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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
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.
What do you think of these ideas, and what other ideas do people have?
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.
completely agree with you! And glad that they began to take action, the forum turned into a trash can, find a clever text is very difficult
