Can anyone tell me if it's okay if I use this signature? updated it myself, thought I'd bring some new colors to the table.
As mentioned, ref links aren't currently allowed but changing your design is perfectly fine.
If anyone sees this please read this and share your opinion:I'm toying around with the idea of having a set group of people who I've personally deemed are high quality posters to continue to get paid per post count and branching off the campaign to allow anyone to join on and off instantly and use a PD3 referral link which will automatically credit their account (I'd likely boost the referral rate to something like 20%+ for those not being paid per post)
I'm confident doing this would greatly cut down on forum spam, while the very high quality posters who I select would have the option to continue the campaign as it exists privately or swap to a referral based payment.
This isn't at all decided, so feel free to weigh in.
I personally would not like this as it would likely result in a few "lucky" people getting a lot of earnings while most others would likely earn next to nothing. If there are 4 or 5 PD3 signatures on a page on a thread, it is really just the luck of the draw which one someone clicks on if they are going to click on the link regardless of the quality of each of the posts. Also, I think for medium sized posts with no to 2 or 3 "quotes" it would actually be more likely that someone would click on the signature above a high quality post then the signature on the high quality post if both signatures are the same as the top of a person's screen is more likely to be looked at then the bottom and due to the fact that a person will not scroll down until they reach the text at the bottom of their screen.
Assuming that PD3 is profitable (after things like hosting, internet access, cloud flare, security, payments to devs, marketing - this campaign), I would suggest trying to more accurately measure how effective this campaign is. I would suggest starting by changing signatures so that everyone would use a campaign referral link. In other words everyone would use the same referral link. At this point you could better measure how man clicks you get from the campaign to PD3, how many people sign up and the EV of the house edge when they signup with the campaign referral link. The most effective way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign is the EV of the bets placed by people who signed up after clicking on a signature. If for example these people place 1,000
BTC in bets in the month of August (you would be expected to make 9
BTC off of these bets) but you spend only 5
BTC then the campaign is profitable and would likely not need to cut costs. If on the other hand you were to be expected to make 9
BTC but spend 12
BTC on the campaign then you would obviously likely want to make changes. You could audit the fact that everyone is using the correct referral link using the import HTML function on "spreadsheet" on google docs.
The above would not be the only way to measure effectiveness, as the number of clicks and subsequent bets should also be measured as someone may have an account they do not use on PD, but seeing the ad reminds them of their account and they decide to play.
One other option that I would suggest would be to pay a lower amount per post but also allow for referral links. You could for example cut per post payments by 20% but also allow for a reduced payout via referrals. IMO the best way to keep track of this would be to use a member's "u" # and add payment when payouts are made. One other variant of this would be to base the per post payment on how many months an account has been enrolled in the campaign. The first month would have a low per post rate, and a high referral rate, the 2nd month would have a higher per post rate and a lower referral rate, this pattern would continue until maybe 4 or 5 months when the per post rate is similar to what it is now and the referral rate is very low. A special referral link could be used for this and audited in a similar way as above (importhtml using google docs spreadsheet - lack of space intentional). The initial per post rate would discourage spammers and would encourage people to stay in the campaign over the long term. Spammers would likely also be able to be weeded out over time as they may be able to slip through the cracks for a month or two, but over several months this would be more difficult.
One thing of importance is that other campaigns that have shut down have offered users to be able to use their referral links if members kept their signature; few people would take them up on their offer. I think this would be a defacto shutting down of the PD campaign, which IMO would be very sad as this is the longest running and most reliable campaign out there. I would suspect that PD's success is because of the campaign's success.
Another thing to note is that the quality of the posts should not matter as long as the posts are not outright spam, and you are not getting spoken to about spam from the campaign from theymos (I would kind of doubt this would happen). As long as the campaign is profitable (see above) there is no reason to find ways to cut payments to members.
