Topic: Proposal: Disallow Ads in Signatures - page 4. (Read 19045 times)

I am sure many have thought of this before. The only issue with it is the fact that this wouldn't be able to be enforced adequately.

I think it's nice that there's one established way to earn
bitcoins left online that's profitable for both the user and
the owner.
PTC sites and whatnot are only profitable for the owner
of the site.
If we remove this we'll be seeing a lot of new spam posts coming in when people try to make money in other ways, scams, ponzis, etc.
I didn't like the signature re-construction at first but after using it a while I'm pretty satisfied with it. There's less spam from newbies.

It's lowering the quality of the forum if anything. The general Bitcoin Discussion for example has never had lower quality than now.

Wow this thread has gotten pretty long, I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with sig advertisement but what is wrong is the moronic terms that the people who pay for these advertisements do, it's like with these referral links and marketing schemes, the people behind them are perfectly happy getting attention no matter how negative it is even if that means hiring other users to spam the shit out of forums. What the moderators should do if they want to get rid of these guys is force them to pay on an hourly/daily/monthly basis, they wouldn't be able to pay people based on per post, I guarantee you it will make more than half of them just give up and leave because they're just doing this as a cheap way to get attention.

Marketing people don't care about what others think of them, they just want to get as many views/sales/signups as possible, even if it means annoying the fuck out of people, so the best way to get rid of them is make it too expensive and unprofitable for them to sign up users to their programs, the only reason so many of them are doing this is because people are selling their signatures for such a low cost, you could also do some kind of blacklist against the people who are advertising based on Pay Per Click/Pay Per Post/Pay Per Signup and put a whitelist for those who choose not to.

This forum is in peril.

Trolls and morons have already driven most of the developers away.  Spam (and people padding their stats for future spamming) are killing old threads and making some boards nearly useless.  I monitor a bunch of old threads, and I don't even bother reading half of them when they pop up with new posts any more because I've learned that they are filled with "Me too" and "neat!" posts.

This place is a tool to foster communication.  Incentives should align with that goal.

Paid advertising in sigs and posts gives people incentives to hurt the community through hard and soft spamming, and should be stopped.

I propose a few options.

Option 1:  Disallow commercial advertising in sigs, even unpaid.  Any link to a product or service that isn't both free and Free, or text describing or pointing to same, is "commercial".  Give one warning and clear out their sig.  If they put it back (or a different ad), permanently disable their signature.

Option 2: Disallow all advertising in sigs.  Same as above, but even disallow mentions of free and Free projects (such as mine).

The second one would be much easier to enforce, with less effort from moderators and less whining from violators.

Neither one would put an end to the flood of useless posts, but they would help.


This only helps a little.  Even when one user blocks sigs, they still see all of the posts that are used to bolster the user's activity to enable better advertising for the people that haven't blocked sigs.

The problem with simply ignoring those people - including me - is that not all of us make bad posts or such. That is why I believe this move to be a step in the right direction.

And that's why the changes were nonsense. Just check the box that says "ignore other's signatures" and nobody gets bothered.

Yes. I think it's the simpliest soluiton that works. Anyone (including me) can decide to ignore them. :-))

Of course everyone's gonna suggest what benefits themselves the most, lol.

Hmm just because you are a Full member, you mentioned  above three tiers..! I would have liked your suggestion if you would have said to assign signature privileges only to sr.members or above :p

B!Z quality posting 

lol @ post #2

This could be an alternative solution. However as you say it would take a lot of effort to blacklist those sites.

Also, the problem is that this would only restrict newbies and jr members specifically. You have to remember not all newbies and jr members are spamming, and this seems unreasonably harsh as a collective punishment.


Another suggestion I would like to see some moderator respond to is this:
Make it so, that old signature rules are re-implemented, and that if your post gets reported for spam and deleted by a moderator, you then lose your signature privileges ( ex: No links allowed ) or simply no signature at all.
This would punish only the spammers, which is what you're stating you want to do.

Of course, you would suggest the first three tiers, being a Full Member with a link haha

Why not allow link usage to all tiers but block the first two or three tiers from using known paid advertisements sites.
You could blacklist those URLs and make them automatically redirect to bitcointalk.org
Link shorteners too would be blocked for those tiers and would redirect to bitcointalk.org

This will allow personal sites and would block usage of paid links.
This would take some time to blacklist the people though.

Well if they spam then they don't get payed, which contradicts the purpose of signing up for the campaign. Well we're having this argument so do you consider this spam? I'm sure the companies that pays hates spammers since people will hate the spammers and so the ad and so the company.

This is what I think. It is not really the common spammer that annoys me. There are people out there who do not post something with the intention of contributing, but just to earn money, even if it is not spam. This affects the forums badly in the sense that people won't actually get too involved with the issues and are not interested in continuing the argument any further.

Most people don't spam. Their posts might not be the most necessary, or add that much to an ongoing discussion.
The bots you're speaking of exist on this forum, but mainly to get activity up to then sell the accounts. They're not bots to advertise.

And how about this. When we change the restrictions of the bitcointalk signature to what it is today, higher activity accounts become more valuable than ever. To me, this is a clear incentive for people to release their posting bots into the forums, because they are now able to sell their accounts, and will in the future as well.

There are more than 1 hole to poke through the benefits of this change.

In most of the Bitcoin world, ad campaigns don't check anything at all. They send off their cheap hounddogs to spam the message into all places conceivable and count on the fact that - worst case - it's not them that get into trouble but their ad vehicles (people posting or piggybacking Ads in their signatures).
The only step further down into the mud would be spam-bots, but those aren't advanced enough to initiate and simulate human conversation. Plus, they are forcefully kept out of Forums (captchas etc.) where possible.

There are exeptions, but these are extremely scarse.

The discussion has circled a bit by now. Everyone is aware of that people like you ( lots and lots of people with you ) that actually just want to make a bit of money doing something that they otherwise would do anyways are getting punished for something a minority of stupids do.
Newbie restrictions would be better, or better report a post functions.