This may or may not be intentional or even related...
I'm seeing that in the "Meta" & "Beginners & Help" forums, Trust ratings are not shown.
Is this intentional? I think it should certainly be in the Beginners section to attempt to protect new users.
MOD: I only posted it here because I didn't notice this until after the sig changes...if it should be elsewhere, let me know.
Topic: Proposal: Disallow Ads in Signatures - page 10. (Read 19060 times)
This is what I was talking about in terms of content, selling what you write, and branding: https://hjbuell.com/content-writing-copywriting/
Hopefully I did not come across as an ass to anyone. Totally not my intent. I just deal daily with people asking me to write great content for pennies - so I'm intimately familiar with how easy it is to buy posts and spam content.
Cheers,
- H
Hopefully I did not come across as an ass to anyone. Totally not my intent. I just deal daily with people asking me to write great content for pennies - so I'm intimately familiar with how easy it is to buy posts and spam content.
Cheers,
- H
This isn't going to help the problem at all.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Luckily the activity system means even 1000 posts in a day won't get you out of newbie status.
This isn't going to help the problem at all.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
+1 agreed
BadBear: what exactly does spamming consist of?
@Crypto -- True, but it's in the interests of advertisers to have meaningful and engaging content tied into their ads. People who make good posts will also make short and funny posts - but it's the quality posts that count. That's what spammers aren't capable of.
Take a guy like Roslinpl who is making quality posts, adding meaningful contributions to the forums, and doing a bang up job of presenting good arguments, thoughtful ideas, and some short funny / opinion stuff as well, and that's the sort of face you want representing your brand.
Not the crap spammers do.
Anyway, my $0.02, and that's about what it's worth too
Take a guy like Roslinpl who is making quality posts, adding meaningful contributions to the forums, and doing a bang up job of presenting good arguments, thoughtful ideas, and some short funny / opinion stuff as well, and that's the sort of face you want representing your brand.
Not the crap spammers do.
Anyway, my $0.02, and that's about what it's worth too
Of course good quality content is great for the image of the brand, but ultimately it is clicks to the site that matter. There are some participants in sig campaigns that make short, meaningful replies to posts on here - but should that be disregarded? Nah.
If you go down the quality people representing your brand then ad sig owners would have hired a hand-picked team of folk who post long, high quality responses. But they don't, because it is a balancing act between the value in a post and the quantity of posts to increase exposure.
hilariousandco has made a hell of a lot of posts, in fact, he is on the first page of top posters - yet I have not yet found a useless post that he has made, even the shorter ones have been helpful/funny/within topic.
Good solution, gives people incentive to want to hang onto their accounts if they want to be paid for their sigs.
Once they get banned a couple of times they'll figure out that if they ever want to hang onto their account to get around this that they need to not spam. And we do ban spammers, I ban probably 10-12 people on average a day.
I report posts as I go, also, but even with a 100% accuracy (do they really keep track?) some threads/posts I've reported are untouched.
Just because a specific post may remain doesn't mean the moderator didn't act on it. May have opted for a pm warning, or may have just banned them but didn't delete posts, etc.
Another issue I clearly see with this is that the advertising services that are going to stick around on this forum ( yes they will ) are going to pay even smaller sums for newbie / jr members, therefore creating an even bigger incentive to post high quantities of low quality posts to make up for 'lost' money in comparison to the full members.
You have a valid point, if that happens that will create more problem, IMHO the decision of putting restriction on Signature is justified, but I don't think its the solution to cut down the spam post. Lets see and analyze for next few days..! Once they get banned a couple of times they'll figure out that if they ever want to hang onto their account to get around this that they need to not spam. And we do ban spammers, I ban probably 10-12 people on average a day.
I was busy for the past few months in reporting spam posts. And it seems like I got 100% accuracy so far. Just hit on the "report to moderator" link and you'll see that useless post gone. If it's disallowed, there will be a plunge in activities.
I report posts as I go, also, but even with a 100% accuracy (do they really keep track?) some threads/posts I've reported are untouched.
Just because a specific post may remain doesn't mean the moderator didn't act on it. May have opted for a pm warning, or may have just banned them but didn't delete posts, etc.
Another issue I clearly see with this is that the advertising services that are going to stick around on this forum ( yes they will ) are going to pay even smaller sums for newbie / jr members, therefore creating an even bigger incentive to post high quantities of low quality posts to make up for 'lost' money in comparison to the full members.
You have a valid point, if that happens that will create more problem, IMHO the decision of putting restriction on Signature is justified, but I don't think its the solution to cut down the spam post. Lets see and analyze for next few days..!
@Crypto -- True, but it's in the interests of advertisers to have meaningful and engaging content tied into their ads. People who make good posts will also make short and funny posts - but it's the quality posts that count. That's what spammers aren't capable of.
Take a guy like Roslinpl who is making quality posts, adding meaningful contributions to the forums, and doing a bang up job of presenting good arguments, thoughtful ideas, and some short funny / opinion stuff as well, and that's the sort of face you want representing your brand.
Not the crap spammers do.
Anyway, my $0.02, and that's about what it's worth too
Take a guy like Roslinpl who is making quality posts, adding meaningful contributions to the forums, and doing a bang up job of presenting good arguments, thoughtful ideas, and some short funny / opinion stuff as well, and that's the sort of face you want representing your brand.
Not the crap spammers do.
Anyway, my $0.02, and that's about what it's worth too
The most obvious solution to this is not to count posts of less than 50 words towards post count. (19 words)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
I dunno, I believe that paid writing in general is for quality. Whereas let's face it, paid sig advertising is about quantity and exposure.
Spam is great for sig advertising, however, sig advertisement owners such as Satoshi Dice games know that it is not good for the community, could tarnish their image with the said community and ultimately leads to crackdown.
So the sig advertisement owners, like Stunna, take measures to try and reduce the spam by filtering out the spammers - this includes quite a bit of due diligence on his part, but also he asks for the community to report any post abusers to him, such that they will be removed from the campaign.
So filtering out posts for payment based on word count is not that great:
- It means that people like Stunna have to check EVERY single post to get a figure of payment
- Those that post feel that they have to squeeze out extra words just so that their otherwise useless post meets the payment criteria
- Certain folk in the community will still get butthurt as they will say that people are posting exactly x words, mostly filler to meet their target
I don't believe that word count is the way to go, not as a participant of a campaign, or as a member of a community, but at least it's an idea on the table so that has to be appreciated.
The most obvious solution to this is not to count posts of less than 50 words towards post count. (19 words)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
This would require more staff to moderate this though or the signature advetiser to moderate this because it would take a very long time each day to find out who is posting less than 19 words and who isn't.
You could limit the font size and colours for the signature, that's all you could do without constantly checking new posts!
First - your post clearly demonstrates that you have no idea how paid writing works - which is fine. The (19 Words, etc) is simply giving you a visual spot of approximately how many words a post is. An advertiser (not a mod) can easily look at posts and see what they will or will not pay for without actually counting the words. I can sit here all day and tell you within 5 words with content of 50 words. If the forum code that tracks post count can't be modified to track the words or characters per post, then the advertisers can eyeball it. They will quickly get a handle on who is worth paying and who is just crap.
However, that just highlights the problem with this entire thread. None of you really grasp how paid writing works, and so you're applying solutions from your own perspectives that simply aren't going to be effective long term.
Short of eliminating signatures, you aren't going to fix the problem by changing signatures. Instead, you're going to drive off users who would make decent posts to earn a buck - which will only serve to increase the amount of crap in these forums because you're just adding incentive for the third world to make more shitty posts.
Allow me to explain (and really, I am not being an ass, so please forgive me if I come across as one - that's absolutely not my intent).
Third world countries - the ones you see the ads on TV that tell you how $1 a day can feed Sally, or whatever, are actually places you can live for less than $1 a day. You can feed a family for $1 a day in most cases. So that means anyone who has access to an internet cafe (a room filled with computers, all connected to the internet), can go from cafe to cafe in their city (let's assume 7 cafes), and make 14 posts a day on their accounts, even commenting on their own posts from other accounts - or creating foolish threads just to generate more fodder for them to comment on.
That means that in two weeks, they can have 14 accounts rocking the forums, each one making a collective average of 1 post per day. With the post minimums they way they are, those posts can be more or less crap. Every cafe has a different IP, so there is no way you will nail them all. At that rate, someone creative could spend their one day in each cafe, drinking tea (which is so cheap it qualifies as almost free), and making worthless posts about nothing.
The truly creative could one up it even more. Then there are those who +1 their trust in the process (for the truly entrepreneurial). There are some higher level users in these forums I've tracked and been warned of by others who do just that. Look at the trust of some users, and then skim their posts and - surprise - you find whole one sided conversations, with the same tone, character, and prose (or lack thereof in some cases).
So, at the end of the day, you either eliminate signatures, in which case your forums more or less die because your advertisers move away as the forums become a closed group of people increasing their own trust levels and posting crap, or you look at the issue from the perspective of people posting crap, and move it out of their range. When it is no longer possible to post crap, people stop posting crap (outside of the trust system abuse). Plain and simple.
Anyway, good luck with staying relevant in a sea of turds when you've just added incentive for more turds to float out in the forums.
This isn't going to help the problem at all.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
But you are limited by time, you only need to log in and make 14 posts in a two week period to max out your activity for that term. Of course, people could still post crap to get those 14 posts, but it's not a hard task lol.
This isn't going to help the problem at all.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
+1 agreed
Another issue I clearly see with this is that the advertising services that are going to stick around on this forum ( yes they will ) are going to pay even smaller sums for newbie / jr members, therefore creating an even bigger incentive to post high quantities of low quality posts to make up for 'lost' money in comparison to the full members.
Perhaps the allowed signature styling should change with activity score / membergroup. Like:
- Newbie: No styling (including links) allowed. Max 40 characters.
- Jr. Member: Links allowed. Max 100 characters.
- Member: Unlimited length.
- Full: Color allowed.
- Sr. Member: Size allowed
- Hero: Background color allowed
Then newbies will be less effective advertisers, which would hopefully significantly reduce the incentive for low-content posts. And when people become capable of effectively advertising through their signatures, they'll have invested a lot of time into their accounts, and they won't risk being banned by spamming.
It would indeed decrease the incentive for low content posting, but it would also take away the incentive for high content posting from newbies / jr members like myself that are currently advertising.- Newbie: No styling (including links) allowed. Max 40 characters.
- Jr. Member: Links allowed. Max 100 characters.
- Member: Unlimited length.
- Full: Color allowed.
- Sr. Member: Size allowed
- Hero: Background color allowed
Then newbies will be less effective advertisers, which would hopefully significantly reduce the incentive for low-content posts. And when people become capable of effectively advertising through their signatures, they'll have invested a lot of time into their accounts, and they won't risk being banned by spamming.
Many advertising services already state that they do not support spamming, meaningless posts or general BS, and therefore advertising itself doesn't make people spam.
I think this will hurt the users of the forum, especially the newer members that are actually trying.
Hope you change this again, it's not good.
The most obvious solution to this is not to count posts of less than 50 words towards post count. (19 words)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
Problem solved. People can still make short, one word posts - they just won't contribute to post count. More importantly, the required '50 posts' that people need to make won't happen nearly as quickly, as short posts won't bump the number. (40 words)
Barring that, penalize the advertisers. If an advertiser is generating enough income from posts here, then they can do a better job of checking people using their signatures. (28 words)
(87 words in total)
This would require more staff to moderate this though or the signature advetiser to moderate this because it would take a very long time each day to find out who is posting less than 19 words and who isn't.
+1
You could limit the font size and colours for the signature, that's all you could do without constantly checking new posts!
This isn't going to help the problem at all.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Shouldve kept it like before... people are still going to make useless posts that have been posted before (repeating) and overall people are going to aim for high statuses and therefore spam.
Thanks IamCANADIAN013, it's always on the page I didn't look at, sigh. sigs are useless here.
Has no-one thought forward as to the implications of this rule that has been implemented.
A newbie is now encouraged to make a pile of useless posts, in order to earn the capability of a full sig.
Now, what appears to be a contradiction.
From the page for newbies.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/newbie-readme-177133
Don't make threads or posts solely for putting up referral links, that's what signatures are for.
and from the very next post,
FORUM RULES
NO SPAM
NO BEGGING (AKA ASKING FOR BITCOINS)
NO REFERRAL LINKS
If no referral links are allowed, why does it say "that is what signatures are for"?
If no begging is allowed, why are there so many sigs with wallet addresses?
I hereby reserve the right to appear stupid, I am a newbie. :-)
Has no-one thought forward as to the implications of this rule that has been implemented.
A newbie is now encouraged to make a pile of useless posts, in order to earn the capability of a full sig.
Now, what appears to be a contradiction.
From the page for newbies.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/newbie-readme-177133
Don't make threads or posts solely for putting up referral links, that's what signatures are for.
and from the very next post,
FORUM RULES
NO SPAM
NO BEGGING (AKA ASKING FOR BITCOINS)
NO REFERRAL LINKS
If no referral links are allowed, why does it say "that is what signatures are for"?
If no begging is allowed, why are there so many sigs with wallet addresses?
I hereby reserve the right to appear stupid, I am a newbie. :-)
Post count doesn't really influence your rating on here a great deal I believe. From here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2513302
The activity number is determined in this way:
time = number of two-week periods in which you've posted since your registration
activity = min(time * 14, posts)
Activity is updated every 30 minutes.
My understanding of that is that posts are a very small portion of your rating, its more about the time you are on the board.
If a person make a pile of useless posts they can expect to be reported and eventually suspended or banned is my guess.
It's not like this is some kind of race or status thing.
Thanks IamCANADIAN013, it's always on the page I didn't look at, sigh. sigs are useless here.
Has no-one thought forward as to the implications of this rule that has been implemented.
A newbie is now encouraged to make a pile of useless posts, in order to earn the capability of a full sig.
Now, what appears to be a contradiction.
From the page for newbies.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/newbie-readme-177133
Don't make threads or posts solely for putting up referral links, that's what signatures are for.
and from the very next post,
FORUM RULES
NO SPAM
NO BEGGING (AKA ASKING FOR BITCOINS)
NO REFERRAL LINKS
If no referral links are allowed, why does it say "that is what signatures are for"?
If no begging is allowed, why are there so many sigs with wallet addresses?
I hereby reserve the right to appear stupid, I am a newbie. :-)
Has no-one thought forward as to the implications of this rule that has been implemented.
A newbie is now encouraged to make a pile of useless posts, in order to earn the capability of a full sig.
Now, what appears to be a contradiction.
From the page for newbies.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/newbie-readme-177133
Don't make threads or posts solely for putting up referral links, that's what signatures are for.
and from the very next post,
FORUM RULES
NO SPAM
NO BEGGING (AKA ASKING FOR BITCOINS)
NO REFERRAL LINKS
If no referral links are allowed, why does it say "that is what signatures are for"?
If no begging is allowed, why are there so many sigs with wallet addresses?
I hereby reserve the right to appear stupid, I am a newbie. :-)
Jump to: