here that's suggesting to ban signature campaigns are all enrolled in them.

It is tedious for both the moderators and signature campaign managers to filter out the spam. In a lot of cases, newbies tend to spam incorrect information and posts without putting any effort into it. They tend to be around in threads such as "When was your first Bitcoin transaction", etc. In some cases, they would just go to random threads and copy what the people above is saying.

The latter is the most annoying kind of spam, even worse if the person above is spreading the wrong information and it would just get amplified. The most we can do is to regulate the campaigns and make sure that they review their participants thoroughly and it is frankly, quite hard for campaigns with a lot of participants.

No, I don't get paid for posts in this section.

Banning sig campaign will not only stop spammers, but also wipe out a large amount of high quality posters. Frankly, if there is no incentive, why would high quality posters visit and spend their time here? There is plenty of money lying around the internet for quality content generators. To speak the least, DO NOT underestimate theymos' BI. He had a reason to allow Sig Campaigns as well as discriminating sig space among various activity level.

To outsiders and people new to the forum the 'helpful and quality posts' you are talking about might seem 'genuinely helpful and oozing quality and substance' but the reality is they are just bloated artificial adhering to the 75-100 characters minimum quota-fulfilling run-of-the-mill generic posts. We can see and smell these from a mile away. This is how things work here - you write a bunch of stuff and you get paid.

Now what is the purpose of this forum? I will tell you. To get traffic and sell ads - major purpose. In-between we have the campaign runners, the campaign farmers, the people picking up scraps from giveaways, the people doing trades, the people scamming, the people trolling, the wannabe forum police, the psychopaths etc. It's a diverse ecosystem depending on you guess what - the signature campaigns.

You have a massive point there. Mostly, people treat it as a way to earn some money by abusing it thru spam, making a lot of account for the purpose of acquiring more Bitcoins which really takes away the real essence and purpose of this forum. And there comes members who ruins the discussion by their messed up grammars which is barely comprehensible.

We can't neglect the fact that there are people who still do quality post and some who come up some ways to counter these people whose purpose is to bleed out money but it seems like it is very hard to do so since the number is growing day by day. I also read that thread regarding Bitcoin Office having insanely 200 accounts.

The point is to seek out those people to never treat it that way and as a member to do their duty to have healthy discussions and report those who are doing bad things to the forum and put those people in their rightful places. But we need to put strict rules regarding ICOs which has a considerable amount of crap posters.

So does we need to ban this campaign which is the most simple and effective solution rather than counter and counter and considering the rising number of these cases? I am now considering it as well since my brain hurts thinking of solutions to counter those. I too myself struggled to find sensible posts nowadays. But I believe we can still regulate it though it would be hard.

To OP, it doesn't mean to do it all your time blocking those people but rather you can do it if you encounter one then do it if you encounter one again. It really is a hassle but an effective way to make those people disappear whenever you browse the forum. I don't mean to take his all time to block them all.

But it's not a reward system for contributing anything of value. If it was there would be no problem with campaigns as they would encourage only quality discussion. The only thing that they currently reward are third-world shitposters who make literally dozens or sometimes hundreds of accounts to take advantage of crapcoin campaigns that will happily accept and pay anyone regardless of content. Your entire posting history could be copy and pastes of others posts or one line sentences of absolutely nothing of substance and they'll get paid for it campaign after campaign.


Nobody has time to spend all day ignoring the literally hundreds of shitposters. People would just leave if they had to do that because if you haven't got a signature it would be mostly pointless posting here. The forum is largely unusable for any worthwhile discussion because the vast majority of the content is by semi-illiterates churning out one sentence of barely intelligible crap on one account after the other purely as a way to earn a living. Many of them will have little to no interest or knowledge of bitcoin at all but only care about it for the money they can bleed out of signature campaigns. And the ico campaigns almost exclusively do little to nothing about the quality of posts on their campaign and several of these campaigns pop up every month accepting as many users as they can get which is often in the hundreds. One farmer alone was caught with over two hundred accounts on one campaign and that will just be the tip of the shitberg.

I dare to disagree. These siganture campaigns in the forum should be treated as a reward system for actively participating and contributing something valuable to the forum itself. It is not solely for financial interests but rather an exchange of ideas and thoughts, a way to learn more and effectively especially to those who have experienced it first hand.

To OP, you can choose to ignore, report, or blacklist them. Signature Campaign managers are implementing strict rules and choosy in picking participants because they knew about this. Maybe some are not that strict enough particularly in the ICOs which have hundreds of participants to look at it one by one.

I believe some of the Signature Campaign managers do review posts by accepted members and reject them if the content value is low. Some earlier post spoke of the newbie's learning what not to do by posting thru trial and error. I believe that with time anyone can become a better poster. Banning all Signature Campaigns is not the solution.

I agree and aside from learning from the post of senior members here they also learned that through signature campaigns they can earn something out of it. Signature campaigns are a way of marketing and advertising tokens or coins that we also take advantage of when we buy those coins. It's just that there are some posters here that are joining signature campaigns and doesn't really have "good quality" posts. Managers should be strict on that supposedly because it's their way of advertising their campaigns.

I would think it's an issue with how some of the signature campaigns are managed.  I think that signature campaign managers should be "scouting" good quality posters that they'd like to promote their product, rather than everyone applying to be a part of a signature campaign, regardless of whether or not they support the product.  When the criteria for accepting people into a campaign is lax, then a high quantity of low quality posts are the result.

Of course this would require a lot of time and due diligence for the campaign managers, and not everyone may have that type of time.

Some newbies come here for the signature campaigns and after some time, they are gaining some knoweledge and they start to post some really intresting post. They start to invest, to mine. I think it is a good thing for everyone, this forum was made from the beginng to give some advices to people, who are intrested in cryptocurrencies. Signature campaigns is a new way to atract people to Crypto world, soo why not?

I don't really notice anything negative coming from it that is disruptive, nor do I care if someone ignores me because I have one. On the other hand, I wouldn't care if they banned it either, but that would be difficult to enforce on a case by case basis.. it would mean that anyone who mentions any coin in their sig could technically be campaigning for it.

If you want annoying signatures, try the wrestling forum. Large animated gifs taking up megs of bandwidth that show women jiggling their butts and other assorted space hogging nonsense.  The sigs here are not intrusive, and if people post replies just for the sake of pumping their garbage, it's not something I notice enough to care about.

of course they are, but a fair amount of users are just spamming the boards, posting rubbish, and just copying articles from other places as they get paid per post, and they are a large part of the everyday user base. They make it harder for the people offering good advice, and discussions on coins and hardware because its filled with paid spam.

From the perspective of the owners of this forum, they would likely lose a lot more members than they would gain by doing this, and thus they would lose money. Therefore, I doubt this will happen. But I agree that it would make for a higher quality forum.

Avoid generalizing signature campaign members just because you hate them. A certain post can be judge subjectively depending on how a certain person sees it but still there were cases that a single post can be proven nonsensical at the first time you sees it. If you were going to blame someone, then blame those who unjustly and intentionally posting spammed comments or just trolling the community. I sometimes didn't reach my quota on posting and I am not paid sometimes but I don't mind it because I only post when I'm feel like to post but not I'm obligated to complete it.

It's just another form of advertising. I think moderation is what needs to be improved.

SMAS.

Well, if theymos don't see signature spam problem, why sig campaigns should be banned?
If bitcointalk would disable signature campaigns, I'm sure that forum would loose big part of traffic. It's obvious that theymos don't want it
If you don't want to see posts made by people who are wearing paid signatures, just use DannyHamilton ignore list.
Signature spam is serious problem and reading posts made by spammers is just waste of time. But still, there are many good guys with paid signatures, even some staff members wearing it.

That's pretty much sums up general internet in 2017.

I get 0.04 a week,if you call that a pathetic amount in bitcoins,you're too rich for this forum.
(Shouldn't your name be on the donator list already?)

You did your part,really that helped in the Fight Against The Spam Combat so much.

They don't undermine the forum's advertisements.
A lot of people come here for the signature campaigns. Traffic is what drives the forum's advertisements as well.

Stricter rules aren't needed when the manager of a certain campaign just selects non spammers. Non spammers have a natural posting behavior, they don't show any signs of ignorance when it comes to the rules of this forum, they don't chain quote others, they don't post with half broken English, they are correcting others where needed, they write with decent sentence formatting, etc. Seriously, a quick look into someone's recent post history is enough to see what kind of poster it is. And mostly when spammers get banned/kicked from a campaign, they confirm that they only post to get paid by suddenly stopping with posting completely, or they stop posting as frequent as they used to do.

Agreed that they should be banned. They encourage too many low quality posts. It also undermines the forum's very own advertisements.

Not really, no. You shouldn't be a signature campaign manager in the first place if you're not competent enough to combat spam. A simple solution, to at least avoid a fair amount of users would be to adopt the SMAS list:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/smas-signature-managers-against-spam-light-version-1545652

That will be Time Consuming and its not worth the effort to go through each and a single reply and try to make sense of the response. The current system is flawed. If there were only some kind of voting system for each reply just like reddit, Only replies with X amount of Upvotes will be considered to be eligible for the payment. Also instead of sorting the replies by "time", They should be sorted by their "upvotes". That's one way of only getting the job done.

I feel this is too drastic. One compromise would be for sig campaign managers to implement stricter rules when it comes to posting. Only constructive and sensical posts should be considered eligible for payment.

But I do see the problem with the increase in non-sensical posts. Quite annoying actually.

Oh come on drop all pretense already. Everyone is posting on this forum for their financial interests only. Users, mods, admins, the whole package. It doesn't matter if you have more green than the Brazil national flag. This forum is one gigantic artificial advertisement and nothing more.

While it may be hypocritical of me to say so, I believe that the fault is left on the higher management of this forum rather than the signature campaign themselves. theymos doesn't care about signature spammers polluting the forum, which as a result has it so that every other staff member cannot do anything about it without going against his word. I already know of at least one staff member that has adopted the "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude, mostly due to theymos' distance from the actual problems that are arising on the forums that he manages.

However, the forum is getting consistent ad revenue, so there is obviously nothing going wrong.

---

As for how to actually fix the problem, there is little that you can do about the lack of higher management. I know that several staff members have attempted to reach out to theymos about the issue or even try to battle the issues themselves. Sadly, these fixes either garner controversy or simply have limited effects.
There are a few ways that you could go about changing things from a user's perspective. You could try to maintain an ignore list like DannyHamilton or gadman2. However these could have limited use and require a fairly high amount of maintenance with updating. Another way that you could go about tackling this is by modifying the Signature adblock script to hide all posts that meet the criteria set by the program. If you are unsure how to do this, I could try to throw together an edit for you.

One final word however, while signature spam is a problem not all users wearing a paid signature are spammers. Users such as shorena and achow101 have given/give valuable input to the forum whilst wearing a paid signature. Regardless of what method you go about using, it could be worthwhile white listing some members from it to retain as much value as you can on the forum.

Well if you are so mad with sig campaigns then you can either report these people and them to your ignore list or do what DannyHamilton does.

He just chose to ignore every signature member lol.
Take a look:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/my-personal-ignore-list-973843

It has been discussed many times before already, and the result remains the same ~ signature campaigns will not be banned.

I can only agree with the high level of spam here. For a while it was reduced to a certain extent, but I must note that it has become worse in the last weeks.

It's likely a combination of sold accounts and newbies joining here due to the increased price. It's difficult to find a thread that is worth posting in, or a poster that is worth quoting.

ban all sig campaigns is not a good idea. ban spammer could be the best option.

I'm a hypocrite but I agree with you.  My attitude at the end of 2015 was "If you can't beat em, join em".  But English is my only language and I don't plop nonsensical scuntposts every 20 seconds.   

If this forum did away with campaigns,  I'd still post here.   It's a good idea.

Days on end wasted scrolling through nonsensical, unoriginal and distasteful posts.

Members spamming the community with comments to advance their sig campaign earnings, prostituting themselves for pathetic amounts of Bitcoin.

It's a plague and it must end.


Discuss.