Topic: Ideas for improving post quality? - page 10. (Read 4900 times)

Well having a copper membership does not provide for any protection against getting banned. If you pay $40 (+ a $20 tx fee) for a copper membership, then you will need to earn at least $60 (plus the cost of spending your earnings) just to break even, so users have an incentive to not engage in activity that would result in them getting banned.

I think it shows they have a genuine interest in spamming the boards to earn revenue from their sigs.

Probably because doing so would create a false sense of security, and would create incentives for users to scam instead of selling their account if they need money...

This could work. I might suggest making receiving x merit points in a month be worth y activity, then increase the activity required to obtain each ranking.


I am a little more hesitant to support something like this. While many people use signatures to earn income from advertisements, some people also use signatures to make political statements, support certain causes, etc., and I don't think it would be a good idea to prevent that in certain threads.


When an outsized percentage of users participating in a signature campaign are banned for post quality related reasons, the company behind the campaign should get called out by the forum. This is somewhat similar to what caused the PrimeDice signature campaign to close down, except that long standing users within the community were calling out the harm that the PD signature campaign was causing to the forum. This would give incentives to those ultimately behind signature campaigns to weed out low quality advertisers, as if they don't they will be known as someone contributing to the spam problem.


I would also suggest limiting the boards that contribute to "potential" activity. This would make it more difficult (and less profitable) to farm accounts with low quality posts.

On a similar note as above, I would suggest tweaking the "features" of signatures that each ranking can wear, being more restrictive to those who have lower rankings. We could also increase the amount of activity each person needs, while also increasing the number of ways someone can earn activity (see above for re merit points).


I do like the idea of a paid membership (copper) to allow users to "skip" the process of accumulating activity points to achieve a certain ranking status. If someone buys a copper membership, at the very least, it shows they have a genuine interest in participating in conversations.

I hope my simple text sigs are not too intrusive.

Signatures are a small way that a forum can say thank you to contributors. That alternative - paid to post boards - tend to be a lot worse in my opinion. I don't spend a lot of time on boards that don't allow signatures. Large text in sigs, or intrusive banners are another turnoff. A simple text string with a max of 3 lines, and a size restriction should be sufficient. It might reduce the clicks for the sponsors, but that could be a good thing, and might contribute to a reduction in spam posting.

Removing signatures all together would be the best, but atleast with this one we would have a few safe places without all the spam.
Demanding a certan rank to post would only lead to more account sales no matter how it is done.

This will fix everything. Just do it.

I don't think prizes are a good thing. It would just create bad feeling if one didn't win one.

You've rejected account sales, but I hope you will reconsider this. Account sales mean that the reputation rankings are meaningless - I ignore them, and form my own opinions from current posting activity. Also, it is another thing contributing to bulk posting of low value comments.

Blocking signatures completely would be a bad thing in my opinion. I use my sig for various minor things, such as selling bitcoin domain names. This is the only option in this forum if one wants to offer Bitcoin domain names. The market place is full of not very interesting ( to me ) things, and threads are constantly being bumped. However, the problem with signatures seems to come from supporting signature campaigns that posters don't use themselves. They just see them as a means of gaining revenue, and don't care if they are honest, or if it damages their reputation by promoting the sites. One solution could be to restrict links to domains that are owned by the poster. I believe that this would cut out many of the posts that are made to scratch a few Satoshi.

An open board for discussion where a (full) member requirement for posting would be a good idea in my opinion. This could provide very useful reading for guests and junior members, and could generate some great discussions. Advertising on this board could be more valuable for the forum owners as well.

On a personal note, I would like to see a dedicated board for the sale of crypto related domain names. A paid sub-board with registrar advertising, where the registrar accepts Bitcoin or other cryptos, could provide another source of revenue for the forum.

Aside from the possible account sales moving to external sites or platforms, is there any other reason behind ruling this out? The main issue is the account sales in the first place, it would be best to allow a single account for each person only (I know it will be hard with the use of similar VPN's and etc... but there are other forums that actually identify each users regardless of them using similar VPN's and etc...). Not sure how hard that is to get implemented, but I think it will be worth the hassle. Also certain users can have their accounts reviewed (by mods) and if their behavior fits within the forum rules, they could create other accounts (for the right reason and not for joining in other signature campaigns), something like only a single account (per person) is allowed to have a paid signature.

The idea is there but needs more finishing touches and resources (to make it work).

I fully support this idea.

I think this is much needed in Off-topic and Politics & Society sections (not just trial, implement it right away on those sections).

I am also grateful to theymos for this post because this has been discussed in meta so many times that we needed the owner to express his views on it.

First of all, I think we would need a definition of what quality and spam are, because if we adopt a tough definition of spam, almost 100% of the Bitcoin Discussion Section would have to be deleted whereas if the definition was softer that wouldn’t be needed.

Then, here is what I think of Theymos’ proposals:


The earning merit points part could work to some extent, but I disagree with the BTC part because that wouldn’t improve anything, rather you would be overpaying people who are already writing quality posts and getting paid a lot.

I mean, people getting those prices would be people in the Chip Mixture Campaign and Senior Members and above of “quality” (well-managed) campaigns, who are already quality posting and getting a lot of money for posting.

I think there is more than enough post quality on this forum, but the problem is one can barely see it because of all the trash. If you want post quality to shine you just need to get rid of the trash. I don’t think most shitposters are going to improve their quality no matter what measures are taken, like giving a prize. Some may do, but most of them won’t even be able to do it even if they try. See all the uneducated people from third-world countries signing up every day on this forum in the hope that they are going to be able to make a living from it by posting one-liners. Do you think they are going to improve their quality posts? I don’t think so.

So, instead of hoping that shitposters are going to improve their quality by giving them prices, we must find a solution for getting rid of shitposters.


It seems a good idea at first sight, I’ve seen senior sections on other forums, not because of the so-called quality but for other reasons. What I don’t see is what will happen afterwards: I mean, if that section is created you will get the Bitcoin Discussion quality section will few posts and few replies and you would still have the current Bitcoin Discussion section, which wouldn’t have been improved.

Another problem I see here is that if signatures are disallowed, do you think many people are going to post on that section? I mean, think, for example, of people in the Chip Mixer campaign, who have to make an effort to write 50 weekly quality posts and are getting paid 0,0375 (weekly), which is around $700 (almost 3000$ monthly). Do you think they are going to post a lot there? I don’t see it.

These are my thoughts on Theymos’ proposals, I see if I come up with ideas for improving quality but without a definition I think it will be difficult because as we have discussed other times on this section, my idea of spam differs than most people here, so I’ve seen many people saying that the entire Bitcoin Discussion section should be trashed and I don’t agree with that.

P.S: I was re-reading this post and I have to say that I strongly agree with the following proposals by hilariousetc:

I'd support this idea.
The section can also be used to test the impact of globally removing signatures.

Removing certain sections from contributing to activity/post counts has been discussed in the past, but never was integrated.
Was there a reason this discussion vanished/idea was dropped?

I'm of the same mindset as you on this. If there is a paid entrance into the forums that would cut down, if not eliminate entirely, the multiple accounts that are made just to spam. I think that it would also offset your concern for Idea 2.

I'm glad you're finally at least open to discussion about what can be done as the forum has become unmanageable and is only going to get worse as more and more people realise you can earn decent money just by posting (or copy and pasting), but why have you ruled these out? Removing signatures from ranks and making them a paid privilege is one of the only ways to stop account farming pretty much 100%. It's never going to stop as long as signatures are tied to ranks/activity. All it does is encourage mass shitposting to 'rank up'. You don't even have to remove signatures fully either. Maybe everybody can only have some sort of very basic signature like yours or the current Junior or Member level signature and for a bigger one with colour etc you have to donate. I think this would essentially price most shitposters out of having unlimited accounts and limit them to only what they can afford. You could also even offer them alongside being able to rank up naturally over time. It wont stop account farming fully but it will cut it down considerably and I'm sure many users would much rather pay $100 or so to bypass the restrictions to get a bigger signature rather than have to wait 6-16 months or whatever it is to just shitpost to achieve Full Member or Hero status etc.

Also, prohibiting account sales would also help and improve the image of the forum. It's not exactly difficult to do or enforce either. Most people selling accounts here now are either just hackers, shitposting farmers, or straight up scammers trying to sell non-existent accounts they don't even have. Allowing people to purchase the signatures from us would put a stop to this shady business completely.


I certainly wouldn't be against trying something like this but I think it will just cause more confusion and more threads asking why they're not a Member yet or begging to be voted for or whatever.


This is actually something I was going to suggest. How about we trial a sub board of bitcoin discussion where posts in there don't count towards activity or post count and signatures aren't displayed at all? Sig spammers and farmers would leave it well enough alone then and only people who were interested in decent discussion would contribute. The forum is currently plagued with what I call 'hit and runners' (and others have noticed this too). Basically users will just make a quick half-assed post consisting of a sentence or two then move onto the next thread and repeat the process. You can quote and respond to them either calling out their incorrect bullshit they've just posted or offering an intelligent contribution to further something they've said but you'll never get a response as they'll never return as they don't care to actually have an intelligent discussion about anything as that's too much effort for them; they just want to hash out their one or two liners as quickly as possible for payment and move on to the next thread because time is money and they get paid no more or less whether their post is 1 line or 10.


This is also something I've suggested in the past. It would be good for campaigns and giveaway threads who want to limit participation to only certain membergroups and above, so being able to set certain restrictions on who can post in there would be beneficial. Maybe being able to block specific usernames as well for those people who feel like they're being constantly harassed or trolled by certain individuals.


Punishing lazy campaigns and their managers would go a long way or just blacklisting their signatures would help (which is what was meant to happen with the Signature Guidelines thread). It can't be acceptable for campaigns to do nothing about spam at all and if they started having their accounts banned and/or threads trashed they'd soon get the idea. I also don't think it would be a bad idea charging ICOs a fee to make their Announcements here or to run a signature campaign as it's these lazy crapcoin campaigns that are causing the most headaches and 99% of spam and staff workload and they should have to compensate for that. The forum loses revenue every time someone chooses to run a signature campaign over bidding on forum ad slots and the worst thing is staff have to clean up their mess for free whilst they rake in millions.

Why do you not tackle the root of the problems?

Do something against shitposters from the 3rd world that come here to spam 1 liners with 100 accounts each.
Just require 50-100$ per account (notice you are not paying to wear a sig) - rest can stay like it is and you wouldnt need to change anything.


edit:

Idea 1 is bad - you know how problematic the trust list is - this will be even a bigger cluster fuck.

Idea 2 is fine, i can totaly live with sections completely free from sigs and sig spammers, but this will hurt the forums pocket for sure  

Forum traffic will be decrease a lot


People still can do account sales on other forum

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2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures.

The project owner only can't advertise on that section but they still can advertise on other section,right?

honestly, i quite like both the ideas you've come up with;

while the prize would give a nice incentive for post quality, i can't really picture in my head how this would work out in practice. assuming the voting would be done manually by actual people, and since merit points would have to be awarded for a large number of users (maybe the entire userbase?), id like to think some automated system would work better, with select individuals running quality checks every now and then. maybe even implement an increasing penalty to merit points for spam / off topic posts (with a 'cooldown' to reset the incremental penalties), with a temporary removal of signature privileges if they have their points go negative. not really worded that well, but just some rambling thoughts on the idea. if you could elaborate a bit how you plan to actually implement this merit points idea i'd appreciate it.

i'd wholeheartedly agree to the idea of having a 'disable signatures' idea for thread starters; it'd be a simple fix for people who want an actual discussion that would eliminate a lot of spammers. however, i feel these threads would be 'covered up' really quickly by threads that allow signatures, just from the fewer number of users that would post in those threads, and would just die out real quick. a 'serious discussion' section though, would eliminate this issue, although im not sure how many people would frequent those sections enough. in addition, how many of these sections would have to be created? maybe one for every main topic as seen on the index page (one for bitcoin serious discussions, one for mining, one for marketplace, etc), but wouldn't want to flood the forum with sections that may or may not be 'dead.'

just some rambling thoughts on the ideas you've presented, but ill try to think up of some well thought out ideas in the next few days and post them here later.

also, any consideration for an account related issues section (bans, locked / hacked accounts) in meta? it seems those threads have been flooding meta quite a bit lately.

What are everyone's ideas for improving post quality?

I have mostly ruled out:

 - Removing signatures or sig ads globally.
 - Requiring payment to wear sig ads.
 - Banning account sales.

A couple of ideas that have been floating around in my head:

1. To attain ranks above Member, you'd have to earn some number of merit points. Merit points would be awarded in a monthly vote on best posts of the previous month, with various measures (TBD) to prevent gaming of the vote. Winning merit points might also come with a BTC prize.

2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.

What do you think of these ideas, and what other ideas do people have?