To the Mods regarding post quality here...

[BittBurger]

I haven't been here in awhile.  I initially left because the posts were becoming 99% inane.  Meaningless comments, often in horribly broken english that basically said nothing of value.  Often just one-liners, or pointless replies.

Then I noticed that every single post by these people had a beautiful, large, full color banner for some bitcoin gambling site, or bitcoin product or service.

Now I am back, and I just looked through a thread in the General Forum.  Literally the entire thread is pointless meaningless comments with zero intelligence or thought put into any of them, and literally *EVERY* post has a banner ad in the signature.

Has it escaped the mods on this forum that their forum content quality has gone to complete sh*t and that its because you allow spamming / advertising in signatures?  Do you realize you can singlehandedly quadruple the intelligence and quality of posts here if you ban advertising in signatures?

Why?  Because these people only post to get their signatures displayed on the page.  Therefore what they write is going to be pointless by default.  And banning signature spamming will instantly stop them from bothering to post.

Unless this site is getting paid for those advertisements, there really is no reason to allow this to continue.  Each thread looks like a flashing billboard with near zero quality content.

Just wondering.

-B-   (forum Admin for nearly 15 years with 65,000+ members)

[1715384678]

1715384678

[Xian01]

You assume the admins actually care enough to do away with sig spam.

They don't give a fuck.

This place has been a spammy shithole for years.

Helps to turn off signatures in your Preferences.

[Athertle]

Have a read.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

OP, I couldn't beat 'em, so I joined 'em.  For quite a while I raged against the signature campaigners for exactly the reasons you mentioned.  It pissed me off to no end that these fuckers were actually making money for posting complete garbage while I was making relatively well thought out posts in decently written English.  So I joined what's considered the bottomest-of-the-barrel campaign, and I do my damnedest not to spam garbage. 

I actually like this forum for its openness and its tolerance of a lot of things, and I very much support bitcoin.  I try to be a model signature campaigner, and that business model--the renting out of the signature space--has intrigued me ever since I heard about it.  It gives people who are extremely poor a chance to make a little bit of money here if they're so interested, and I fully support that.  Good topic, OP.

[Lauda]

Moderators do not make the rules, we enforce them. Theymos ultimately decides everything.

[Decoded]

The post quality may be shitty, but that's because the admins are lenient. Maybe if they had certain rules set for signature campaigns, do the campaigns strongly discourage spam.

I know crypto games currently is very strict with their post quality rules, that's why there aren't any crypto games spammers around. They've either snapped to attention, or been kicked.

[lemipawa]

Unless this site is getting paid for those advertisements, there really is no reason to allow this to continue.  Each thread looks like a flashing billboard with near zero quality content.

Just wondering.

-B-   (forum Admin for nearly 15 years with 65,000+ members)

I don't think the site is getting paid for the signature's that appears on users who promotes them.
I thought of that as well before that campaign managers that they need to donate or something but I read somewhere that they don't, but it helps in increasing the traffic of this site because of those of participates in signature campaigns.

[bitcoin revo]

I hope you don't consider my post to be one of zero quality and solely for making money.

Let's be honest; signature spammers (and yes, I do agree that 95% of people with a signature don't know how to do anything but parrot things back and forth, so thus: spammers) bring in some extra cash for theymos, whether you like it or not. 80% of all the discussions here would be gone - probably more. That's 80%+ less traffic that the forum can boast about, which means roughly 80+% less profit.

but it helps in increasing the traffic of this site because of those of participates in signature campaigns.

[ranochigo]

If you don't want to see useless comments, try importing dannyhamilton's ignore list[1] and use his methods to ignore spammers. If you don't like the flashy signature, use the plugin[2] to disable them. The main problem came when campaigns like YoBit started automated campaigns that has little to none restrictions. Almost all of the poor quality posters came from automated campaigns. It is not the admin's fault, it is the fault of the signature campaign managers. YoBit have hilariousandco(?) co-managing it which reduced the spam by a bit.

Just a note. Not all participants want to spread thoughtless post and post solely for the payments.
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973843.0
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1003570.0

[CIYAM]

As was pointed out by myself and others in @deepceleron's topic blocking the sigs and even ignoring the posters does not prevent you seeing the topics appear in the Watchlist or Unread posts list (you only work out you've wasted your time after you click on the topic to see that the latest post is from a user on your ignore list and when your ignore list has hundreds or thousands of users on it you aren't going to remember all of those user names).

Also with new accounts appearing (nearly every few seconds it seems lately) you are simply never going to keep your ignore list up to date.

I have been working towards creating a completely decentralised forum that will have a superior ignore implementation (so your personal list of topics would not show as unread any topic that has had posts added by users you are ignoring and that by default new users can be automatically ignored).

The hardest part is of course getting people interested to join in and create the content which I'll be hoping to do in 2016.

[Windpower]

You assume the admins actually care enough to do away with sig spam.

They don't give a fuck.

This place has been a spammy shithole for years.

Helps to turn off signatures in your Preferences.

The admins barely do anything to fight spam on this forum. Only when a spam bot is reported, then they will take action. Otherwise, nothing.

[DaddyMonsi]

You assume the admins actually care enough to do away with sig spam.

They don't give a fuck.

This place has been a spammy shithole for years.

Helps to turn off signatures in your Preferences.

The admins barely do anything to fight spam on this forum. Only when a spam bot is reported, then they will take action. Otherwise, nothing.

The Moderators are the one's taking action on those spammers with the help of the other staff's and some members who are vigilant in reporting spammers through "report to moderator" button or by simply creating a thread to get noticed by the Moderators.

[erre]

Have a read.

Very sad OP locked his thread , this was a good discussion

I think that we need some subforum (i.e. technical and general discussion) where sig are banned, while in other places (like gambling and services) they could be mantained.

Low quality posts are everywhere, but for many people sig campaigns are the only way to earn a couple of bucks in bitcoin, and this is really good to spread adoption. Faucets pays too little...

[GannickusX]

Honestly people like to complain too much about the posting quality here but before there were signature campaigns no one gave a fuck and people still posted shit. There are some sections full of bad posts like the gambling section but overall the important sections have really good quality posts and you can always just ignore the bad posts.

[CIYAM]

And honestly it is only ever ad sig posters that keep making posts like the one above.

Sheesh... are you so desperately poor that you have to try and defend yourself because you are worried about losing your income if the forum actually did try and get rid of the rubbish posts?

It is also actually ironic that any attempt to create a topic regarding this just ends up full of ad siggers posting nonsense into it like they do in every single other topic in this forum (apart from some of the technical discussions or self-moderated topics).

I would recommend the OP to lock this topic also as it will just attract more and more silly ad sig posters as the other one did (maybe next time create a self-moderated topic so you can keep them out).

[mexxer-2]

And honestly it is only ever ad sig posters that keep making posts like the one above.

Sheesh... are you so desperately poor that you have to try and defend yourself because you are worried about losing your income if the forum actually did try and get rid of the rubbish posts?

Just repeating something I said on the "main" sig spam discussion thread

Xialla-    anyway, I used the list for pretty long time and thanks for your endless work on it.
Me-       For some reason, I seem to be on the list for the last two months, even though I had replaced my paid sig with one of my "funny" message everyday.
CIYAM-   Like it or not the very purpose of this forum is now for people to earn micropayments through posting (no matter how poor quality the posts are).

Me-        Well even if I do agree that the quality of the forum is going low, choosing between the two is a hard decision:
            1) Disable paid signature, lose 1000s of users coming for getting paid by them, lose pretty much all of the ad revenue/traffic stats as well.
             2) Let things be, or maybe , lower the criteria for getting banned. Lose the respected member slowly, but nearly no difference in ad              revenues/traffic stats.

P.S: Anyone who has Danny's ignore list, will ofc, not see this post

[GannickusX]

And honestly it is only ever ad sig posters that keep making posts like the one above.

Sheesh... are you so desperately poor that you have to try and defend yourself because you are worried about losing your income if the forum actually did try and get rid of the rubbish posts?

It is also actually ironic that any attempt to create a topic regarding this just ends up full of ad siggers posting nonsense into it like they do in every single other topic in this forum (apart from some of the technical discussions or self-moderated topics).

I would recommend the OP to lock this topic also as it will just attract more and more silly ad sig posters as the other one did (maybe next time create a self-moderated topic so you can keep them out).

How is what I said non-sense? I can't express my opinion because I have a signature ad? How is your post any better than mine? Do you think that because you don't have a signature ad your posts are going to be better than the ones who do?

[minifrij]

Very sad OP locked his thread , this was a good discussion

No it wasn't. It was about 50 pages of people with sig ads saying "yeah there's spam but don't ban my sig campaign please", which is exactly what will happen if the OP doesn't follow CIYAM's advice.

I would recommend the OP to lock this topic also as it will just attract more and more silly ad sig posters as the other one did (maybe next time create a self-moderated topic so you can keep them out).

I think that we need some subforum (i.e. technical and general discussion) where sig are banned, while in other places (like gambling and services) they could be mantained.

I've discussed this with hilariousandco previously, the verdict is that it would be too difficult to maintain and enforce this sort of thing. That, and the sig spammers would simply more to another subforum. To quote him directly:

Hard/almost impossible to enforce. Besides, many campaigns already don't pay or include those subs but some people can make constructive posts in off topic anyway but it's the ones that don't that should be punished. Also, the people that spam in off topic would just start spamming in other sections where they're not prohibited so it's the shitposters that you need to deal with not where they can post.

Has it escaped the mods on this forum that their forum content quality has gone to complete sh*t and that its because you allow spamming / advertising in signatures?  Do you realize you can singlehandedly quadruple the intelligence and quality of posts here if you ban advertising in signatures?

As previously said the mods cannot decide anything without theymos' permission, though I am in good faith that they do remove any extremely low quality posts from general forums (Not including Off Topic, since that place is a self-proclaimed cesspool). The problem comes in that post quality is subjective. Someone like CIYAM, who has good knowledge of Bitcoin and the way that it works, may find a post describing very basic matters low quality as they may see it as useless. In comparison, someone with a very basic knowledge of Bitcoin may find said post very useful.
Personally, I don't see this being fixed completely. Yes banning signature campaigns would help greatly (probably removing over 90% of the shit posts people make), though you are either kidding yourself or under great ignorance if you believe it would fix everything. I believe that in order to stop this problem signature campaign managers (and staff) should be harder on the shitty posts people here make and/or new rules should be implemented to clearly define the sort of posts allowed and disallowed to try and make the term 'low-quality post' less broad.

Though I don't know what I'm talking about because I have a signature campaign, right guys?

[CIYAM]

Yes banning signature campaigns would help greatly (probably removing over 90% of the shit posts people make), though you are either kidding yourself or under great ignorance if you believe it would fix everything.

If we got rid of 90% of the useless posts the forum would be be attracting useful posters like @DannyHamilton rather than driving them away (as is occurring now).

Of course there is no perfect solution and no-one is actually asking or expecting that. Also what I think of as being of particularly "low quality" would I think be what most reasonable people would. If you have no technical expertise then clearly you should not be posting in topics that are asking for technical expertise (I don't go and complain about stuff in many of the subforums as I've blocked most of them now anyway).

Though I don't know what I'm talking about because I have a signature campaign, right guys?

This isn't a personal attack against any individual - you have admitted yourself (as have other ad sig posters) that the forum is full of rubbish posts and that those posts come from ad siggers.

[Amph]

yea it would attract one knowledgeable user maybe... and remove 90% of the traffic, which will kill the forum

if by instance you believe that only a few elite people can join any discussion here, then it's better for you and your elite group to create a chat group on telegram and discuss everything about bitcoin

the problem here is that there is plenty of reiteration, because we have discussed everything related to bitcoin already there is nothing to discuss anymore, minus news of the future

but those make up for a very low amount of discussion, that would be pointless to run an entire forum just for discuss that...


now yes please, begins to think that this is another shit post that is worth less than your because i'm carrying a signature...