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. |
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Wouldn't be interested, would probably think it's spam.
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I do give warnings from time to time, and sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Spammers wielding ads in their sigs are generally a group for whom warnings, at least in my limited experience, rarely work. They tend to get very defensive if I tell them they should work on improving the quality of their posts.
Yes, when I was referring to warnings being useless I meant specifically this type of poster/situation. There are many levelheaded and good people here who respond well. These folks on the other hand, are paid advertisers, and like the saying goes, money talks, bullshit walks. |
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Now at the current situation you guys are banning accounts that has posted a lot of useless posts. But you are not looking for solution to this. So what you want Is only constructive posts on forum? You should set exact detailed criterion for posts. Who doesn't follow them should get a warning, and give exact time to stop posting posts that doesn't meet criterion. If the time exceeds to start making normal constructive posts ban for that account should be applied BUT I don't think It should be permanent. Bans for accounts that keeps posting useless posts should be up to 1 month in my opinion. When time expires and he/she starts to post useless posts again, he will instantly get 30 days ban again.
I think that would be a solution? What do you think?
I've only permanently banned one so far IIRC, the rest (close to 30 now since yesterday) are about 80% 1 week, 20% 2 weeks (the really bad ones). Second ban 4 weeks/8 for the bad ones, third may be permanent, depends on who it is and their history. I'm not going to set an exact criteria for posts, if one needs that, then one is probably part of the problem and a waste of my time. |
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I think deleting the offending posts and/or messaging them a warning that if they continue to post crap at their current rate they will be banned will be a stern enough warning. If they're having their posts actually deleted then this will obviously make them step up their content as it's not worth it to them and is actually counter-productive to keep doing so. If after a warning they continue to act the same then give them a weeks ban as punishment and then they should get the idea. Like you said, many don't want to risk their accounts as they are valuable to them so banning outright, especially without a warning (if you didn't give them any other warning), should be a last resort and could probably be avoided in most cases.
There's too many to delete posts one by one, it takes 3-5 seconds to delete one post. Deleting posts in threads is different because there is a quick moderation option available via checkboxes and they can all be deleted at once, this isn't possible on a users post history page, has to be done one by one. PM warnings are useless in my experience and you just end up in circular arguments. The week ban is the warning. You don't have to delete them all, but I still think a quick warning threatening a ban if they continue would be more beneficial to all involved and they'd more often than not get the message, and if they didn't then a brief ban would give them time for that to sink in. Could an option to delete users posts with check boxes not be implemented? I don't make threats. I've asked for such an option before, but really if you need that option to delete so many of a user's posts, they should probably be banned anyway. Still a good option to have to clean up after the ban though. Should be suggested for the new forum software. BadBear, we obviously have a different opinion on signature campaigns but I'm perfectly fine with that. I won't go far supporting my opinion and I also appreciate that you're here explaining what is happening and giving us some insight. But honestly, what's to earn out of giving people the impression there is a "risk to get banned"?
Well it's our only option at the moment, besides just let it continue. if this doesn't work then we'll need to explore other options, such as disabling sigs, not allowing links, or filtering links from services such as the ones who buy signature space for ads. I don't think the first option should be banning everybody from having signatures altogether. As a last resort ban the actual paid campaigns or the urls of specific offenders who don't keep in line with policing their own users/deals, but I guess that can even be circumvented as links can just be cloaked easy enough. I think a lot of people will get the message with the recent bans and it'll spread some fear or warning to others though, but I still think a message to offenders first would've been much better. Maybe, like I said though, most people don't take pm warnings seriously. Hell most people probably don't even know who I am if they don't read meta, which most don't. Why would they listen to me? No use debating what might've been though. |
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I think deleting the offending posts and/or messaging them a warning that if they continue to post crap at their current rate they will be banned will be a stern enough warning. If they're having their posts actually deleted then this will obviously make them step up their content as it's not worth it to them and is actually counter-productive to keep doing so. If after a warning they continue to act the same then give them a weeks ban as punishment and then they should get the idea. Like you said, many don't want to risk their accounts as they are valuable to them so banning outright, especially without a warning (if you didn't give them any other warning), should be a last resort and could probably be avoided in most cases.
There's too many to delete posts one by one, it takes 3-5 seconds to delete one post. Deleting posts in threads is different because there is a quick moderation option available via checkboxes and they can all be deleted at once, this isn't possible on a users post history page, has to be done one by one. PM warnings are useless in my experience and you just end up in circular arguments. The week ban is the warning. BadBear, we obviously have a different opinion on signature campaigns but I'm perfectly fine with that. I won't go far supporting my opinion and I also appreciate that you're here explaining what is happening and giving us some insight. But honestly, what's to earn out of giving people the impression there is a "risk to get banned"?
Well it's our only option at the moment, besides just let it continue. if this doesn't work then we'll need to explore other options, such as disabling sigs, not allowing links, or filtering links from services such as the ones who buy signature space for ads. A handful of people probably already got banned. And this happens while a nother handfull of people is having a daily three digit post count.
I'll get around to them eventually, I have a whole thread dedicated to maintaining a list of these folks with input from all moderators welcome. Also have users pm'ing me with suggestions, a lot of people are sick of this. Do you think that the ones that got banned are going to come back and never spam again in fear of not getting banned again?
It takes at least two months to get an account worth selling signature space on, I'm pretty sure it'll work. According to my humble opinion again you should At least let them know why they got baned in more detail. Let them know specifically what post of them was it that you didn't like. Don't just press the "ban button" without getting into the effort to explain why the user got banned. This is going to prevent people from being repeat offenders and also help make the situation more clear. You should do this anyway if you don't want people to come back at you complaining for an unfair ban.
Because to me, it seems normal to get complains if accounts get banned without any previous warning. (And no I don't think the posts you made as warnings are proper for this situation, it's so easy to miss one post out of thousands no matter how ipmportant it is.)
I haven't seen many complaints, just two people who didn't know how long they were banned for and why because I forgot to add the reason and duration in the text field (I pm'ed them when I saw their post). Most of these folks know full well why they were banned. |
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It seems like BadBear handled out the bans for all members other than newbies. The points he makes are fair, but here's what frustrates me: - He gives no warning before he bans people
- There are no clear guidelines on how not to get banned meaning that anyone would be banned without any given warning or reason
If BadBear wants a personal all out attack against signature campaign participants he can have it. But to me, this should not be the way to solve his personal issue. Given the above, he is able to ban anyone at anytime for any reason he thinks is apropriate. And that's something that shouldn't happen that easily. He's just baning accounts by following his own opinion blindly. Do you really believe that he should be able to ban people just because he hates the fact they're participating in a signature campaign? I don't want to ban people, I quite dislike it actually, I think everyone should be free to express themselves here with minimal restrictions. I've declined to ban people many times up to now for this, and I've been wracking my brain thinking of ways to deal with it without having to ban people. The longest running thread in the staff forum besides the ban request thread is a thread about the paid signature campaign and how to deal with it. It's a huge issue. This spam has to stop, people are making worthless post after post and drowning out good discussion with complete garbage and it's ruining this forum. The only thing that has been done about it is this. Perhaps the allowed signature styling should change with activity score / membergroup. Like:
- Newbie: No styling (including links) allowed. Max 40 characters.
- Jr. Member: Links allowed. Max 100 characters.
- Member: Unlimited length.
- Full: Color allowed.
- Sr. Member: Size allowed
- Hero: Background color allowed
Then newbies will be less effective advertisers, which would hopefully significantly reduce the incentive for low-content posts. And when people become capable of effectively advertising through their signatures, they'll have invested a lot of time into their accounts, and they won't risk being banned by spamming.
After this, they just upped their payments in order to attract more of the higher ranking members. And the risk? What risk? It's really hard to get banned here, you have to be a spambot or a complete idiot to get banned here. There is no risk, which makes this measure completely and utterly worthless, and that obviously isn't what theymos intended if you read that post. There needs to be some risk, and I'm going to make sure there is, or else I'm failing everyone on this forum in my duties as a moderator. I've made many posts with suggestions on how to fix this issue without having to resort to banning people, but in reality none of them really work without punishing everyone. I don't like that it's come to this, but it's necessary. |
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Direct threats of violence aren't allowed.
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It wasn't mprep, it was me, he was just passing along some useful info that he has and thought would be useful for you guys.
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Personally I'm not sure who I'd trust with that, that is active enough. Admins can see everything, pms, even if deleted, ips, deleted posts, alt accounts, everything. Easier said than done.
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Your post is pretty general, only specific question you brought up was about bans, those I usially just pm them if it's the banned user in question asking. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's unanswered. If it's some random other person asking I'm probably not going to answer because it's not really any of their (your) business.
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Yeah there's a ton of garbage being posted in off topic lately. I suspect it's paid sig spammers giving themselves threads to reply to.
I've suggested posts in off topic shouldn't count towards post count.
Hmm, not sure if the people behind the bots are from the paid sigs or not, but a lot obviously just jump at the chance to post something in a nonsense thread as soon as it's posted. Maybe having certain boards that don't affect your post count would cut the down the spam a bit, but I think it'd also just move a lot of it to somewhere else and we'll then see stupid discussions in the politics section or whatever. I think we should disable the postcount feature entirely, don't you think ? We have activity , that should suffice. I've actually suggested that too in the past, but it would still be relatively easy to determine posts, knowing there are 20 per page. I've resigned myself to the fact that we're going to have start banning people, didn't want to but it's getting out of hand. Banned a dozen this morning alone (1 week/2 week duration to start), with a dozen more under review, and I'm just getting started. |
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Yeah there's a ton of garbage being posted in off topic lately. I suspect it's paid sig spammers giving themselves threads to reply to.
I've suggested posts in off topic shouldn't count towards post count.
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^ Is this the real TF, or his account has been hacked or traded?
Most likely sold. Posting from that account is pointless actually. What makes you guys think it was hacked or sold? He's defending the service. The account would probably be worthless to someone else anyway. When he first returned he was making posts that were out of character, didn't seem like him. Probably is him, he probably never left, just switched accounts and logs back on the TF account every once in a while. I don't have a clue who it could be but I find the whole discussion interesting and pretty informative. Would be nice to hear what other think
I can't think of a more worthless reply, enjoying Stunna's new rates? |
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Do you really want some INTERNET FORUMS MODERATOR deciding if your business is a scam or not? People are more than capable of making their own choices provided they have all the information, which is hard to get if moderators are being heavy handed. If they make dumb choices that's their choice to make.
Besides we tried it with scammer tags, know what happened? People still got scammed, then blamed us for it anyway, because hey, that newbie with a month old account doesn't have a scammer tag, he must be totally legit or the mods would have done something right?
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I don't agree that this is FAKE. It is true. All the data is true. And a database doesn't have to store all the data if it can just display the data which the user requests. Besides, in a database not all the fields can be indexed and searched. It isn't a database. Using your (very loose) definition Google or Yahoo is a database of the entire internet (though they are closer to being so than your website). You're just using a sensationalist title to drive traffic to your website. If we can benifit from this site, it is that this site increases the visiting users for site btc123.com, and in some extend advertises the new block explorer : b.btc123.com
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what the hell is this site, and how does it relate to the security of my bitcoins?
I'm not sure what the purpose of that site is, unless it's a joke. It isn't a database (that would be impossible), it's generating the pages in response to queries. So possibly an attempt at a scam, as in you look for your private key, and the holder of the list uses the generated pages to narrow down the possible addresses that have actually been used (there are 2^160 possible addresses, or 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976). Since people have trouble putting that in perspective, there are only 2^63 grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. The total number of bitcoin addresses in use is so much smaller than the amount of possible addresses, that something like this is completely and utterly useless, and it would also be trivial to expand the number of possible addresses in the future. I laughed when I saw that website, cause I just know people who don't know the math are furiously putting page numbers hoping to find one  . You'll likely witness the heat death of the universe before that happens. Here's some good reading about address collisions/exhaustion. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3462.0;allhttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27277.0;allhttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26278.0;allIf every person on Earth makes ten addresses per second for 20 years (2x1018 total addresses), then the probability that two of these addresses collide is about 1.57x10-12.
A committed individual or organization could easily aquire network storage in the Petabytes. I think that would be more than enough to get a sizable operation started.
1 petabyte is 10 15 bytes. There are 2 160 possible BTC addresses, each of which is 160 bits == 20 bytes long. So to store all of them you need 2 160x20 bytes, which is 29,230,032,746,618,058,364,073,696,654,325,660 petabytes. Bear in mind, we are not looking for a single address among the clouds here. We are looking for -any- address containing BTC.
Suppose each of the 7 billion people in the world has 1000 unspent addresses. On average you would need to try more than 10 35 addresses to find each spendable one. Suppose you can check a million addresses per second, this is going to take you more than 10 21 years. If everyone in the world is trying to crack this at the same time, it will still take around 10 12 years. And when someone finally cracks it, after paying the electricity bill for 10 12 years, they might be disappointed to find that the key unlocks just 0.05 BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. Even if it's ten million bitcoins, it's not going to pay the electricity bill for 7 billion computers running for a trillion years. In short, don't worry about it. |
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There's only 2 (well 3 but one isn't really involved with that aspect) people who can temp ban, so it's less common.
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Well services/scams in the beginner section don't belong there. At the very least they should be moved to the appropriate area like gambling, securities, services, whatever so established members can see and weigh in on it instead of a bunch of newbies tripping over themselves to send some dipstick money.
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