Topic: Just remove signatures already. As in delete, disable, gone. - page 3. (Read 44870 times)

I would also like to point out that signature campaigns stiill pay better than faucets and are a great way for newbies to earn extra change while being paid to post on this forum. Sig campaign managers need to do their jobs more and remove spam from this forum. I have seen spambots before spam a Make Money thread. Every from of earning a passive income is open for abuse, but it also has more to do with protecting these forums form spammers and malicious programmers. Perhaps introducing CAPTCHAs would slow down spamming?

That's a pretty narrow view of things. Sure if you are here it means you know about Bitcoins, someone told you, but so what? how does that negate the fact that it helps redistributing Bitcoin? Someone with 0 money to invest in Bitcoin, can get their first satoshis by being active on the forum, which means this person will have an incentive to keep growing their Bitcoin knowledge.
Spreading Bitcoins = ways to get Bitcoin that aren't strictly investing on it which is prohibitive for 99% of people out there.

It is part of their tasks. People also spam links, virus embed links and other crap. Moderators are meant to keep people inline and the forum a little cleaner

I personally kind of like the fact that I can post on this forum about something I enjoy, Bitcoin, while getting some pocket change for it.
Yes, while some people abuse it and spam short one sentence replies, others just see it as a nice bonus and do put effort in their posts and bring value to the forum.

I'm personally also not against recreational gambling from time to time, so I don't mind seeing all the gambling adverts, though I can see how this can be annoying to some people.

To me, the amount of freedom we get on this forum is one of its greatest features, and I personally try to respect that.
And I know that the campaign manager of my signature campaign takes post quality very serious, since we're representing their brand.

Signature campaign can bring money and lives to the forum. Moderators can remove the useless posts. Is this their task?

Just lock this thread already...

I would agree with your logic here if we were not discussing Bitcoin.  One of the major problems I see being talked about in the popular media concerning Bitcoin is the lack of available markets to spend it.  What better place to visit to find markets to spend bitcoin but on a Bitcoin forum?  I think the real argument here is between those who speculate and hoard bitcoin and those who spend bitcoin readily.  This forum is the point "where the rubber hits the road."  Bitcoin's functionality, value, and future is dependent upon it being adopted and exchanged readily.  This forum is where that all happens!

Now, we can say, "Let's ban the signature campaigns because they attract too many new and uninformed users who ask stupid questions, clutter the importance of our discussions, and just want to earn some bitcoin to spend on stupid stuff like dice or altcoins."  

But, if all we are doing is arguing about block size, talking code, and watching our bitcoin hoards grow and not PROMOTING higher adoption rates by including lesser informed people who don't have a stash of coin already, then we might as well give up on the project. We can let JP Morgan come out with his own alternative version that WILL be inclusive.  And, we can let all the "trolls, spammers, and newbs" spend JP Morgans coin while all us exclusive members sit around and talk about our caches of ones and zeros.

Bitcoin is a platform that encourages digital currency to become a globally decentralized monetary system that is all inclusive and more fairly distributed than our current systems.  It will hardly work if we discourage promotion, adoption, or distribution.  The signature campaigns provide all three of those characteristics.  

Well I know I'll get flak for this because I have a signature on me but I want to point out some things with signatures.

Pros:

• Helps all members earn a little on the side
• Helps promote small projects like silver wallets and papernotes, as well as large ones
• Gives a chance for people to get rakebacks from businesses

Cons:

• Many people spam the forum with useless information (I admit to this sometimes)
• Ads are annoying, but it is how almost every company gets their name out there nowadays.

I would like to interject with OP's and many others' complaints about forum signature spammers. If you look at me and my account, I myself have a signature campaign and as well a programmer. In other words, I make my money from this forum by posting and finding coding gigs. Not everyone with a sig campaign is a spammer and I think it is time more rules are implemented about sig campaigns. Some people I hear make 500 posts a month from multiple accounts. OP is right in that sig campaigning has gone way out of control

As has just been said above by the last two posts, this is nonsense.  You don't say to yourself, I want to see some advertising, I'll go to a forum.  You say to yourself, I want to discuss some topic, I'll go to a forum.  People don't go to fora to view ads, advertizers place ads where people already are.  You've got it totally backwards.

Let us count the reasons...

• Signature campaigns give people a way to acquire bitcoin who don't have the funds to buy some (believe or not a lot of ppl on this forum are from developing countries)
• The ads spread awareness of several different bitcoin-based companies, which spread the economy of bitcoin
• Some of the funds earned are used at the companies doing the advertising (usually the gambling sites)
• Some amount of the new people that come to this forum learn about signature campaigns and the cycle begins again - kid wants to earn bitcoin, kid finds a wallet, kid does earn bitcoin, kid spends bitcoin, kid helps improve the bitcoin economy

I agree that bullshit posters should be controlled. I don't agree with the process by which one or many people decide what's bullshit and what's not. There's a lot of constructive posting getting hassled for absolutely no good reason...but, this isn't a democracy, it's someone's house and we're all just guests.

If you don't like signature campaigns there are ad blockers out there that allows you to block all the sig ads.

If sig ads were gone, then no one would post on the site and the forum will die out.

Signature campaigns are an easy way of getting money to the "newbies" of the forum, who didn't buy bitcoin when they were -$20 a piece.

I don't see how signature campaigns are spreading bitcoin. Signature campaigns are on bitcointalk, a forum where everyone has already been told about bitcoin.

This is to stop spam bots spamming all the shit they can before getting nuked. With the six minute restriction, admins have six minutes to react.

It also usually takes me more than six minutes to read through an OP and read some responses and come to with a response of my own, so I don't see why a newbie would need to pay more than 6 times in a minute.

That's not so clear.  Anyone who sees a signature ad is already on the forum, which seems to mean that they've already heard of bitcoin.


Here I agree with you.  The sig ads not only promote services (ie, spreading awareness of ways to use your bitcoin), but as you say, by providing a little bitcoin that you didn't spend fiat to get, I find I'm more likely to spend it back into the bitcoin economy.

Signature campaigns are doing god's work in spreading Bitcoin to the average joe. If you remove them, you will remove a source of spreading this Bitcoin around. Also, I have noticed that a lot of people (me included) is a lot more prone to not simply hoard your Bitcoin indefinitely, but to use it as an actual currency and purchase goods and services with it, if you get paid directly on it. When you have to buy Bitcoin with your fiat, you don't feel like spending it. There's something psychological about it, it feels like buying Gold, then using this Gold to buy something mundane.. not worth the effort of converting your fiat for that when you can directly buy with your fiat. In fact it's pretty stupid.

OTOH, if you get paid on BTC directly, it's way more convenient to use it in a shop that's accepting BTC, and right now, sig campaigns are the most immediate way to get them. So you are also not only killing a way for common people to make some beerBTC on the side, but a big part of this BTC potentially going into merchant's hands.

Good for you.


I can't speak for the forum, but I personally have begun to ignore signature ads. I just skim over them. Forum ads looker cooler (since they can use things other than BBCode, IIRC), too. I've clicked forum ads more often than signature ads.

I don't care anymore since I'm using DannyHamilton's anti-signare whore list..

btw this is how it looks like on some part on forum (where whores are "encouraged" to post by signature managers)

Well I don't essentially agree with Magnesium but I disagree that it would have a positive impact on forum traffic or on ad revenues.
This is a circle IMHO:
1) Signatures ads start coming up
2) People start joining signature camps
3) More people join the forum for signature campaigns
4) Sites see that there is a wide audience in Bitcointalk, and we go to 1st step again
I still don't get however , why do sites choose forum ads over signatures, sigs are more visible than forum as, more cost effective and so on

I concur. I don't understand how someone could have come up with the other conclusion? If we were to disable signature campaigns (not signatures in general), i.e. make them against the rules, that would not reduce the forum traffic but rather the amount of posts (mostly posts that are useless anyways). In the end, this would have a positive effect on the forum in general (quality over quantity). I also do not think that it would have a negative impact on the forum's ad revenue (it might have a slight one). It could actually go the other way around as there would be no other way of advertising your company/service.