Good luck getting glorious leader to make a change!
The idea that paid signatures add nothing to the site and encourage useless posts isn't true simply because you state that it is true. In fact, it is false on its face.
1) People who have no other way to earn bitcoins may choose that as their best (and only) option to obtain them. As such, they are more likely to remain and contribute to the site. Adds to site.
2) While some people are encouraged to make useless posts, that is easily rectified by a note to the offender or the sponsor. As the sponsor is going to only pay for substantive comments, once again, that encourages people to post substantive comments. Adds to site.
Taking away incentives to stay, contribute meaningfully, and build community, is not a way to better any site. Especially this one where the members are generally interested in bitcoin, and not just slinging websites that exist solely to sling websites that exist solely to sling websites that exist solely to create referrals and downlines.
And actually, it seems that convincing glorious leader to make a change took almost no effort whatsoever.
We state it as true, by observing spam variances since paid advertising's induction to now. It is absolutely conclusive that paid signature advertising has increased spam to an astronomical level. People that do paid signature advertising as the only way to earn Bitcoins, rather than spend 20 hours per day forumlating hundreds of thoughtful posts, spend 30 minutes posting hundreds of times per day, giving the moderation staff hundreds of posts per day to delete and users to ban. If you think the sponsor has time to look through tens if not hundreds of thousands of posts per month to judge if they are spam or not, you would be incorrect. They can say they only pay for substantial posts, but they dont have the staff nor time to read through everyone's posts. I'm glad some sort of change happened, now we will see if that fixes the problem more or less, or if more steps are needed.
Correct, the issue was first addressed a bit over 3 months ago to be exact.