Topic: Disable signatures/bounties til a user reaches full member status. - page 4. (Read 2471 times)

This completely ignores the fact that most high-ranking members didn't join bitcointalk to shitpost for bounties.  That's a relatively recent development, and by limiting or prohibiting signature advertising in the lower ranks, it discourages people from making new accounts and ruining the forum with shitposting. 

I don't see a lot of Heros and Legendaries making a living here by writing complete nonsense.  That's almost exclusively a noob issue.  It also sounds like you're extremely butthurt about the merit airdrop back in January.  That happened because I think Theymos realizes the higher ranks have earned their way to those ranks.  In addition, most of the merit abuse I've seen has been with the lower ranks, which is not surprising since they're the ones who want it the most.

If the signature needs to be disabled, that should be done for all the members. There were many high ranked members involved in merit abuses cases. Especially, the high ranked members who got the rank by default should be treated same as a newbie.

It's the global persective that makes it difficult to control signatures. Individual members ignoring posters or signatures don't really make much difference. The search ranking, and guest views are far more significant, and are the reason that scammy signatures and spammy posts are so damaging to Bitcoin Talk. If a guy hunting for crypto information clicks on a a link to a rubbish thread, as a result of good SE placement for his search phrase, he is likely to ignore BT in the future as a result of its apparent low grade content.

Disable all the signatures,dont be biased,there is no one here in the right position to remove the ability to earn of anyone.
Being here first doesnt mean that you are in a good position to tell us what to do.If theymos really wanted this thing a long time ago why he didnt tried to? because its unfair to the newcomers.

A signature does not avoid spamming, it has the opposite effect seen from a global perspective. Signatures normally require you to post a certain minimum amount of posts per week in specific sections. In order to comply, spammers tend to post quick gibberish posts with disregard to the actual conversation going on. This, done on a large scale, becomes a spam fest. Obviously this attitude is not restricted to specific ranks on the whole, but it is present with larger representation on the lower ranks than on the higher rank.

The idea behind making it more difficult to bear a signature (be it by rank, merit, whatever other mechanism), is to lower the overall spam. The principal being that, by doing this, spammers will have more of a Haw attitude and move on elsewhere to find their cheese, than a Hem attitude that deems them to stay put spamming, even though the cheese is running out ('who moved my cheese' allegory in case someone’s not following here).

How does a signature avoid a low rank member spamming in bitcointalk? I really cannot understand that.

A low rank member will keep spamming and posting shit with or without a signature. I agree that stricter rules are necessary and this can be done by the forum side. Meaning more moderators that can keep the quality of the forum in a high level.

This is why I wrote that it should not be mandatory to use this ignore function, and it will be useful when the merit system will work 100% as it was designed and every legit user gets the merit he deserves, in that case this would be an easy solution to let people avoid shitposts.
As soon as people start to use this ignore function, bounty managers would realize that the shitposters' posts won't show up at all in the forum, so they won't pay for them. This would stop a part of the spam, not all of them.
I know it's not the near future, it was just an idea

I'm glad someone else has voiced the thought that I've had for some time now.  These shitposting bounty hunters have to get referred to bitcointalk from somewhere, and it's goddamn ridiculous.  I picture billboards along unpaved highways all over Asia & Africa advertising how much wealth can be achieved with little work, and I'm sure word of mouth must be huge as well.

I fully support this suggestion, as well as the one hilariousandco made that newbies should have to earn at least 1 merit in order to rank up to Jr. Member. 

The merit system has improved things in so far as people who are capable of making good posts have really started to make excellent ones, but I don't think it's cut down on the shitposting at all.  Bitcoin Discussion, Economics, and a handful of other sections are still full of awful, incoherent nonsense.  I do think that in order to combat this, there needs to be more restrictions put in place for noobs. 

And it's not like all of the suggestions would have to be implemented all at once.  Theymos could try something like what Yahoo62278 suggested here, or what hilariousandco and others have suggested--put in place one thing and see what happens.  If it has a minimal effect, try another suggestion.

A handful of them are, and so am I. I am all down, for new changes, that might help this forum. Especially because I have learnt so much, the only way I can repay is by helping it out,in its desperate times.

That wouldn't be of much use, I really want to know how good the autoreply bot is, tons of alt accounts can be operated from there, without logging in. People just might prefer that.

I have been saying this for months now, theymos should just make a guideline for signature campaigns and an official set of rules. There are just a few stickies here and there(by theymos) saying what is allowed and what isn't, but it would be really helpful, if he compiles one list, with new issues coming by everyday, that list could really help sorting things out.

And literally, any suggestions that anyone is coming up is related to restrictions. There should be another possibility without having those restrictions.

I don't see how governments being unfriendly towards bitcoin, is related to people using a VPN to access bitcointalk.

In a few countries where VPN is banned, I have heard stories that random officers started checking people's phones to see if they had VPN installed or not. I don't believe that story, but I can see them doing that.
The new softwares that come out don't work well, they mostly use the same blacklisted IPs the other VPNs do.

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How does this help with the Spam problem? Its just personal preference. And there are legit users who haven't earned little or any merits, who have more than average level of posts. I don't think this would be that great of an idea.

Its simple.
Because most of newbie /jr can be bots.

The forum can't refuse Campaigns-it's business. It's no secret that most of the forum users are people who have to earn their miserable cents in the advertised here  projects. Remove these components and the forum will turn into an elite club of crypto-currency lovers.
You can not impose any restrictions, people are enterprising, will find ways to circumvent the prohibitions.
Moreover, it is impossible to introduce a fee-this will cause a growth in negative feedback and negative attitudes towards the forum.
The most reasonable solution against spam is the organization of work following the example of Yahoo:
1.The publication of authentication in the teem  and the publication of reports in the form.
2. Means from bots is adding to the own post of authentication the  captcha-answer,
 for example:
link to the topic of the forum: the 1st word in the 5th sentence.
Thus, each user will learn to read articles about the crypto-currency).

I have a big problem also. Why do we need to have pages and pages with people posting their twitter/facebook reports instead of having a google sheet report when they can upload manually the reports ? Also in my opinion, bounties should be restricted to a certain number of people and I can agree with the fact that a full member status must be achieved in order to join in any bounties but the main problem is still the hundreds of accounts posting only twitter/facebook reports. I remember good old days of bounties, when you checked the bounty thread just to see others opinions about the project,bounty situation and many others but now all I can see is this spam of social media reports and today I saw a full page of just one post with twitter reports that simply made me sad.

Yes, I think this is not a good thing for forums, because I also find members with Full Member rank and even hero accounts in this forum who become spammers, Maybe we can think of a better solution,


I would rather agree with this, so if he is a member and having 15 merit that means he is a person who has quality in the post and although this is not entirely true but I think this way is much better than banning accounts under full member using signature,

Honestly, I have often been in bewilderment as to why this hasn't been implemented. Posters dropping comments without even bothering to read the OP (this is more rampart in signature bounties/campaigns). I hope CM would start negging such stupid blind posters.


I don't think shitposting is ICO specific. It's just that those who manage the campaigns are too lazy to follow up what posters put out there on the threads. I sincerely wish those who manage bounties would sit up and do the needful.


This is sadly true! I have seen legendary members make unbelievable shitposts.

English is a second language to me. Although, it's a little different as I learned Welsh, and English at the same time growing up. Although, initially I predominately spoke Welsh. That isn't the case anymore, because of the amount of people speaking Welsh is dwindling, and thus my Welsh is becoming rusty/forgotten. Point being as long as they can string up a sentence which is comprehensible it isn't a problem if it's their 2nd or 10th language.


It's really not needed. I would say that the majority of the work the moderators do is dealing with spam.

The problem is that there are incentives to do bad things in the forum, such as paying people to advertise while making crap posts as said advertising creates exposure for what is being advertised and there are no real consequences to doing this. This is in addition to incentives for people to make low effort posts they are being paid for by the number of posts.

There is no easy solution because most solutions will affect those who are not causing harm.

Let's implement an ignore system (which is not mandatory to use) with different levels, like this:
- No ignore (freedom)
- Small ignore (ignoring only blatant spammers, scammers, etc...)
- Medium ignore (ignoring more spammers, scammers)
- Strong ignore (ignoring nearly every spammer, scammer)
- Reversed ignore (whitelist, everyone else is ignored automatically).

If it's not mandatory to use the ignore list, people fighting for freedom can't have any argument, because people will be free to choose if they want to ignore spammers or not...

This needs some (or a lot of) users to maintain the ignore lists.

But on the long run (when the merit system will be fine tuned) we can set up the ignore system like this:
- No ignore (can see everyone)
- Small ignore (ignoring users with default merit, who haven't gathered additional merits)
- Medium ignore (ignoring those who gathered less than 10% additional merits for their rank)
- Strong ignore (ignoring those who gathered less than 30% additional merits for their rank)

In this case, ignore lists are not needed, it can be automated (and still not mandatory to use, to let people choose if they really want to read shitposts...)
This needs the merit system to work as expected, so it needs time, but it can be a kind of automated solution.

EDIT:
I've changed my mind.
Why not to implement the second solution immediately, to test it? If it's not mandatory, people can not complain about it.
For newbies, who had no chance to gain merits, there will be the merit sources (with no ignore list activated of course) so they will have the chance to gather some merits to escape the ignore lists.

I agree with you, but I think bitcointalk has to do something against this huge amount of spammers/bots.
They keep posting everywhere just for increase their rank (or they're trying to...) and this will penalize the entire community.
That's why maybe making strict rules for signatures would be great for the community.

I don’t understand why so many people around here think it is okay to tell people how to conduct business and how they should be saying things.

This forum is an advocate for freedom and likes to give people as much freedom as possible.

How about allowing affiliate links in signatures? This would allow bounty managers to reward affiliates based on the effectiveness of their signatures, and not just based on their skills as graffiti artists and polluters.