Topic: Signature advertisers: suggestions? (Read 2145 times)

I realized that immediately after clicking your name after posting, and deleted the post, haha. You were both too smart for me and too fast with your reply! But yeah, the "u=xxxxxxx" is unnecessary.

It was a link to kenzawak's profile actually. So it would have worked perfectly for him since he was the one asking. But your way is obviously better

You already can

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/kenzawak-1082600

The issue here is the shitposting they generate.

I haven't read the whole thread so I'm not sure it's been suggested yet.
If signatures really bother some people, why not give them the option to disable them by paying a small fee like you do when you buy a copper membership ? Or you could make that option free for some of the most recognized users here (hero / legendaries or those who have earned the most merits).

I do not understand how this will help in the case where users have created "Offices" for abusing bounties. They will do work from their home, clicking each other link ,skewing the whole metrics.

Secondly, theymos is not concerned about how much view a signature created, he is concerned about the shit posting happening due to signatures.

Maybe it isn't - I don't know what others think of these kinds of posts. Certainly it's not on the same "level" of spam/shitposting as most of the altcoin/bounty spam, but when you get to page 16 of a thread like that there is pretty much a 0% chance that any idea is original and hasn't been posted in that thread before. You just get the same ideas on repeat, just phrased differently - in this case "be patient", "keep holding", "no one can predict", "market is moving sideways", "bull market soon", etc.


Yeah, exactly. Short of reading the last page of replies for every post, which I can bet 99.99% of bounty managers wouldn't do consider the utter trash they are willing to pay out for. I think the simplest solution would be to just refuse to count posts in any spam threads, which many BTC signature managers already do, but again, good luck getting them on board with that without some top-down rule enforcement.

Oof. I can't say I haven't seen those kind of recycled arguments around, I just didn't think it was considered spam by the majority. I wholeheartedly agree. Cheers.

To address such spam is also not the easiest, because even manually campaign managers would have a hard time figuring it out, since a recycled comment looks legit on its own, but in the context of 10 other comments, it's most definitely spam.

If I can come up with something I'll comment here, otherwise thank you oeleo.

Those are strange criteria. As pointed out in previous posts, the vast majority of spam is coming from users using altcoin/bounty signatures. As asche has said, I also disagree with your "real" versus "not real" campaigns/signatures. Yes, bounty campaigns/signatures pay in complete trash, but they still contribute massively to spam, and that is what we need to address here.

Still, you can easily find examples of your criteria, for example: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.49447865

Click for full size image. 4 useless posts back to back, all from senior+ members, all with earned merits, all with a bitcoin-paying signature.

---

If that were true, it wouldn't be an issue. I just went to Bitcoin Discussion, clicked on the first thread with >100 replies, and went to the last page. Here it is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5067162.160. There are 16 posts on that page, 14 of them with an altcoin signature, and all 14 of them completely worthless. I didn't have to search for that example, literally the first thread I clicked on. As someone who spends hours reporting this nonsense, I can assure you this spam is everywhere.

---

Agreed. It would be difficult/impossible to implement any kind of system like this without simultaneously creating more of a "black market" for merit. It would certainly require a lot of vigilance over the merit sources to ensure no foul play was going on.

But all those bounty managers are just newbies and brand new accounts... I don't understand why they'd be considered as real users if their raison d'être is to spam. They never even comment outside of their own bounty section, let alone make rational, meritable comments. If the bounty section were to close overnight half the forum wouldn't notice.

If we're suggesting sig campaign improvements, I'm sure those would be the last people to benefit from it. Everyone here knows that the altcoin bounty section is a spamfest, you can't just quote me on that and send me examples of spam from there, because it's ALL spam.



What is it with people quoting half messages around this forum? Even so, improving quality of life for signature users ==> Direct implication to improving the signature experience for the advertising business.  

That is an interesting approach. Reading your take gave me an idea. What if features like signatures or PM limit removals were able to be purchased on a monthly basis using merit. That would cause a merit burn scenario and would remove the “buy 1 merit, shitpost for life” issue.

However, moving merit towards the direction of being a currency would likely result in crooked merit sources trying to profit from their position, which should be strongly discouraged.

Read OP again. Bounty campaign = signature, this is exactly what this topic is about

There is no REAL or NOT REAL sig. Altcoin shitcampaign are the culprits, and I could find 100 accounts matching 1-3 caracteristics.


You interpreted that as "to suggest improvements to signature users". It's not what theymos wrote.

It's the point I mentioned above, when a new generation of self-made higher rank users come (Senior Members and above), especially some of them has good trust points.
At that time, when it really happens, the past generation of shitty higher rank users will be rejected from campaigns, definitely.

From all the comments where everyone complains about shitposting and spam, I want to know who are these people everyone is arguing about?

Can you guys post link to posts that are made from users that are :

1. At least Members (This is the minimum rank needed for a signature campaign -1, right?)
2. Have at least 2 Merit points (Almost all sig campaigns ask you to have 10 merits though, right?)
3. Make shitposts or spam.
4. Has a signature under him. (No bounty campaigns, I don't consider those signatures. This post was made to suggest improvements to signature users, and signature campaign managers. A bounty campaign manager USES spam to bump his own thread. Let alone give a shit about users spamming other people's threads. Those altcoins usually end up dead with 0 value and nothing but a promoted scam. I don't understand how people keep wasting time and effort to promote them, but hey, when you think about it, it's probably because they just can't get into any REAL sig campaigns.)

Please, if you have too many of the people that fit this criteria, I genuinely want to see you spam my PMs with them.

Is spam really an issue on the forums BECAUSE of signature campaigns? Sig campaigns have been harder and harder to get into. As more people get higher ranks, and the more people get higher merits, the managers themselves will add criteria to filter out the bad. This is a perfect example :


But hey, maybe I'm wrong and completely oblivious to the massive flood of "spam", so please show me where it all is. Thanks.

It is the fact, but there are other two facts:
1) Shitposters, and higher-ranked users who ranked up to high positions due to the old ranking system before merit system launched  will hardly to be accepted by strict campaign's managers. Especially shitty higher rank users that could not earn even one merits, or could not satisfy the minimum required merits (I usually see strict campaigns require ten self-earn merits over last 120 days to join).

Yeap, and they tend to publish shitty posts.

Agreed with you. So, why not make demotions aim at higher rank  users like the wave of demotion on Junior Member.
The forum will turn into chaotic situation, when that massive higher rank users complained about this.  

I don't think that the idea is realistic.
If a new system, for example Spam Control System, implemented, it will lead to massively debate in the forum, and it might be abused.

What I have come to realize is that both my suggestion, this suggestion and others above can't totally solve the signature ads Issue. People will always look for away to cheat the system especially those trying to make a living (in forum) from 3rd world countries. If theymos can't find a solution anytime soon, the signature privilege should be removed totally so we can see those truly here to learn

Completely agree with "proposition 1" - we should make it an ongoing task to earn your signature, and not "buy 1 merit, shitpost for life" as it is now.

In terms of "tagging" accounts for shitposting as you outline in "proposition 2" - this is essentially the same as reporting, and so I don't think we need to introduce yet another new system to achieve this. I think what we do need is to be more liberal in the banning of shitposters, or introduce signature bans/removals/blacklist for repeat offenders. I keep on seeing the same names popping up in my report history, users who I alone have got 10, 20, 30+ of their posts deleted in the space a few days, but it is very rare (in my experience) for these users to actually get banned. It's pretty frustrating to have to keep on reporting the same user over and over when they are simply churning out a post a minute of garbled nonsense.

As I read in multiple posts in this thread I don't think it would have any added value to implement the functionality mentioned in OP.

A few facts I am considering in my reasoning:

• 1- Most sold account are bought to participate in signature campaigns
• 2- Most users buying high ranking account tend to be shitposting the hell out of it
• 3- Most bought accounts don't earny any merit, or just a few
• 4- When it comes to old accounts from before the merit system was created 2 & 3 remain true
• 5- It is still fairly easy to get 10 merit to be able to wear a signature, even without adding much value to the forum

Proposition 1
It would be very nice to tie the signature function to the condition to have received 1 or several merit over the last 30 days for instance.
This would prevent bought accounts from wearing any, and should decrease the value of any account on the secondary market.

It would also make the merit begging not worth the time since it would have to be performed all the time.

Proposition 2
Be able to flag or "tag" any account for shitposting. This could be done through the Trust system or by a separate function.
This would need to be tied either with a system deactivation of the signature space itself, or to new signature guidelines that would prohibit any user wearing red trust or such flag to join any signature campaign.
This would again decrease the value of sold accounts since (I hope) most of them get tagged.

My own experience

Few informations about my relationship to signatures:

I used to wear altcoin signatures for several bounties. I chose to stop doing this.

I started with bitcoin paid signatures with everybet, which terminated too soon, their site having issues.
I am know (obviously) wearing a BetItAll sign, also BTC paid.

2 advantages to this signature model:

• They are not stake based, so you are paid for what you are posting. But if you don't post, your share won't decrease like it would in a stake system. You simply get paid less for said period.
• The pay is fairly low. For northern countries standards anyway. I can hardly imagine people getting out of their way to earn a few cents/post. There are of course exception for the highest paying campaigns like  Chipmixer, but this is counterbalanced by the high difficulty to join.

However there is also an issue:

Most of them are paid on a per post basis. While this makes perfect sense from an advertising point of view, it is still an incentive to post more, or outside your usual posting pattern, which can again lead to shitposting. This is of course down to the Bounty Manager's discretion. I believe most managers of BTC paid campaigns will carefully look at the posts and not pay for such "forced" postings that have little to no value.

Long story short, the manager holds all the power, but clear enforceable guidelines would help generalize the good behavior you can see from some well known managers.

I totally agree with this suggestion. The signature campaign is a significate marketing strategy of the forum so removing it will remove the vibrant color of the forum engendered by the various signatures. But keying to this suggestion will mean that any signature campaign will be a serious one. it will also reduce the spate of scam campaigns since it will be easy to identify campaigns that are serious from unserious ones.

It is not the signature that became the problem in this forum but the manager bringing the project. We could not blame bounty hunters not to do their job the right manner of promoting the project because the project itself is not a 100 Percent paying project. If only a project will pay well the bounty hunters then promoting a project will be easier. As studies conducted by some who are ICO enthusiasts that almost 90% of the ICO projects are scam, fail and etc. This should be  minimize and not the promotion of the signature ads.

Years ago, I participated on a forum where spam posting due to signature rewards was an issue, too.  Actually it was a pretty similar situation as it is on bitcointalk today.

After the introduction of a signature views measurement service, the campaign owners started to accept only members which had a high rate of views, mostly thread creators and creators of posts on popular and useful discussions with an interesting history. Or they paid rewards per view. Creating post number 1849 on page 190 on a pointless discussion thread, brought only a couple of views which finally became unattractive what caused an significant decrease of needless posts.

As far as I remember, it was not a native forum solution, rather a external service where a 1px image was added to the sig besides the text. Each time the pixel was loaded it counted the view. To prevent using visitor exchanges or other viewing tools, it locked the IP for a couple of hours to be counted for the same user.

This is true only when the spammer has one account. If he has more the other accounts are only active when they are hired by managers and will not post anything when they are not paid to do so. It's the manager's role to see it and refuse to pay for spam posts. SMAS was a good idea but got abandoned.

I disagree. Spam starts with the spammer and is then encouraged by the signature manager. These users were spammers before they got into a campaign and they will continue to be spammers once they are no longer in a campaign. If we got rid of signatures and advertising entirely we would still have spam, so it's unfair to lay that problem at the feet of campaign managers. They're making the situation worse by being terrible at their job and paying people to ruin our forum, but they didn't start it.

From the discussion on this thread, it seems the problem is not the signature advertising, but the spam that comes with it from some participants who do not contribute quality.
There has been lots of suggestions on how to curb spam, increasing merit requirement to wear signatures, or encouraging bounty managers to reward quality posts only.
Admins can filter all the suggestions and come up with one which would not excessively alter the current forum protocol.

This would be so easy to abuse it will destroy every advertisement here.
Anyone could simply create a bot to run a hundred ip every day and click his own link, inflate the number of views each topic has by orders of 10 and what is worse, that could be done with free tools even a 7yo could install and run.

The only way to prevent this would mean to turn the sig space into googleads in terms of surveillance and filters, and I don't think theymos is that keen on doing any of this.

It is on the same line of Copper Membership. User promoting their own business might will require this membership to promote their business themselves.
I do not think spammer will buy Membership.
Important thing is that  any membership did not give any right to spamming, so they can still be banned, or their signature can still be stripped if they found spamming.

These two suggestions are totally contradicting each other. What would be the use of the ban for not earning Merits in 120 days if a user can have the ban lifted by paying for it? It wouldn't reduce any spam in that way, since we all know how much money those spammers earn by spitting out crap all over the forum, and it wouldn't be a hurdle for them to get their signature bans lifted by paying a small amount.

For altcoin bounties I rarely see them use signatures as the main promotion medium. It's almost always twitter, telegram, and all sorts of social media spam marketing. They know their target audience and they know that the forums shun ICOs, in the boards I frequent the most I think I see one out of 6 people with a bounty sig rather than a service signature.

Of course the spam happening in the bounties section is pretty dumb, but I'm not going to comment on that to keep this on topic. Even if theymos said he doesnt explicitly like sig campaigns, he asked for possible improvements to how signature campaigns are ran here, take the chance to improve quality of life for managers/campaigners.

I could see a few suggestions myself but since the forum wants to stay detached out of all of it, it becomes tricky. One thing would be a better thread management of some sort to help campaign managers recruit new users. Sorting commenters by rank, maybe filtering them using merit, and so on to make it a lot faster to clear out the noise.

For users that want to participate in these campaigns, a simple notification on title change would do wonders. Campaigns open up and close new spots constantly. If someone who already applied, could be able to be notified once the title changes from CLOSED to OPEN, it would help them stay up to date.

This is indeed a very stupid suggestion. A single successful campaign could produce a hundred of these "managers".

No, it would not. As long as you have a small set of honest managers (i.e. non greedy), then that situation would remain fine. Most of the high rates nowadays come from fraudulent advertising, often off-site (plus they enroll their own army).

If the prices of these badges were higher and assuming most of these ICO companies manage the bounties themselves, I believe Companies won't pay thousands of dollars for buying the badge.  Well if the price for Manager badge is high, then bounty management would become centralized with very few trusted and reputable managers. Yes that would be good, but doing so will also make these managers to demand for higher pay rates. $50 is literally very low but having some kind of payment would be better.

Might be a better idea. But we cannot assure how effectively this limits spam posting. If everyone work for what they are paid like what you, Yahoo, DarkStar does then we would not have seen these spams.

Yes, that's true. Shady companies don't spend for signature creations or for these review websites. They just come here announce their scam and start a bounty and run away with what they have gained. This should also be controlled to an extent. Though the forum acts as a decentralized one, but it also acts as a entity for promoting scams, hence theymos should get involved in this area and enforce much stronger rules.

Spending $50 for a "Manager" badge would do nothing to reduce spam. Are you aware of the amounts of money flowing through these campaigns and the people managing them?

---

We wouldn't have to ban altcoins as they are a part of the crypto life but limiting the ways they could market themselves here would be greatly beneficial. For example, what if the bounty managers of these would only count the posts they are making in the altcoin sections? That would be hard to police but it could be a step in the right direction.

---

That could be one solution although it wouldn't do much. Another thing could be to only allow Sr. Members + to wear a signature that contains code (I doubt a lot of companies would want participants in their campaigns that could only wear a single line of text).

This forum can be saved from signature spams only when crypto is in bear market. Once if btc starts to reach out to a wider public and gets into the limelight, we would face an insanely tough situation preventing spams and saving this forum. With increase in btc prices, there would be a steep increase in ICO generation rates resulting in increase of spammer registrations in this forum. Even systems like Merit and implementing new Guidelines won't save this forum from spams and the situation would be uncontrollable as it was prevailing during 2017-2018 era.

For instance, let us take a simple scenario. Around 958,576 users have registered in 2018 and 493244 have registered in 2017. It's around twice as much as the users have registered. More than 50% of these were spammers, not really active or were just tired of spamming and left altogether during the bear market. Considerably the spams increased during this period. Either way bear market is a good time to implement any such new rules to the forum such as banning of alt related stuffs or signatures or implementing new rules as this would act as some kind of weapon during the upcoming spam war. Some prevailing problems which must be seen through,

[1] Signature spams starts with manager. They are the one who hire spammers to promote their project. If so, why not restrict topic starters in Bounties section to some sort of paid membership ranks like "Manager" Ranks and the prices should be around $50 or somewhere near. This would make the companies to hand over their bounty management to only people who have bought those ranks or some good Managers who are affording to pay.

[2] People here keep reminding me that we are in a bitcoin forum and not in a altcoin forum whenever someone requests for some additional sub-boards in Altcoins. If it is so, then why should we allow the promotion of alts here? We could ban them altogether.

[3] theymos could easily implement a new rule such like, only those who received 10+ merits in the last 120 days could use signature? Will this work really? I need community suggestions. But there seems to be another negative aspect such that merit abusers would get those.

These were mentioned already, and seems to be a working idea. But practically it costs thousands of USD for the company to pay in btc considering the amount of registrations being done by bounty hunters which these companies are not ready to pay 

Almost all the cryptocurrencies were useless in the beginning, but they gained popularity and prices based on their use cases. Similarly tokens while they are announced in this forum for bounties have no real value but they might gain value in the future. I am not completely against usage of alts for bounty payments, but saying them useless is kinda incorrect.

I promote btc in my signature, satoshi pays for me. 

I believe the reason altcoin campaigns are the problem is as a result of the highlighted sentence above. I'm in support of altcoin campaigns not having the privilege to pay participates in their worthless token but not also in support of all paying in bitcoin. They should be given a chance to pay in selected altcoin. That's why I previously suggested this
Altcoin campaigns have higher number of participants and paying all of them in bitcoin will cost them more than in most altcoin like EOS that has zero fee (not endorsing any coin here)  just explaining my statement with example.

I did not notice that Jeremycoin did not promote any business in his signature.OgNasty promotes his business, alanst is a newbie, cryptohunter should also be included, but with the neg trust, I do not know if he does not promote by choice or lack of.

Technically, I do not have a signature either, but it's just for lack of choice.

I technically don't have any obligation (nor am I paid) to wear the ChipMixer signature. You also missed OgNasty, Jeremycoin, cryptohunter and alanst

LOL

Only two members, in this topic, do not attempt to receive any BTC with their signatures: suchmoon and fillippone. Theymos and Quickseller have a tip address.

I really do agree with what LoyceV is saying this could benefit both parties and reduce the numbers of signatures that causes massive spams.. This will be a good advantage for bounty hunters which could assure them that they will surely get BTC or maybe ETH that could exchange to fiat rather than priceless ICO tokens which has a lower chance of exchanging it to real cash, this will also be a disadvantage to those people who is creating scam ICO's because for them to be able to run a bounty they need to pay BTC or ETH which would also be too costly for them (but it still depends on the bounty managers if its a third party or their own bounty managers because if its their own bounty manager for sure they will not reward those hunters)..

"Less pages"?

You mean more? And if that were your intention, even the grin thread has more pages.

i never saw a post from theymos with less pages.
are you all so afraid of loosing your money per post? 

I second this. I have no idea how much work it would be to integrate this into the current forum software but it sounds like a solid idea to weed out all of the low quality posts.

What about following the same guideline that forum follows for the advertisement policy:

1. No ICO signatures are allowed.
2. Campaign that can be accepted in forum for signature advertisement can buy/acquire permission for specific number of signatures for their campaign. (Should not be like stake system and you can enroll any number of participants for stake.)

Few additional suggestion.
3. Individual not having gained a single merit in last 120 days will get signature disabled.
4. If users 3 post got reported in a week for spam (obviously good reports) user will get 1 month signature ban + punishment currently decided by forum.
5. Paid option if somebody do not have merit.

I believe that most of the comments are about increasing moderation or restricting the actions of users in order to reduce spam. I do not think the intention of the topic is to increase the attributions of the moderators and administrators of the forum. I believe the intention is to improve the quality of the campaigns and provide better tools so that more companies can use this marketing service.

Signature campaigns is a great "use case" of Bitcoin. It simply demonstrates how Bitcoin and other currencies can be used for payments, invoices and are easily verified.

So the two suggestions I liked the most were these:

• DdmrDdmr: CMS dashboard for managers. This could even be an outsourced and paid service. With more accurate statistics, campaign managers and funders would probably avoid spammers and users who post only on MEGA topics.
• MadZ: separate campaigns that pay in coins that are already traded in well-known exchanges from projects that pay a% of an ICO, which does not yet exist. And my suggestion, separate the signature campaigns from the service area in the Bitcoin section. This would allow a greater organization of the campaigns and eventually accept other means of payments that are also accepted by the forum as Grin and maybe others.
• I would also suggest giving a discount on the forum's ad auction for the project that had a good signature campaign among users. This suggestion is likely to be widely rejected, but... If a certain campaign had a good number of users and they received a good number of merits without users with negative trust, they would have an advantage in the Auction. If they won, they would receive a discount of 5% or 10%.

My apologies than, I might have missunderstood. However, it seems that we’ve come to a healthy conclusion which is that it’s not really the campaigns that need separating, but the managers, which is kind of easy to do as, from what I’ve read above, we already have a list with the good ones. Maybe I’ve oversimplified it a bit  

Anyway, wichever path is to be followed, as you said, theymos will most likely choose the right one.

I guess there's a miscommunication here.  I wasn't suggesting that a judgement be made beforehand, but only after a manager has proven his incompetence as far as regulating the participants or a participant has proven to be a chronic shitposter.  There are some altcoin/token bounty managers who will accept anyone with two thumbs, and who obviously don't care about post quality (don't ask me for names.  I know they exist because of how many bounties I've seen with obvious alts enrolled and how many shitposters are accepted into their bounties). 

There's no perfect solution to these problems, not even the ones I've supported or suggested myself.  Every possible solution is going to have drawbacks and I know this.  One thing I will say is that it's fortunate that Theymos doesn't make changes on a whim, and if he does attempt to curb this issue with lousy bounty managers and bounty hunters, it'll most likely be effective because he'll have thought about it a great deal.  I'm just hoping he does make some sort of restrictions on the campaigns that don't pay in bitcoin, since those seem to be the main problem.

Definitely the latter. Well, you can't possibly know the quality of the campaigner's posts and how the manager runs it before you pass the sentence on a campaign. What if a mod makes a mistake in judgement, and refuses something that can become a fairly "good project" (hate these words btw as I've reported quite a few one liners like these myself) but passes something that would scam the users or have massive shitposing? One mistake is all it takes for the fuse to be lit. It's hard to determine which are the good ones and which are the bad ones beforehand...I can't really see what the outcome would be in such a situation but I don't see how someone would want to be a judge and pass a sentence before knowing "the criminal's" entire story

Another idea could be to disable setting a new signature if someone hasn't earned x Merit during the last 120 days. They can still delete their old signature or leave the old signature as it is, but can't set up a new one. That will prevent shitposters to join the next campaign so that they are stuck on their old signature and would run out of paid signatures just by shitposting sooner or later. There would be no problem for inactive members, their signature would stay as it is.

We can do this automated or manually (for the benefit that people can still wear personal signatures for their own business even if they haven't earned x Merit during the last 120 days). Manually means: tagging them by DT for wearing a paid signature without receiving enough Merit during the last 120 days.
Reports can be made by easy proof of their Merit history (120 days) and providing a proof, that the signature is paid and active.

I think it's very easy to judge compared to judging if someone is a shitposter.

You mean good posts from bad ones, or do you mean good campaigns from bad ones?  If you mean the former, I don't see a problem with mods having to judge post quality, which is something they basically do anyway when they agree with a report or not.  Pugman's suggestion of nuking someone's signature space based on a "report post history" isn't a bad one, either.  You have no idea how many individual reports I've made against single users, one by one, for shitposting.  Usually someone is either a chronic shitposter or someone who may have occasional low-quality posts. 

If you mean the latter, I'd tend to agree with that except I don't think mods would be judging the merits of any given project but instead the quality of the campaigners' posts and/or how poorly the campaign manager is running the campaign with respect to that post quality.

I like the idea of a merit requirement in such a case, though I think 30 merits might be too easily obtainable.  50 merits or so might be in the ballpark.  And yes, I do realize that a lot of shitposters aren't even getting 30 merits, but we all know that if they had to in order to be able to wear a signature, they'd be able to get them from friends/alts/buying them.  50 merits might seem like a high bar to clear, but it really ought to be--for the forum's sake.

Would mods really want such responsibility? The forum staff should NOT be in the position to separate the good ones from the bad ones. Why? Because 1.People are corruptible 2.Anyone can be easily misled by a seemingly good campaign at start which could turn out...let's say not what it was expected. Who would be to blame if people get scammed? Obviously the mods..

The "Signature Membership" similar to the "Copper Membership" idea was probably the best one so far alongside with the one where 20-30 earned Merit is needed to unlock signature-wearing privileges.

Give mods the ability to whitelist/blacklist signatures? This could help so much, I can't even elaborate enough. Dedicate a few mods only for this, hell, you could even improvise the report to mod button in such way, where users can report different users for different things. Like have options to report the whole post history, to request to ban sig due to continual shitposting, to ban the user due to actual breaking of more serious rules.

This is a shame.  While I understand you don't want the liability, I think it would be a boon to the forum's revenue and could be a cool way to reward users here. 

If signature advertisements were as simple as clicking a box in your profile settings to activate it once you've reached the designated member level, and you received payouts based on views/clicks, that would be a pretty cool system.  No more signature campaign managers.  No more favoritism to alt accounts.  No more war on newbie accounts.  No more shit-posting. 

Do by this you mean tipping? The money has to be coming from somewhere. If not from the campaigns then I doubt a typical user of this forum will feel the need to spend money on posts he finds entertaining. We're not on twitch.


Publish statistics, make the managers responsible. They are the ones with the most to lose (high ranked, well trusted accounts, lots of merit, better deals than normal campaign members). If your participants are spamming and you get the highest number of:
members with negative trust
deleted posts
nuked spammers
(list up for discussion)
You lose the right to run a campaign, or get some other form of punishment, like some bench time for your account.


There are very well moderated campaigns out there, so the signatures by themselves are not responsible for the spam.
Banning signatures is comparable to banning guns because some people happen to be killing other people each year.

If that is really true, and your primary concern, then ban all sig and take away all financial motivation for posting much as it is possible.

Do not fear shrinkage of users, those that leave were not real enthusiasts and would have no issue diluting useful collisions here to gain some btc dust. Get rid of the bulk of financially driven posters and the forums usefulness will jump ahead.

If you are a true enthusiast and want to help build an end to end trustless decentralised arena you will put effort into helping build it regardless of whether your post will earn you money.

I just got chipmixer burn in on my oled screen reading this thread. Do you really expect to get an objective view here? be sensible.

May as well go ask which alt is best on the alt board and expect objective helpful advice.

Whilst there is financial incentive to post and whilst you have people controlling peoples ability to get paid to post (and their rates) whilst themselves being part of "high rate paid to post" campaigns ..then you will always have motive, and means for abuse. That will end up being a big problem.

You will have a system that is encouraging gaming the systems from both ends the top and the bottom. To prevent this gaming you have a huge problem on an anonymous forum like this. I say to me it looks impossible to set up some decentralised self governing control as it seems you are attempting. In addition to that you must accept these mechanisms are influencing free speech.

Your idea in the OP does have some merit. It would take out some of the possible gaming and manipulation regardless of what people are telling you (you need to look at the motivation for them telling you that). I mean if we could thrash out some real criteria for merit so it was not open to wide abuse and then we only showed sigs under those posts that were merit worthy that could actually work. It would be a good start to a real meritocracy and something all people should support.

If we could

1. drill down on criteria that defines a post of positive value
2. drill down on how to ensure only posts of positive value receive merit
3. drill down on how only those merited posts were rewarded financially

that would be excellent and a true meritocracy

those top 2 things alone seem quite impossible on an anonymous forum

Until you can create a fair meritocracy you will have a war, gaming and create more destructive issues on board than what you realise.

My advice remains as it was many weeks ago. Until there is a sure and tested way to allow the board to be used as a financial reward structure that strongly represents contributions given that is reasonably fair and impossible to game then ban all sigs.

I would strongly recommend that you read this thread again

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-most-important-thread-you-can-contribute-to-this-yearno-kidding-5088852

Although it may be rather long, boring, and in quite horrific english that does not at all render the truths you will find there invalid.

I see you as a person that wants satoshis principles took forward and applied when and where possible. I see that you are trying to decentralise control here and find ways to make things better for the entire board. I do not think it will be possible whilst financial motive is there and any room to abuse your systems still exists.

To create a real meritocracy you will need to drill down and down to define the smallest units upon which you will then build. There can be no room for abuse else you will always have successful selfish actors and wars.

For now ban all sigs and take time to develop a system that can cope with them in the background. Then later perhaps release into the wild. Until you can ensure all systems guarantee to treat all persons actions and behaviours the same and equally then you will always have a big issue here.








 

As a non-experiment user, this is how i see things:

The problem is not limited to sig campaigns, when to look for new improvement ideas, but with Bounty Campaigns in general. [Let's mention signatures/translation/moderation campaigns, as the other bounty parts haven't so much importance]

Problems that need to be solved:
- Spammy posts.
- Thread Boost.
- ICOs/Projects run by scammers.
- Fake managers.
- Fake translators/moderators.

So let's admit that this is basically fundamental and should be set long time ago, typically for both managers and participants:
I can't understand why this is, completely, ignored since set.

And as the forum will never take part of the money involved in bounties, here some suggestion that can be, if ever, taken into consideration:
- Like "Copper Membership", users have to pay some fees in order to start new threads in Bounties board (Let's say something between 200 and 500 dollars) as not-fake projects can pay this small amount or to hire a good rated manager who already paid that fee to properly start monetizing his services. Forum users can only comment in existing threads of Bounties board. Collected funds can be used to hire more stuff to moderate the Bounties board.
- Only signature campaigns for Btc can be posted in the Services board and managers don't have to pay the fee like in the Bounties board.
- Managers can't edit their bounty threads or remove links to spreadsheets, they can reserve first comments for updates or change of the rules.
- Participants of the signature bounties (announced out of this forum) are responsible about their posts/signatures/translations and some restrictions can be set to reduce spam boost and fake translators.
- Merit requirement for translators/moderators.
- Merit requirement for participants of signatures campaigns that paid Btc.

Totally agree.

To follow on from what hilarious has said:

Take DdmrDdmr's data from this thread.

The board with the highest merit/post ratio is Technical Discussion. Go to Technical Discussion, click on any thread, and see which signatures are popping up - ChipMixer, CryptoGames, Bitvest, etc. Campaigns which pay in BTC. The board with the lowest ratios are all the Altcoin boards. Go to Altcoin Discussion, click on any thread, and you are met with 20 different signatures for 20 different coins/tokens, none of which you have ever heard of, and all of which probably won't still be around in 6 months.

We don't need the data to tell us that, however. Anyone who has been here for more than a month knows that the spam problem is because of these altcoin campaigns. When they can create the payment out of thin air with no cost to themselves, they are happy to pay for any old trash. It's not signatures per se that are the issue, it is that there is an infinite amount of trash coins which can be given away in exchange for signature space. If we forced all campaigns to pay in BTC, they would quickly become much more selective about who they let in - the incentive for spamming would disappear and the incentive for making good posts would increase.

I also agree with the points made regarding the Guildelines sticky. What's the point in it even being there when it is completely ignored.

Either just ban them outright or tighten the restrictions on how they can operate here and give punishments for those who can't run them efficiently. Problem solved either way. I'm not sure why you would waste time with the update thing though. People shouldn't be having their signature possibly modified without their consent and that would just open up a potential huge security concern (if I've understood is properly). All campaigns need to do is clean up their act and the only thing the forum needs to get involved with is warning and punishing those that don't.

Ask yourself this: Do you ever see any shitposts from the Chipmixer campaign? Nope. Why? Because they've got a manager who does his job properly and how it should be done. And then we've got all the shitcoin campaigns who do absolutely nothing and it's them that have ruined it for everyone else. If signature campaigns were banned then all the problem users and campaigns would leave instantly never to return thus leaving all the quality posters who would stick around out of pocket and having the bonus of getting paid for their quality contributions taken away. It just seems like the worst of the community will have ruined a good thing for everyone else. Take a look at the highest merited users of all time. If you take you (theymos) and satoshi out of the equation then in the top ten highest merited users of the forum 5 of them are wearing a Chipmixer signature. That should tell you a lot. Chipmixer is pretty much the only campaign known for it's quality participants. Now, imagine if all campaigns were run like this and all campaigns were known for their quality posters (and the ones that weren't were handed punishments). There would be no issue with signatures at all then. I've said multiple times before over the years that signature campaigns could actually help improve the quality of the forum and Chipmixer is proof of that, but when we allow users and campaigns to pay people just for bashing their head against a keyboard what do you think is going to happen?

It's not just about signature campaigners being out of pocket and restricted either. There's lots of people who conduct business here and use their signature to advertise their own goods and services and they'd also be screwed and lose out (unless there was some sort of whitelist for certain users).


This should have been done long ago and it looked like some progress was being made when I finally got theymos to agree to the Guidelines, but then nothing happened and all requests for blacklists were ignored. If theymos doesn't have time to issue sig blacklists then I think he should probably code an interface instead that would allow Globals to be able to do so (or a special team of sig campaign mods or whatever).


No. I gave a few warnings out initially but most just ignored it completely and when I requested certain campaigns signatures to be blacklisted nothing happened. It really won't work without theymos' input otherwise they're just hollow threats and with bans they can just run campaigns off site. If it became public knowledge that we don't tolerate lazy campaigns most will just clean their acts up in the first place so warnings, bans and blacklists will probably have to be issued less and less as time goes on.


I wouldn't be against only using some sort of team of 'trusted' managers. The only issue is how do new users get on there and how do we divide work between them? Some new managers do actually do their job properly but the overwhelming majority don't. Most new campaign managers are just completely oblivious to how the forum operates or how much work managing a campaign is and that is a huge issue. At least if there's a trusted team of known users then they will know what to do and the standards to keep. I think I suggested before you could make the 'trusted' sig managers mods or some sort of staff rank and only those users are allowed to run them. At least we could guarantee some quality control then.


That's why we need signature blacklists otherwise this wouldn't work.

I don't think merits is the right metric for this. A (signature) manager should be able to distinguish between quality post and garbage post, but it doesn't get reflected on their merits. For example, one of Indonesian local moderator (which is also a bounty manager for some projects in the past) doesn't have 1500 merits, simply because he's too lazy to make a post and instead focus on tackling our reports. But his judgment is good, better than maybe most altcoin campaign out there.


I honestly doubt they will be able do that. It's much profitable to give their tokens that were created out of thin air for payments.

@admin, maybe you could think this way: signature campaign and altcoins, in general, brought more people to this blockchain ecosystem and eventually benefiting bitcoin. For example, I came to this forum because of the claymore miner problem that I need to solve. It's a shame though that I know blockchain because of ethereum, not bitcoin.

The problems are about spam, low-quality posts, and enormous scams like others have mentioned.

There are four actors involved here: the campaign (manager), the signature bearers, the ad consumers, and the forum as an entity.

Creating a sort of signature CMS for campaign managers could clearly be interesting for them, providing flexibility to try out different messages overtime, and use A/B tests to optimize their signature ads. From a marketing point of view, that is very interesting, although to be able to exploit that properly you’d need to know a bit about dynamic marketing ads and how to optimize them.
The signature content could even change depending on the board section you are in (I’m specifically thinking about displaying the signature in the local language for those that bear one and post on their local board – after all, it would be easier to understand the message if the signature add was displayed in the language of those that are potential targets).

That does sound like a fair share of work to create, and while the signature campaign yes/no debate could go on and crystalize in a ‘no’ further down the road, the truth is that they are a core driver for traffic to the site, albeit all the counter-effects. Ideas such as a CMS for signatures probably would enhance the forum’s position versus other competing sites that promote campaigns.


The signature bearers for the most would not care about a change in content of his signature billboard from time to time, pushed by the campaign manager. Most likely, they have never even bothered to take a look into what they are passively advertising, so the way it is done is of no real concern in general. There is though a rarer segment that does, and will not flash any add on their signature space. CMS would therefore need to be an opt-in/opt-out feature to cover both scenarios, and it would be up to the campaign manager to reward each scenario according to campaign rule discretion.

Creating a set of forum endorsed campaign rules, and tying merits dynamically to being able to bear a signature have all been discussed above, and are interesting to consider (although impact has to be measured on all ends).


The ad consumers, any of us potentially, would probably notice the change of content derived from a dynamic signature CMS, simply because our sight is not trained to ignore new content that easily.
Whatever spam accompanies the signature would still be the poster’s prerogative, and only limited by personal standards, campaign supervision (currently only in a few selected cases) and forum constraints (forum current set of unofficial/official rules).
A nice perk at some point could be to include, under specific requirements, an opt-in/out switch on the user profile to see signatures on the whole.


Lastly, the forum as an entity, while not wishing to get involved with how campaigns are rolled-out (aside from the general forum unofficial/official rules) could monetarize features such as the signature CMS. I mean, it would require a development which is non-trivial, and it would give campaigns an interesting potential set of options.

BTC payment has been mentioned above, be it to the forum and/or the campaign signature bearers. That would at least place something real at stake on behalf of the campaigns, and in many cases, it could lead to better campaign management and, above all, supervision of the content being posted in order to get some ROI out of the campaign.

If we can tackle campaign managers, we have solved half of our problem so my suggestion goes like this. Before a user gets a privilege to manage a campaign he/she must have a past record of been meritef for quality posting  e.g a Legendary member applying to be a campaign manager must have earned 50% of the current legendary merit requirement to be eligible to manage a campaign.i.e user must have earned  1500merit for equality posting. This will make then take their job seriously as they can lose the privilege.

Secondly, there should be selected altcoin used for altcoin  bounty campaign payment. I am against the idea of banning all altcoin bounty leaving only paid bitcoin signature. The forum has grow more than just bitcoin. I believe that's why we have grin as a payment option now.  So this is my suggestion, every altcoin bounty should pay their participates in the token of the blockchain their project are developed on.
Example, If your project is based on ETH or EOS blockchain and you want to run a bounty campaign participates will be paid in ETH or EOS  and not your worthless token. I believe this will also have an impact as they got something to lose if shitposters are been paid.

Given the two most "active" sub-forums are alt-coin related, it is safe to say signature campaigns have a large effect on the forum.

A small change I think might benefit this ecosystem would be dividing the "Bounty" sub-forum between campaigns that pay in a currently tradable tokens/coins and those that pay in yet to be minted coins. Essentially, escrowable vs. non-escrowable campaigns. This would serve as something of a quality filter, while still remaining fairly hands off in terms of actual screening.

I always think that people will come out with more creative ways of doing things in an area with limited tools. Just like in sandbox video games, you'll see a lot more creative gamers in the simpler game with limited capabilities and vice versa.

My point is that serving signature campaigner with greater tools will supposedly make things easier for them, but it will decrease the creative mind out of them. This doesn't really benefit the forum itself, but it does give some to the community.

When I say deleted by mods I don't mean the posts remove when a thread gets deleted. I also gave some posts deleted because warning the newbies in their threads and they get deleted.

What I mean are the posts reported by others and marked as good. so you have been actually reported for the specific post.

I like the positive reinforcement vibe but I think I'm too cynical to see how this can work without some stick to go with that carrot. Shitty campaigns already cost next to nothing to run (paying in worthless tokens) and would cost even less if the forum provides better management tools so they'll just leech and keep spamming. They don't seem to care about post quality or if the post gets deleted.


Yeah, something like that, although 3 is way too low. I think I got 3 deleted just recently and I swear it wasn't my fault

We need penalty for those who spam a lot, if you have like 3 deleted posts by moderator for the past 2 activity cycles then your signature should be off for at least a month.

Some clear rules for the bounty managers + a requirement to become a manger you need to earn minimum 10 merit.

If you cannot post/recognise quality content, you cannot properly manage a campaign and most likely allow spammy participants.

I am not earning with my signature, while a am giving away knowledge.
Sent you merits, even if I don’t like to ban something, I think the effort put in those signature campaign could be better put at work on bitcoin itself.

I don't think enough posts are getting deleted at the moment for it to make a difference.

I'm not sure about the idea of banning them outright. It's already possible to hide signatures and block those who look like they're in a signature campaign.

Merit limits could be enforced I guess but I doubt it'll do much. There are lots of users here that are in signature campaigns and a lot of prole go over their maximum weekly limit and just keep posting anyway...

If I were going off donations for helping people in the time I've been here and helped people, I'd have $40 in three years...

Renting signatures to people as a tax and donating the proceeds to charity would be a nice idea. I feel if sigs were removed completely, a lot of users will come for a random trades and then go again there's be no community or reason for the trust and merit system because someone will buy something with money they've earnt in fiat and go again until they next have a nice amount of money to plunge into more goods six months to a year later.

---

My point in this post is that I've come across users who have lived off signature campaigns in the past and it's helped them in between jobs to stop them being completely cut off. There's the issue that quite a few of these are spammy but a few high merit earners in the past I've known personally to do this sort of thing.

I don't see any problem with regards to signature campaigns. What triggers me is that even those scam projects are allowed to announce their bounty campaigns in this forum and even ask for more posts that makes bounty hunters looks like spamming. Maybe change the payment method on signature campaigns and bounty campaigns from token payment to Bitcoin or ethereum payments. In that way, scam projects will think twice before engaging on their anomalies.

I like this one. I'm thinking about something similar.
Let's say, you have to "pay" 1 merit/month to be able to wear a paid signature (and you can only use your earned merits for it).
This way, there's no need to change the merit requirements for ranking up, because newbies can still become juniors if they manage to get 1 merit, juniors can rank up if they get more, etc...
So they will have a chance to become even a legendary sometime in the future.
But if they choose to use their earned merits to be able to take part in a signature campaign (in order to monetize their time spent here instead of ranking up), that's their own decision.
This way, you can stop spammers, because they will quickly fall back to newbie rank, if they take part in a signature campaing, but they don't post useful stuff.
If the members are taking part in a signature campaing and they post quality stuff, they will manage to rank up parallel with monetizing their skills and time (ideal situation).
1 merit per month is really not much for a good poster, but will stop spammers on the short run (I mean they would just have to stop spamming for money if they run out of merit. If they want, they can spam for free, but they won't... or they have to start posting quality stuff, if they want to wear signature again).

Individual signatures have to remain free in the future, and we should not restrict them to e.g. black and white or small font, etc... If someone wants to advertise himself with a kind of colorful signature like the paid campaigns have, why not...

The question is, how to decide if a signature is paid or free?
If theymos implements a kind of central signature database from where the campaign members can choose their paid signature, this would solve the problem for the decent campaigns.
But how to restrict shady ICOs, if they start to manage their campaigns off site and members say that their signatures are not paid? I know that it's possible to prove that they are paid in the end, but it requires effort and time from forum stuff or members.

Or we decide that having a signature is a kind of premium stuff here and that's not available for everyone (like the avatar). It's still better that you know that if you have the necessary merits, you can set up a signature (this is a kind of motivatoin to post quality stuff), compared to the situation when theymos just ban all the signatures...

I don't know if I agree that it is fair to allow someone to continue to advertise for a banned advertiser, simply because they have an increased personal stake in that advertiser. I might be misunderstanding your statement again, though, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

As far as I know there currently aren't any campaigns that are operating off-site, but admittedly this is not something I keep up with in any capacity. It would seem only banned advertisers would have any reason to do so, but I might be wrong about this. Regularly it is very easy to tell if someone is genuinely associated with a campaign, because campaign managers are extremely transparent with their spreadsheets and applications are normally public. Granted this isn't a rule, but it would seem an easy guideline to adhere to if you want to run a legitimate campaign.

I'm mostly thinking out-loud, and I see where you're coming from, but there seems to be applicable answers to these questions.


I feel like we're playing word-games at this point. If there were nothing resembling a "license" then there would be no enforcement of any guidelines and we'd be where we currently are (or worse).

Increase the forum's usefulness for its members.

Also, forum systems can be designed to encourage good behavior. For example, if I got everyone involved in sig ads to use a forum-provided signature management system / stats tracker, then I could show only a "modified impressions" value which takes the real impressions value and subtracts from it if the person is getting posts deleted by mods (or something like that).

Would it be difficult to enforce?

From a technical standpoint, no. It would be very easy.

From a fairness standpoint, yes. There could be some people who are advertising a company outside of the signature campaign, for example because they have an ownership stake in the company, or work for the company in a role that benefits when the company has increased sales/volume.

Even if this rule were to be enforced, campaigns could be managed entirely outside of the forum, which would make it difficult to rule out someone using a bunch of accounts to wear a particular signature, and post a bunch of garbage, making it look like the campaign has a lot of people enrolled making lots of shit posts, when in reality, these people have nothing to do with the campaign.

That is still a de-facto license. I also have a feeling changes will eventually be made to the DT system moving it in the opposite direction from where it has recently gone.

Would it be a difficult/unfeasible task to enforce a rule that users advertising for banned advertisers are given a few days to remove their signature before being suspended/banned?


I meant more along the lines of a community-enforcement; similar to the direction DT is taking.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. I edited my post for clarity.

I don't think theymos wants to be involved in giving licenses to get to perform a job.

Either I misunderstand what you're trying to say or I don't see the problem with losing these campaigns. If a campaign is unable to uphold the Signature Campaign guidelines, then what exactly is the issue with them moving off-site? Unless you mean to say the management of the campaign will be taken off-site and the participants will remain here.

It would be interesting if there was some kind of a process that would determine who can appropriately manage a campaign, sort of like there is a process that determines which trust values appear by default. This of course leaves bias as a part of the equation and means we'll have to hammer out some criteria. Done properly though, I don't think it would be too terrible to enforce, sort of like DT is somewhat self-sufficient (at least, that's the goal).

I don’t think theymos will restrict campaigns to those that only pay in bitcoin because of free market issues. This would clearly benefit those who participate in dig deals.

I am not a huge fan of enforcing the “signature campaign guidelines” for managers because it will lead to campaigns being run(managed) off the site when advertisers are banned. This is also why forcing campaigns to pay in bitcoin will not work.

I would note that it is not uncommon for a group of people to wear similar signatures because they hold a similar stance on issues they feel strongly about or want to support similar statements.

Agreed! I know I'm not the best manager out here but I try not to incentivize spam while making sure everyone follow some rules to make sure the overall environment gets better.

---

I can't stress enough how good this would be. Honestly, if we were to remove all the ICO signatures it would probably not be as big of a problem. I tried my hand at an ICO Campaign once, for about two weeks until it went to shit and I'm never going to bother with it again. As mentioned by yahoo as well there's several "Bounty Manager" teams popping up in Services daily, I doubt any of them would have the rep to actually work on a smaller sized organic signature campaign for a bitcoin mixer, as an example.

Not to mention that I've seen some of these "teams" have groups on telegram with thousands upon thousands of newbie accounts signed up to join any new bounty they'll launch. I for one would not miss it one bit if removed.

finally. i send you all the merit i have. but i dont have any.

my advice: ban it asap.

EDIT: @theymos: only 4 (including myself) dont earn something with their post in this topic. thats all you have to know

There are about 20 new " ICO managers/Teams" popping up weekly. I'm not saying the forum should "screen" all of them per say, but maybe some Merit restrictions and rank restrictions should be put into place before anyone can offer managing services?

I don't think think it's out of the question to require teams to use a forum escrow or must hire a manager from an approved list.(There is no actual list unless you count https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/overview-of-bounty-managers-5032713 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/overview-of-bitcointalk-signature-anti-spam-campaign-managers-4412712 these) An official list could be made but then the forum is basically endorsing the users put on the list, or the forum could ask a disclaimer to be added to any list be made by the community.

Users that have shown interest in the quality of their posts and posting habits IMO are more likely to actually care about the campaigns they manage. More likely to care about spam.

I also like the suggestion of no token paying signature campaigns allowed. Maybe also include translations as well. I think facebook, twitter, youtube, instragram, reddit, blogs etc are fine as they are not spamming the forum. Just my opinion

People who don't post often will get close to zero sig views because their posts will be buried ..or if a few their posts or topics are interesting which will also mean enough merit to have the sig displayed  


I share a bit that feeling, the WOT is one example where this farming happens by newbies but it's the best thing we have right now. And if nobody is giving you merit it means that nobody in the crowd shares your opinion, and this should make you think twice why are you posting here.

My idea would be something around 1 merit for 2-4 activity periods, or we could make this to rank dependent or we could make it both posts and merit related (no idea of a formula yet and brain not helping kronk now)
But seriously, if you have 2000 posts and 1 merit in one year....there is something fishy happening.



Bring in the ICO spam bingo ticket :p

Has there ever been any enforcement with this stuff? Take this, for example:


Good point. There's a world of difference between tokens printed out of thin air and bitcoins, in terms of advertising costs. It's really apparent when you compare token-paid bounties to BTC-paid campaigns.

What is the problem we're trying to solve with this?

Anything short of enforcing some sort of anti-shitposting policy on signature campaigns is probably not worth the effort. Bad managers will be bad even if you give them good tools.

For example the forum could track how many users in each campaign got banned or had their posts deleted by mods and adjust certain privileges based on that, e.g. limit the number of users they can hire. But that would basically require EVERY signature to be approved by the forum, which I guess goes against the "no screening" stance.

two problems with this. first, people who don't post often shouldn't lose the option to have a signature just because other people are spamming. i really don't think automatically disabling signatures is a fair option, and manually dealing with this is out of the question re staff time.

second, i'm still not confident that merit accurately measures "quality". i get the feeling a lot of people award merit to posts they agree with and within various in-groups (rather than being strictly related to post quality). if there's a time-based merit requirement for signature, i think the requirements should be really lax, otherwise decent posters will be wrongly penalized. one can of course just "play to the crowd" to farm some merit (and it's not uncommon to see that already today) but.....fuck that.

Absolutely, 100% agree.  I'm sure Theymos is well aware of the real problems with sig campaigns, and they have nothing to do with signature updates or tracking exactly how long a member has worn a signature.  Sure, his suggestions might help campaign managers, but that's not really a problem that needs solving IMO.

Nice to hear Theymos at least considering ending signature advertising altogether.  I'm not all for that, because I think they're useful to a lot of people (and businesses), but I would bet a large amount of money that the quality of posts would increase exponentially if members couldn't earn money by renting out their signature, avatar, and PM space.  Bitcointalk might not become a ghost town, but it sure as hell would look a lot different than it does today.

I also agree with this.  In addition to the reasons you've given, I think it would cut down on the number of awful ICO bounties, which are usually the culprits behind all the garbage posts in the Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion sections.  It might also cut down on some of the scammier ICOs if they actually have to pay in a real cryptocurrency instead of some token destined for the 1-satoshi crypto graveyard.

If there will be no merit decay, then at least this.
Some formula on activity/posts vs merit earned days  /rank whatever

I think that the simple way would be: no merit earned in the last two activity periods > disable signature or at least make them one line normal characters size no colors not clickable.

Quote from: ?? on ??

Signature which pay with Bitcoin usually have less spammer, but it can be exploited since manager can simply manage campaign outside this forum.

Yeah, but members could also be tagged and banned if we set up this as a rule.

Also, a fee to display signature would probably kill all the ICO and a lot of the spam.
But don't make it payable in grin  

Forum taking cut's is stupid,  I agree that for now signatures are necesary, hate them myself. I think perhaps forum should atleast ban obvious scams, I know it's not what it's done but same user that years ago donated 50 btc for that green coin could now get scammed because really nothing is done from that part to prevent them.

I understand this point of view, as those token campaigns are really the main problem regarding spam.

However I think banning this payment method would be against the forum philosophy (this was the best word I could think of), almost a censorship and a way to control people' activities here. Even scammers are not deleted, but just tagged.




What I think would be a great addition is to add a high merit requirement to wear a signature. Something like 20 or 30 merits at least.

There are lots of users here with legendaries/hero accounts (probably hacked/bought) with less than 5 earned merits and are spamming the forum wearing signatures. I don´t think they should be allowed to do so. Maybe they could buy a Signature Membership like Lafu suggested...

I don’t think signature campaigns typically last long enough for the automatic updates to be useful. The subscription tracking might be useful to ensure someone isn’t changing signatures and claim to have worn the signature when they have not.

If what you described was implemented, the forum could force publish stats about the campaign (or manager), such as how many users have been banned while wearing a signature.

It also remains to be my position that the use of signatures (beyond two lines with no special formatting) should be a paid feature to force those who wear paid signatures to have incentives that align their interests with that of the forum.

Maybe something like as for the new users can buy a "Copper Member" to post pictures , so if they want it to use they can buy the "Signature Member"

Just an Idea !

It would mean the end of some bounty managers and their control over alt accounts on these campaigns   Ouch

I have only two suggestion.
1. Allow only bitcoin paying campaign signatures.
2. Have a sort of moderated/cured/well maintained form where campaign managers can import their rules, so comparing signature campaign could be made more straightforward and effective than looking at varidous threads (like https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=615953.1080). This won’t mean bitcoin forum to sponsor or touch signatures campaign,but only putting some order in the current mess.

I don't think forum itself or any function should be involve with signature campaign. It's working fine IMO, but problem is about spamming. We should think how we can prevent spam. That's why I have Proposed guidelines for bounty managers.. Spam really depending on campaign managers, if they not allow spammer then automatically spam will reduce. I think admin should be little strict for managers.    

I also think that spending effort in that direction is pretty close to waste, because the current type of signature campaigns don't change often enough to worth the effort.
Also if you invest your time in that direction could be seen that you encourage/endorse them, and we all know that sometimes some signature campaigns (especially from the bounty area) are .. problematic.

The only such implementation that would make sense in my eyes would be to automatically remove the user signatures from a certain campaign if proven scam.
(Maybe the signatures "registering" into the system would make the scams don't pollute so much.) Just the new problem arise: who will decide/approve the deletion of the signatures?

I can imagine there's a use case for this, if a campaign manager replaces the one short-term signature with the next one, while keeping the same participants.
However, I wouldn't want this: I want to be in charge of what my signature shows, and I wouldn't advertise anything I don't believe in.

This may be useful for a few (lazy) campaign managers, but I don't think it will do anything good for the forum.

I think enforcing Signature Campaign Guidelines will do the forum more good.

The only other suggestion I can think of, is something I've suggested before: only allow signature campaigns that pay in Bitcoin. The ones paying in made-up tokens have no real cost for the ICO, and thus don't mind "paying" for spam. If the campaign pays in Bitcoin, at least they have something to lose.

I don't think we are in need of any changes in the signature column of our forum because most of the people find no problem with signature advertisements.But the main debate is still we need the signature in this forum or not coz it make the forum filled with lot of spam post.What can we need to control that spam which is caused by signature campaigns.

Allocate some members who tolerate zero spam are the only people can manage signature campaigns like that!

That system would likely benefit campaign managers who manage multiple shorter campaigns. This way they could have a pool of members that sign up with them and just have their SIG changed as a new campaign launches.

Longer running campaigns may decide to market this way and keep things fresh if this system were available, but not that often I imagine.

Personally I dont see much added benefit to the forum as a whole by implementing this. One reason is that account farmers and creators of spam bots might use this as a way to make their lives easier.

Signature timeframe are not important but amount of displays thats why campaign managers track amount of posting in hope the amount of displays will be high.
Thats actually what i proposed cryptohunter to start a signatur campaign against DT abuse where the banner will be implemented from a Database to redirect traffic to latest abuse.

Signatures rarely change, if ever. I don't think there's any point in using forum resources for real-time updates like that.

I don't see anything that could be used to help signatures (that pertain to campaigns) apart from aliases for BBCode in order to fit "more" in the character restrictions. That being said, I would be interested in seeing new BBCode options

Honestly, I find signature advertisements distasteful, and it is not impossible that I will someday ban the practice. However, it's obviously an important part of the forum ecosystem today. So if you use signatures for advertising, what are your suggestions for forum improvements in that area?

For example, one idea I had was to allow users to subscribe to campaigns that other users set up, and then the campaigner could automatically push signature updates to everyone subscribed, and also track exactly when and for how long each user was subscribed. Would this be significantly useful? I'm not all that familiar with how these signature campaigns work, so I'm not sure.

However: the forum will never intermediate these transactions. We will not touch the money involved or perform any sort of "screening", etc. Also, I have no particular desire for the forum to take a cut of sig-ad transactions.

(I'm probably not going to implement anything in this area very soon, but the matter has been on my mind lately, and I wanted to see what people thought.)