Bitcoin Forum

In order solve the problem of spam and clutter of useless and with no substantial content posts. I proposed account post ghosting. It means any post by a given user in a period of time will not be counted and will not be added in the number of posts and in activity. He can posts all he want but those will not be counted and he will only be wasting his time. He can still be ban if he posts outright spam and off topic posts.

Bypass: advertisers manually count the user's post, because all they care about is their ads showing up

Then make those ghosted posts do not show on the "show posts" option.

Easier solution... ban signature advertising because it has only lead to spam

Are signatures even necessary?  Just give people a signature field that can be viewed in the profile, we really don't need to see it after every post.

Something does need to be done, maybe along lines of op, not a bad idea at all.

But pls don't ban sigs, just the paid ones. I've learned a lot from sigs. General stuff and about the individual's pet products. Also I need a switch - see my sig.

Signatures was one of the features since Satoshi created this forum. It comes with advantage and dis advantage. My proposal is to hopefully get rid of the disadvantage. I'm hopeful we can achieve common grounds.

Exactly. Ban all signatures. Anything less is pointless.

I think there is nothing to do with signatures. The problem is useless spam posts. We need to deal with them not with signatures. Accounts that post useless spam posts should get a warning and then a ban from 1 week to up to 1 month. Simple as that?

The plain and simple, straightforward solution.
I don't understand why it isn't already in effect.

When you come to think of it, signatures really have no useful purpose.
A larger "about me" text on your profile page does.

I'm fine with signatures being banned, to be fair - I'm just using one right now because you get paid so much. I guess that's one of the problems, the gigantic amounts you get paid for making posts. I wouldn't mind losing that small income source, to be honest, if it stopped a lot of spam.

I think signatures is a big part of this forums. Everyday new users joins the community to learn about bitcoins. In signatures ,cloud mining , mining rig shops, gambling and other websites are promoted. We are the bitcoin community and we want people to hear about bitcoin and get familiar with It as much as possible and these website advertising really help to go forward with bitcoin, maybe their first used bitcoin transaction is made exactly through any of advert on this forum which leads to a future use of bitcoin. In my opinion this is the main bitcoin forum and anything bitcoin related should be promoted here as much as possible.

If talking about signature spammers this is a problem about spammers  not signatures I have mentioned that few times before and we can easily deal with them by banning them for a specific time from this forum. So please don't mix up signatures with spammers, It's two different things.

I believe you missed my point.  I was not saying that signatures are spam, but that paid signature advertising campaigns lead to people spamming more posts for the BTC.

Signature advertisers just need to be restricted on the terms they provide, the reason for all this spam posting is purely to boost their post counts because of the minimum requirements these people have, if you forced them to pay on a time basis rather than post count it would force them to either leave or adapt.

I don't really see a way to do this effectively though, not really any way to force them to do anything. We can ban them and they'll just add a link to the sigs they're already buying to an offsite offer.

I'm also pretty sure Ritz, Stunna, and the rest don't give one hoot about people who get banned over this, because banned users still have the signature, and it's also retroactive, so they are getting exposure they don't even have to pay for. Really it's a bonus for them.

One solution would be to remove post count all together. Then it's up to Stunna and others if they want to pay per activity. It would be the best option and best decision we can make. It won't reduce all spam. However, it will reduce a large amount of it and bring the noise to signal ratio back down.

Something needs to change this is becoming unbearable and I know the staff are doing what they can, but it's out of their control. As Bitcoin becomes even more popular there is going to be a lot of new users who are looking to make small amounts of money and the first place they will go is to the signature program.


Or just ban it all together. The individual spamming would get banned, so in theory the person who is paying and encouraging it should have their 'advertisements' banned.

(I believe Badbear has already suggested this solution)

Yeah I did suggest that a while back. I would greatly prefer to remove the incentive for people to spam instead of punishing them after the fact. Similar to the change from post count based member levels, to activity based, mostly removed the incentive for people to spam posts. These guys are paying people for posts so it's countered that.

Still easy to see how many posts one has knowing there is 20 per page though so wouldn't really be helpful.

Personally I'm a fan just filtering out urls from these services entirely since they're ultimately responsible for the spam.   

This makes completely no sense to me. It's like banning cars because people die in accidents. Signature advertising is a great way to let others know your business and there are hundreds of users here who reply on topic, why should they suffer because you, admins, can't find a way to enforce a basic forum rule?

I've been growing my own herbs and vegetables for a long time now, and I figured out a long time ago that cutting weeds when they get too tall doesn't help, need to dig the roots out.

Also, nice attempt at a strawman, but I never said all, just the ones that are promoting spam. There ways to purchase ad space in signatures without spamming the shit out of the forum in the process. TF for example didn't pay per post.  There are others that cap the post count at something reasonable.

There's nothing inherently wrong with ads in sigs, but paying per post, and some are even offering a bonus to the 'top' poster, is resulting in too much spam.
 

The car comparison would better fit Tysat's signature, and I agree something should be done to reduce spam, but I'm against removing sigs. I'm sure the campaign owners would prefer to change the payment method than lose the ability to advertise.

I agree. I don't think all signatures should be banned, but maybe make paying per post not allowed instead.

There is no sure way of enforcing that.

True I suppose. I think the first port of call is to do what has been done and keep banning the most prolific offenders. I think the difference is already noticable. Off topic has been pretty quiet the past couple of days.

So, instead of enforcing a detail like that, we should enforce based on the results. Consider the no giveaway policy we made in the Altcoin board: We don't actually say that giveaways aren't allowed, but rather that incentivizing low-value posts isn't allowed. When people tried to get around the rule by doing things like "IPOs", they were still dealt with because of how the underlying policy was worded.

I would argue that the same exact policy should be applied to sig advertisers. As long as an advertiser puts in a good-faith effort to prevent low-value posts and is willing to disavow people who make low-value posts anyway, they would have nothing to worry about. If they don't put in a good-faith effort to prevent low-value posts, their site gets added to our spam filter.

If we can get some consensus on this, we can see if theymos would be willing to do that.