Topic: Just remove signatures already. As in delete, disable, gone. - page 16. (Read 44870 times)

Bitmixer seems really concerned about the need to limit spam. IMO another good practice could be forfeiting sig ad payments to spammers and giving them to initiatives like Help the forum and earn Bitcoins!. Something like a Pigovian tax to curb spam - spam can be considered a negative externality.
I would like an activity-linked payment system, too; however, i'm not sure advertisers find it good enough for them.

There were signature campaigns in 2012. BFL was renting out signature space here in 2012. Although it is my understanding that they did not really catch on and become more popular until late 2013/early 2014.

IMO the best solution would be very aggressive against signature spammers in banning them when they make rubbish posts.

Another option would be to publish a spam report that monitors how much spam is associated with each of the various signature campaigns. Then you could push people to not patronize companies that have their campaigns associated with a lot of spam

This is a good point that the max payout does something similar to linking to activity however, in my opinion, linking to activity was even better because as an advertizing poster, you didn't need to post anythign at all in order to get a little payment.  Therefore there was no incentive to post anymore than when you actually had something to say.  The old bitmixer campaign was a model situation, in my opinion.  I guess at some point they must have felt like they weren't getting their money's worth as advertizers, though, because, alas, things have changed.

A capped amount BTC will do the same as linking payments to activity instead of posts. Both Bitmixer and Bitcoin Scratchticket campaigns have caps on the amount they will pay for posts - 0.035BTC, Bitmixer and 0.010BTC, Bitcoin Scratchticket - thus limiting the incentives to spamming posts to the moon. Problems with spam come when unscrupolous campaign managers tell enrollees they will pay posts even over maximum limits like Bit-X formerly did.

Nice to see you've noticed that - mostly I remember how the forum was back in 2012 before there were any ad sig campaigns - the main problem it had then was the "forum rank" being related just to the number of posts (so a huge amount of +1 posts were appearing).

Back then what happened was that "activity" was introduced - a great solution to making the silly posts pointless (and it really helped cleaned the forum up). But then in 2014 these ad sig campaigns started introducing more crap posts than we have ever seen before.

It is a shame to see a forum that used to provide solutions to problems simply "give up" and let the ad sig spammers win.

Along the lines of what DOOMad was saying, back in the day the bitmixer campaign was offering a small amount of money to wear their signature no matter whether you posted in a given week or not---they based it on activity, which means that they were paying for posts on the board which were already there.  That scheme was wonderful, I think, because there was no incentive to put any posts beyond the 14 in a 2 week period which buys more activity points.  Too bad they discontinued this program, I guess.

Based on what I've seen, the easiest fix that causes the least collateral damage is, you should stop campaigns placing a limit on the minimum number of posts per whatever the timeframe is.  I tend not to post a huge amount and mainly just in areas that are of genuine interest to me, unless I'm bored and feel like chucking an opinion in somewhere (and sig or not that's still going to happen).  That's why I picked a campaign that doesn't require 50 posts a month, or 20 per week, like some of the others do in order to "qualify" for a payment.  If you're forcing users to post a certain amount, it makes sense that some of them are going to abuse it and post crap.  Get rid of those silly minimum requirements and I bet you'll see an improvement in quality. 



But to raise a counterpoint, would the lack of a signature have improved their reading comprehension so that they wouldn't have posted that reply?  Sig or not, people are still more than capable of missing the point entirely.  Not everyone with a paid sig is the same and I don't think it's particularly fruitful to tar everyone with the same brush.  I can't claim that all my posts are perfect, but I doubt anyone can.  Also, please don't go until AT is finished.   

The Staff/Admins have been considering new methods for counteracting signature spam without necessarily banning paid sig advertisements or removing the signature space. If I'm not misinterpreting, most everyone wants to keep the signature space for personal use in play. Removing signatures all together, "As in delete, disable, gone." is a very unlikely senario at this point. Our most promising lead is to add an Ignore Signature option, so that people can turn off signatures they dont want to see. That would ignore all signatures that are the same so one hit of the ignore button for a particular sig would ignore all of the sigs of that design by that campaign. That would require a few additional clicks on the user's end, but if you just casually browse, ignoring signatures that you don't like as you see them it shouldn't take long to have them all ignored (if you so choose)

The effects of that, would be signature advertisements would then become less effective, as people who choose to ignore the annoying signatures no longer are forced to view them, reducing the value of spamming. On the flip side, those lower payments could incentivise additional spamming if people are trying to maintain what they had been earning prior, in which case it becomes that much easier to spot them and remove those people. Spamming is really our only motivation here, we don't care if people want to make a few extra bucks per month posting as they would regularly. We wish that signature campaign managers would work a little bit harder to prevent spam on their ends, but one person can't do the best job of reviewing thousands of posts to make sure that they are quality, so that responsbility falls on the staff.

Regardless, something will be done. It may take us a couple tries to optimize whatever plan we settle on, but the way it is out of hand right now is not here to stay.

I said that the spamming needs to stop, and I also disable the sigs. I prefer to not see ads/sigs OR spam.

Spammers will be found on every forum and it's a thing I have witnessed on every forum till date I have visited. People spam their referral links, make useless posts, derogatory statements, abuse and so on but in that case they do it without getting paid. Here some do it because they get paid while others do it for fun and like a hobby. It's almost impossible to avoid spammers and scammers as one account gets banned, they come back with another account.

As has been pointed out *many, many* times already it is the shit posts not the ads themselves that are the main issue.

Note that only the ad sig posters (such as the one I've quoted) ignore this *time and time again* and keep trying to tell everyone they should disable the sigs when they know full well what the problem is.

Stop with the bullshit please.

Personally I am almost done with this forum - so if they are going to allow the same rubbish on the new forum then @theymos please send me an address to return the 50 BTC I am minding for this forum (I'll send a GPG request for this in the next few weeks I guess).

I agree they should put pressure on campaign managers to enforce rules better. I wear a paid signature because why not get paid for posting? (I post the same with or without it). I like the paid sigs and will use them so long as they are allowed, but the spamming needs to stop. I think BadBear is doing a good job with spammers lately...him keeping up the pressure might be enough.

Also I disable viewing of signatures so I do not notice them as much 

Now that spammers are being cracked down on, and sig campaign managers are taking more action against shit-posting, I'm hoping the situation will get better.

No doubt there is still a problem but disabling them all seems a bit extreme.

One thing they could do instead of this would be to ban linking to websites other than Bitcointalk in your signature. That way, there would be no advertising of other websites. The worst that could happen would be advertising for a thread on the website. If they wanted to combat advertising threads on Bitcointalk, they could remove links from signatures completely.

Websites like overclock.net have rules like these - no images or links to other sites and their signatures aren't very intrusive at all. Nothing like some of the signature campaigns here, some of the signatures here really stick out like a sore thumb in a thread. If you guys want to see how overclock.net signatures differ from here, check out any thread there and you'll see that most of them just contain text with computer specs, links to other threads, opinions, etc. None of them contain any advertising, and to my memory I don't remember seeing an intrusive signature, and I've been on the site for a few years.

I am thinking the same, if the staff want to resolve the problem of the insubstantial posts, once and for all (? subjective) they should ban all the signature campaign, and the possibility for rent the signature space. If they want they can try to 'enforce' some rules to all the sig. campaigns.

Just my personal opinion as your and the others.

 

So IF some users are wearing the same signature of a e.g. dice site but with distinct referrals...would this considered paid or not?
I am just asking since in the past i did so outside of a sig ad campaign...and i don't like being forbidden to do so "outside" of sig ad campaign.
I don't see, however, how this could be separated from a normal sig-ad campaign...without to investigate BTC-addresses..
 

Signature campaigns shouldn't be allowed on the forum is what he's saying. So no public proposals for renting signatures should be allowed.
You should be able to tell if there is more than 5 users wearing the same signature.

How can you say an user wasn't paid to wear a signature? I'm not sure your proposal can be enforced...really.

If signatures cause so many problems why not just ban paid signatures? That allows personal sigs to remain and eliminates all the spammers?

I am referring to this post:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--905210

Hardly a persona opinion.