I've suggested making campaign managers more responsible for their participants and instead of giving users 1/2/4 week bans we do the same for campaign managers for their 1/2/3 offences of not doing their job properly and keeping an eye on their participants. Of course they should be given a polite warning first that they need to step up their game but if they don't a week ban should come next, then 2 weeks and a month. Maybe a perma ban after that but most should get the idea after their first ban. I think this would give campaign managers the motivation to actually do what they're supposed to because it's going to damage their business if they're banned. For the campaign managers that do their job and check users before they're allowed on the campaign and before they get payment I see next to zero spam like on Rollin, but then you get campaigns like yobit who only kick members off after I tell him about them (and it's annoying having to do this daily when it's not my job) and coinomat who do absolutely nothing at all and because of his apathy and unwillingness to moderate or police his users they quickly notice they can get away with it spam and copy and pastes and abuse until they're caught but in the meantime the damage is done. We maybe should even look at leaving negative feedback on some of the worst campaigns who do next to zero. I've certainly thought about doing it and maybe that will kick start them into actually doing something but it would likely be a conflict of intetest for me now as I'm offering to run campaigns on their behalf but something really needs to be done especially to those who don't even bother replying to my messages about abusers and continue to pay them. If you don't have the time or patience to look after your campaign then you really need to hire someone who will.
I don't think banning signature campaign managers is the answer. It would not be out of the question for signature campaigns to originate from outside the forum, and there would be nothing to stop someone from spamming with the signature of a campaign when they are not actually enrolled in the campaign. Additionally, it would be possible that someone could be required to send an email to enroll/apply to a signature campaign, so it would be very difficult to know with certainty if someone is actually enrolled in a campaign or not.
The inability to manage a signature campaign to prevent large amounts of spam is essentially someone being bad at their job, and I don't think the forum should punish people for being bad at their job.
I think it would be better to hold the companies that are bankrolling the advertising to be held somehow accountable. I still think that it would be best to publish a transparency report showing how much each company is contributing to paid insubstantial posts. Other options would include negative trust being sent to a company's accounts, bans on the company's accounts and a "spam allegation" sub where people could post that people advertising a specific company's advertisement are spamming the forum. Creating such a subform would also give companies incentives to be transparent about how they accept members and who they have on their "payroll" for advertising as if a claim is made about someone spamming with a particular company's advertisement, then the company could clearly deny that they are participating and such participation could be easily disproven in a transparent way.
I had removed him. Please message me users, I often don't notice these threads until too late.
A disturbingly large portion of the posts in those threads are all his accounts.
Many thanks to bit-x for their continued contributions to the forum
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Could you let me know his alts so that I may ban/remove them? If you can't then I can't do much about it.
Hilariousandco covered a lot of it already but:
No, I'm not going to share user information with you. I've offered you suggestions on how to get around that in the past. Require a pm from the user to collect payment, or require at least one post a week (almost all the bans are at least a week if not more). The first you don't do, would be easy since you use a bot. The second, after I suggested it, you then went to weekly payments, rendering it useless.
All that would need to be done to verify that someone is not banned would be to have the bot PM a user when they are due for a payment and advising them to reply with a PM within a week or otherwise they will lose that payment. Once the PM is received, then the bot will automatically que them for payment.
Bi-weekly or monthly payments would also give people more incentives to not make insubstantial posts because if they are banned then they would end up loosing a greater amount of their income (they can't PM so they can't claim payment).
And yes there is a lot you can do, you just don't want to do it. At the very least just look at the threads and put a little time into it (it isn't rocket science), it is your job after all, is it not? If you can't do it, don't you think you should fix that? Do you really think just paying people to post and letting everyone else deal with the garbage that results is going to end well? Do you know what I think when I see Bit-X? I think spammers, the same ones that spam my email with INCREASE YOUR PENIS SIZE NOW!@@LOOK@@.
I think that Bit-x has successfully became a company that is severely associated with spamming the forum, and that if anyone who is advertising for them wishes to remain reputable, they should cease their services to them - at least in the near future.
Something definitely needs to change though, this isn't a problem that can be solved with more moderation. For bans to be effective in countering sig spam, the number of bans would have be much greater than it's ever been. Even during the last "ban wave", some of the borderline users I was watching were saying "Well I might get banned but oh well, gotta get paid". The campaigns may not care that users that have been here for years are being banned, some permanently, but I do. I don't want to see that many people banned, ultimately it's not good for anyone. A sig spam ban that removes their ability to use a signature (and avatar, and personal message) would solve the problem of needing to ban users, but it wouldn't solve the sig spam problem.
I think a "
soft ban" when someone is prevented from using his signature/avatar/personal text after a "
hard ban" (when they cannot post/PM) would be beneficial, especially when there is evidence that such a user has been around for a long time. Such a "soft ban" could, over time be reduced so the user would be able to resume using their signature/avatar/personal text after several months of constructive contributions to the forum.
Another potential solution would be for a list of people who have been banned for insubstantial posts+paid signature (both presently and in the past - moving forward) to be a public record to give incentives for users to put more effort into their posting. These incentives would include:
- The value of the account would be reduced if it was publicly known that it was banned in the past for this reason - out of fairness, these previous bans should not be disclosed as someone could have purchased an account without knowing about it's previous ban history.
- The potential to get accepted in a signature campaign int he future would be reduced as competent campaign managers would first check this list for prior bans before even checking their post history
I think that anything that makes signature campaign advertising ineffective overall is going to be a net negative for Bitcoin, as it is paid signature campaigns that get a "good" number of people interested in bitcoin, and allow them to experiment with bitcoin without having to "invest" their own money.
