Bitcoin Forum

Buying out users signatures as advertisements is being taken to the next level. There is far too many of them. Literally every 2nd post contains a signature violently advertising a gambling site or something along those lines.

To a newcomer this honestly makes the forum & Bitcoin as a whole look like one big joke. A bunch of people who have such little self respect that they use their signature to advertise for a measly $20 or so worth of BTC.

Not to mention the negative affect this has on the management team of the forum in relation to the ad revenue. Why would you want to buy a couple of ad's for a week when you could buy 300 peoples signatures for a month for half the price.

Thoughts?

Edit: It has now come to the point where people buying these signature based advertisements are paying higher to people who make more posts in a select period of time. This is encouraging spam & now not only taking away from the forums from a visual perspective, but a content perspective.

you are entitled to your opinion no matter how ignorant I think you sound. Selling peoples signatures or renting peoples signatures helps the community as well as businesses grow, have you ever thought about that?

also, check the thread where the forum does Sell ads they sell them for a lot of money they have no problem selling them because there are a lot of power house companies that will drop the money immediately and will also out Bid other competitors for the ad.

best of luck in the raffle mate!

Move along.

The funny thing is, forum ads don't account for even a fifth of the ads people see per thread.

I could do without all the colored crap turning my monitor into My Little Pony barf, but my eyes (and probably everyone elses') are trained to gloss right past text below the signature bar - so whatever.

(Maybe I don't write as well as I did, or lost all respect - but I was able to get 15 referral clicks in 2 months roughly a year and a half ago which has provided me a steady trickle of income. I tried the same referral link for about a month this year and accumulated 0 referrals.)

https://i.imgur.com/YXlh9C4.png

thank me later :)

Woot

There is nothing wrong with sig ads IMO.

Truly painful.


I'd be a lot happier with sigs in general if they couldn't be formatted, aside from links.

Agreed
This is never addressed though

2/3 of my arguments were completely unrelated to me.

I completely agree too.
An option to disable signature formatting (set to true by default, for new users) would be enough for me.

People who fancy a 1%-house-edge-full-colored-big-letters ad for a "refreshing" break during a long thread read could still enable it.

Please, theymos! ::)

EDIT : To make you more comfortable with this, I can assure you a lot of polluting signatures stand out much more than your official ads.
Which, obviously, make the official ads worth much less.

I find ads annoying as fuck, but oddly enough, because they're in the signatures I hardly notice them, this website seems to be nice enough not to do the typical ones most advertisers do which are horrible where there's lots of flashing etc. to annoy you on purpose. I do think there should be limits on the use of colour though, if they're just plain text I'm rarely bothered by them. I also approve that more advertisers like Tradefortress are offering up much fairer terms than even normal advertisers because they aren't trying to force websites to accept commission based payments, I bet you PPC style advertisers are going to die off eventually because everybody hates them.

I've actually been tempted by some of them, but they'd have to offer more if they want to spam my webspace and signature like they do or they'd have to play by my rules.

We need an 'Ignore sig' button :)

@whiskers75


Profile>Look and Layout Preferences>Don't show users' signatures.

Problem solved

No, we don't, as it already exists.
I like to read people signatures, but just want them not to take a third of my small screen and catch my eyes with flashy blinking huge links pointing to scam gambling sites.

EDIT : stormlighter was faster. ;)

I agree that a number of people that post with ads. Are not by any means quality. Posters.  I have my moments burned into history.  But I actually try to most of the time add to the convo not.

 "Derail brought to you by coinlenders."

I put an ad in my sig because I know the owner.  I know it's for the most part legitimate.  And I've been paid timely to just roll normal.  It's like an exra hundred or so dollars a year.  That does help when you have hobbys.

I think rules over time will change.  A posters ignored level will matter. .. LoL. quack shit usually doesn't fly period.  The problem will root itself out

Sigvertisements have never bothered me, I think it's cool that people can make a little money for something small and easy.  There can be confusion about what is a sig ad, and what is a forum ad.  This could make theymos's job harder if something illegal/viral is advertised, but as long as those are deleted I don't see a problem.

Maybe provide your own bitcoin forum that doesn't allow advertisements?  I hear that reddit is popular.

The only problem i have with signature ads is that some of them are "effin' HUGE", but as mentioned before, you can turn them off in profile preferences.

"violently advertising" wat?

I don't want to ignore all signatures, because something they contain useful information. So I just ignore any poster whose signature reduces the readability of the page. If their judgement is poor enough that they will attach an ugly signature to all their posts, then I'm probably not missing much by not reading their posts anyway.

You should respect where bitcoin economy currently is. For now we are in casino stage. Hopefully we'll go further and we'll establish higher levels of system.

Don't worry, inside joke you would never understand. ;)

http://cdn.mhpbooks.com/uploads/2013/03/sherlock-holmes.jpg

You don't say?

They're not simply "Bit777 - Bitcoin casino" It's

BIT777 ONLIEN CASINO LOTS OF GAME HEAPS GOOD HOUSE EDGE COME MAKE MONEY COME COME COME

That's an example & I don't mean to single out Bit777 what so ever. They're also heavily formatted to really "Jump" out at you. I consider this a fairly violent form of advertising, in the sense that it's very much in your face.

Exactly. I don't see why everyone has to disable their signatures to simply get around this issue. It's a very poor fix to such a problem.

That's right. It is helping members with little BTC to earn more, and helping the economy.

I agree, it's totally pathetic how people sell their signature space for cheap ads!

Are you being sarcastic?

I see you are not old enough (in forum time) to remember the days before the current signature restrictions. Right now, signatures can only include text and are limited to about three text lines in height. Before these restrictions were put in place, many people had moving gifs or ads that were a whole screen high. Those were obnoxious. People use the brightly colored glow/text combinations because that is what is available to them, be thankful that they are not worse.

just ignore the users then if you don't want to disable all signatures.

People just don't have any dignity and will do anything for money!

You must be one of those people who don't understand what ads do.

So that created an improvement, why not improve it even further?..

It has now come to the point where people buying these signature based advertisements are paying higher to people who make more posts in a select period of time. This is encouraging spam & now not only taking away from the forums from a visual perspective, but a content perspective.

If you see somebody spamming to increase their post count, then you should report that spam. I believe there is a "no spamming" policy for the forum already?

Correct!  Please report spam posts.

Some guys pay up to 1 BTC per month. I can't imagine that being profitable :S

I agree some of the colors used are an eye sore.  I also am aware that's the point.  I gues I'm detuned to advertiseing.  I spent a few years of my life away from decent TV Shows because of advertiseing.  I spent my childhood up into my adult life waitng for a GI Joe and Transformers movie. Only to find out they also became an.advertiseing platform.

It sucks, we have our advanced tech to thank.. What do we do?







This clearly is your reason for anger.  What I suggest is if you are going to put this much effort into posting for the logical. As well as posting for troll food.  That you from time to time save a link or two.  Kindly share them with the advertisers and see if they like what's happening.

I would hope they would moderate these folks themselves. If they fail to even publicly say "hey this fucker is no longer being paid.  We won't lose our money to spammers etc". Then post about that.  Go for the juggler.

Learned something today. :P  But some signatures are really interesting :O

Yeah, you used to be able to actually put ad code in your signature so your signature was a banner spot.  So, you would also get paid for the highest paying banners.

Am I the only one not getting paid for everything I do pertaining to Bitcoin?

Thank you for increasing my post count.

... Sarcasm aside, why does it make that big of a difference? The internet is full of advertisements - after all, I'd bet you a majority of the newbies who got into this love their btc faucets. Why should this be any different?

I don't see anything wrong with advertising in sigs, especially if you support it. Plus not all sigs are big colorful eye-hurting ones, take a look at mine for example, or even the Inputs one others have.

I thought about putting advertising in my sig... for about 3 seconds.

The only reason I considered it is that my sig was bad-mouthing Eligius for too long :P

With the NSA revelations, EVERYBODY should be putting their OpenPGP fingerprint in their sig; just like me :D

Disclaimer: OpenPGP does not prevent metadata analysis.

Really? Can you show me to any reference so I can read? I did not know this was available in the past.

This, I agree with.

IMG tags were allowed previously, you could link to a URL with a redirecter.

I won't leave a previously good forum and "provide" another one just because somebody tries to destroy the original one. The vandals should be eliminated, not us.



There is. OP has described it quite well.
But you couldn't have writen anything different than you did, no surprise. :-(



The most important point of the OP is that the sigvertisers make their posts as frequent as possible even when they have nothing important to say, diluting the forum contents that way. And I personally hate wading through a junk contents just for some advertises' pleasure.

I agree. Ignoring particular poster is much better solution.
And, maybe, the ignore count will make some feedback to the advertisers also.

Exactly.

Why not cut the bullshit and stop referring to them as signatures if we allow any content and formatting in that space? It's more of a footer that currently users can customize any way they wish.

There is no need in this footer for colors, font size options, and even links. Text only, convey the information you wish to convey, and that's it.

It's been months that people are proposing this. The deep silence from the staff means this will never happen.

Not exactly.

why waste your sig space when you can do something funny and get paid.

for my sig ad, it's easy to make 50 posts per month as I should post in this forum.

I just feel well.

Yeah, I know that. I think he was trying to say that it was possible to use your signature as an ad area, display forum ads and get paid. Never saw that happening, and I've been watching the forums since 2011 or so.