Topic: Signature spam - how to force users to read before replying? - page 2. (Read 673 times)

First of all we can encourage anyone to make a good post on topic, but we can't force them at all even not by the forum. Deleting their posts isn't going to prevent them and they will do it rapidly since they need to get paid from the signature. Most probably it will hard for moderators to judge moderators either post should delete or not without reading the all replies on the main thread. If you ask me if am I reading all the replies on a thread, then I will answer no. Because it's quite complicated and a waste of time. Because some people just repeating the same thing by changing or spinning words. But of course, I have been trying to read replies by constructive users, because I can learn from them. To be honest, a lower pay rate campaign can't expect high constructive users, as a result, this Kind of spam happening.

This is in line with another good example you mentioned recently, whereby on a given thread in Bitcoin Discussion with barely a few pages of posts (at the time I made the stat), the ratio of those that understood and commented on a given idea was 1:5 (1 understood it for every 5 that did not).

Granted that the OP of that thread wasn’t very clear in his exposure, and that proper comprehension was achievable only after reading the referenced source within the thread’s OP, but quickly triggered answers solely based on the heading seemed to be a constant there.

As you state,cases whereby a proper answer is given, and the subsequent posts revert back to simply answering the OP’s post, instead of building on the provided answers are rather frequent too unfortunately.

Not much to be done though. Reporting for being clueless of blatantly wrong is not a factor, unless it’s done within a low value post (which would be the sustainable basis).

I understood you perfectly, but this is not about scammers at all, we all know that scam is not moderated on the forum - it is not clear to me why you compare scammers and signature spammers in question here? I still think that nothing that makes the forum a better place is a waste (loss) of time, because you've only been here a little over 1 year - and you have no idea what the forum was like 5 years ago - some campaigns were run by bots, there was no selection process, post control...


As far as I can see, this user has an advertisement in his signature, but this year he wrote only a dozen posts and is not regularly active at all - such users are not a problem for the forum - but he is certainly a shitposter, there is no doubt about that.



You forget that it is not easy to start from scratch, and it is difficult for every shitposter to earn even 1 merit - let alone the 10 needed to become a Member rank and enter a signature campaign. Members who have hundreds of alt accounts are a different story.

The only thing I agree with is that campaign managers need to raise their standards, but I wrote before that there is a problem with a very small number of quality members who can fill places in new campaigns - and they are faced with the dilemma of filling places with members who are available (regardless of their quality), or that the campaign does not achieve the desired visibility due to lack of participants.

You misjudged me. I didn't say that scammers shouldn't be caught or we should stop exposing them; if anything, it's pretty obvious that scammers should be busted and I encourage every user from every marketing forum existing to fight them. What I did say is that trying to stop someone from making shitposts is a loss of time, which is different.

You should fight for plagiarized papers, but how can you stop a guy like the one below from making non-stop meaningless posts?


You can't. Even if you report them with accuracy and get it banned, he'll just create another account and continue doing it, if he hasn't a hundred left. You'll just ruin your time. The solution for this problem is to cut his incentive, which would mean manager responsibility.

And how are we to achieve that, we can't force change if those we're forcing it on aren't willing to change. The sad truth is that we can't stop spam totally on the forum and to some extent they're needed to differentiate between quality post and the rest.

Although the merit system was introduced to do this, it hasn't been so effective so far since we're still have the spammers with their ranks. The merits didn't do anything harmful to them, it only reduced their chances of increasing in rank but that doesn't mean they can't join paid campaigns.

Obviously the campaigns they'll be chances to enter isn't as quality as the ones requiring high earned merits but still, we have to understand the spammers don't care. As for what we can do, self moderating the threads will create could help in reducing the level of spams we see on our created threads and for boards such option aren't available we continue reporting the spams and keep hopes in the hands of the moderators to do the needful.

If there's a thousand posts which are report worthy, that signals that there either needs to be more moderation in that particular section or there isn't enough users reporting there. There should be more than enough moderators between us to handle extra reports. If there isn't, that signals to theymos that there needs to be additional moderators considered.

Its never a bad thing to report a post that you genuinely think breaks the rules. Only good comes from it. You either; get a better feel for the forum guidelines, remove spam from the forum or get better coverage of the forum by indicating there needs to be more moderators to theymos.

As I posted above, users shouldn't really factor whether they report a post or not on the pressure or workload of the moderators. Just report it. The worst that'll happen is it'll either get marked bad or remain unhandled if missed.


This has been tried, and tested before. It never really caught on. The thing is, there's so much bias, and subjection when it comes to creating a list, genuinely good users might be bundled into the list simply because the user curating it has a vendetta against them. Plus, its almost impossible to remain unbias especially without any real defined guidelines to users added to the list. So, there will be a huge difference in severity of user, the problem with that is they all get branded as one.

I'm curious to learn about them and keep in mind that there is no perfect system as every system has it own flaws, what we've been operating on the forum is a closed system where the mod do everything behind the scenes and make decisions on their own, while Reddit operates an open system whereby the people on the thread decide what reply is quality and which is not thru the downvote and upvote system without reporting to mod.

I've been here for 4 years and one thing I found out, I think there were a lot of spam in the system compared to what we have now all thanks to the merits system.

Don't abuse the trust system, spammers are not scammers.

I think you are wrong when say that someone cannot be forced to change their habits, and that it is a waste of time - if we had had such an attitude a few years ago, this forum would have literally drowned in spam - but some members then strongly opposed to that and took matters into their own hands - @hilariousandco took over the old YoBit signature campaign, and @Lauda BitMixer which immediately gave visible results - and was ultimately further enhanced with the merit system.

Furthermore, the forum was cleared of spammers thanks to someone who processed the forum from all plagiarized posts, and as a result thousands of such members were permanently eliminated - for those of us who have been on the forum for 5+ years, the change is more than obvious.

If more people were constantly reporting such posts and if such posts were regularly deleted and after x deleted posts such users get a temporary ban, I think it would be more than a clear message for them to start reading and stop being ordinary spammers for a change.

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I have also reported such posts and have had no success so far, unfortunately they have remained unhandled - and I believe that mods do not have an easy task handling such reports, and it certainly takes time to read all the relevant posts.

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I'm going to try, not only because I think it's the worst thing to ignore someone and pretend it's normal, but because sometimes I feel like I'm communicating with stupid bots and not living people.

It's really annoying when some users post something really good and there isn't even a single reply on their post and meaningless posting continues from meaningless users.

There are some ways that come to my mind:
1. We should report every similar post with the title: Meaningless! But that can be an extra pressure on moderators to check every post.
2. We should tag the users who don't read anything and reply blindly (not a great idea).
3. We should create a crowdsourced blacklist of those users and anyone will be able to add them in their ignored list (If it's possible, let's hide Ignored users from the threads they post, like they don't exist).

It will just make their "work" meaningless and logically should lessen the attempts. Otherwise, we can't really force anyone.
Maybe if we PM those users and ask to read before a reply can do the trick, who knows...

So what if mod doesn't delete the post your are reporting? It's not a big deal at all, and anyone who reports the posts regularly will eventually experience that ( I have 71 report marked as "bad") , but that doesn't mean the we should stop reporting.



I can see various ways in which that like/dislike system would get abused. There is something similar on reddit, where comments with more downvotes than upvotes get hidden, but I am not sure that it would work here.

This is it, this is the point individual differences play in, different understanding and how people react, the mod might react positively to the Same post I reacted negatively about. The only solution to reduce spam is to replace the " Report to moderator" with the " likes and dislike" button where a reply with more dislike get deleted

Don't hesitate to report such posts. I've done it many times, and more often than not drivel gets deleted, no matter how long it is. And if someone gets enough posts deleted, maybe he change his ways, or at least ask what he is doing wrong, as they occasionally come to meta asking exactly that.

Although reporting a thousand posts seems a little extreme, that's the job of the moderators.

Mods are paid positions, so they help keep the forum clean. As they are unable to cover every nook and cranny of the forum, that's when the reporting feature comes in.

Reporting a thousand post to moderators only make it harder for them to focus on another area of the forum. We need to understand and know that people see things in different ways, as an Agricultural and food processing engineer I was taught that in every chemical processing there is always negative or positive reactions, the way people read and understand differs, the way people write also differs.

I've seen someone write 8 sentences without making a single meaning just to avoid their post being deleted or reported because the generation we have now caught a glimpse of a two-liner post as spam.

Does the forum have another meaning of what spam is?

You can't. When you have a budget of $1000 each week, you are unlikely to have $200 or any amount unspent each week. At the end of the day, you have to pick the best from applicants. Now, since we have a lot of signature campaign available, can you fill all the quota if you look for high quality users? I believe it's not possible because there will never be such huge amount of high quality users.
Moreover, bounty payment with native token has no value almost. Can you stop that? Well, forum can. Forum can simply say, BTC, USDT or any other coin which have value is the option but that's not going to happen I think.
I can't see any good option without interfere from the admin.

This is more true when those poster don't want to change themselves, then only way to stop them is to make some rules which is not possible in this case.

You can give  glasses to a person who is blind so that he may read but there is no pill developed for spammers.

First of all, what exactly is considered to be low paying signature campaign? Is 50 USD per week low, for 15-20 posts per week, as majority of signature campaigns pay that, or even more ? As someone who writes few thousands posts on few other (non paying) forums, and doing that for ~20 years, if someone told me few years ago that I will get paid that amount of money for forum posts, I would tell him that he is crazy. Of course, that number is low when compared to few best campaigns, but realistically? I don't think so. I have a feeling that people here lost the perspective a little bit, when it comes to that.

There are simply way too many campaigns currently, and lack of quality members leads to managers having to lower their standards. I am also not surprised that advertisers are not willing to increase the payment considering the fact that forum ain't as active as it used to be.

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@OP I suggest that you report few such posts just to try it out, and if its marked good, then continue doing so. Maybe we need some coordinated action against that, that could be done via Spambusters club.

That's probably because the serious discussion boards don't have a particular subject so there are a lot of topics in these boards that if posted elsewhere for example they would be moved to off-topic right away and we know off-topic discussion on a bitcoin forum doesn't really get that much discussion.

P.S. There are other places on this forum that have high quality discussions such as the "technical" boards and you can also always self-moderate your topic and keep it clean.

People do same thing on Reddit when there are no signatures, as previously suggested (you see what I did there?) it would be better idea to have some rules with campaign managers that make them hire quality posters. Shitposts will decline naturally.

That's almost like a trend on every thread out there, unless the OP closely monitors it

Unless we go post @ Serious Discussion/ Ivory Tower, rest assured the discussion quality would be top-notch, albeit a ghost town