I wish someone with authority could disable signatures completely for everyone for some test period of time.
I want to see if that helps reduce spam on bitcointalk. Because from what I could see on other big boards, Reddit included, spam is still overwhelming there.
Would be an interesting experiment for sure. If signatures were banned shitposts and traffic would drastically decrease but there will always be spam and trolls. In fact, most of the disruptive trolls here never have signatures. I think we need to crack down on shitposters though and hopefully just banning people who put no/minimal effort in will quickly get the idea. Campaign managers need to step up their game too and start moderating their participants.
Back then they had nothing to gain, now spammers are spamming with the intention to make money, cut down their most profitable board and they will surely get banned as spam is easier to catch when not in off-topic
cutting signatures completely would stop them indefinately
I recently rarely look what people post in off-topic, but I used to post there a lot in the past, it was fun. Restricting boards is not the answer, spam will likely move to the unrestricted sub boards.
I also don't think that off topic is so profitable since 95% signature campaigns do not pay for posts done in off top section.
Most campaigns don't pay for off topic but it's the ones that do that are causing the problem. Go look there and you will see all the shit posts are being made by people with a yobit signature because they can get away with easily spamming one word responses. Go look in games and rounds and you'll see it plastered with secondstrade sigs. Why? Because bizzarely they pay for that sub (and don't for off topic). Those campaigns are the worst offenders here because they don't do anything to actually manage their campaign and pay people automatically whatever drivel they post. Personally, I think those campaigns should be treated the same as sig spammers and banned as they're the ones causing it. Probably going to leave both campaigns negative feedback soon until they clean up their act but a ban will be more appropriate.
One solution may be to allow users to vote posts up or down, with posts that receive many down votes becoming hidden. Then adding an option to ignore all users with many negative posts. I've noticed some websites have such a system implemented in their comments section.
Wouldn't work and would easily be abused by people with bots and multiple accounts. If someone didn't like you or something you said then they would just use their alt army to downvote you. If people are obviously posting crap then they should just be temp banned until they get the message. If they don't then a perma ban should follow. I wouldn't be opposed to removing signatures entirely if my suggestions ultimately don't work but I think we can quickly get on top of spam by both mods and signature campaign managers being more strict. If people aren't going to get paid for shitposts or banned for making them then they either will up their game or not bother making them at all.
