Posts quality, WTF!?

[BRNSTYLE]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

[1713862282]

1713862282

[1713862282]

1713862282

[1713862282]

1713862282

[Vod]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

I believe the staff are aware of the problem, but lack a solution.

What do you suggest we do?

[hilariousetc]

There have been numerous suggestions on how to deal with the spam but all have been ignored. The easiest one would be to crack down on lazy campaigns and remove them from the forum along with banning their signatures until they get the hint but this can't be enforced without admin input. At the moment anyone can create a crapcoin and a signature campaign to go along with it and pay an unlimited amount of users to promote it with no quality checks at all. Anyone can also create as many accounts as they want to milk these lazily run campaigns dry and hence why the forum is such a shit show. As long as this is allowed to continue it's only going to get worse day after day.

[BRNSTYLE]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

I believe the staff are aware of the problem, but lack a solution.

What do you suggest we do?

We could’ve draft some kind of petition to head moderator or which is more preferable due to new forum development, moderators might want to stick a thread in Meta section for example, where anyone could freely offer or promote their opinion on how to improve rank system and bounty regulation, as well as discuss sanctions for those not willing to obey the rules.
 
The first thing on my mind is to oblige signature campaign managers to control participants posts a way better, secondly to restrict or lower significantly minimum post amount requirements.

[Lauda]

We could’ve draft some kind of petition to head moderator or which is more preferable due to new forum development, moderators might want to stick a thread in Meta section for example, where anyone could freely offer or promote their opinion on how to improve rank system and bounty regulation, as well as discuss sanctions for those not willing to obey the rules.

The administration of this forum has mostly ignored any suggestions related to solving this problem. What exactly makes you think that a petition to the "head moderator" would do anything? There's only one active global moderator, and he can't change the forum policies nor tackle this problem on his own.
Another example of a monopoly ruining everything for its customers/users.

[BurhanPSG]

I think every bounty campaign that we will follow has its own rules and we can only accept it.
post in this forum there is also a rule that we should not violate so surely you will be familiar with this

[AdolfinWolf]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

I believe the staff are aware of the problem, but lack a solution.

What do you suggest we do?

We could’ve draft some kind of petition to head moderator or which is more preferable due to new forum development, moderators might want to stick a thread in Meta section for example, where anyone could freely offer or promote their opinion on how to improve rank system and bounty regulation, as well as discuss sanctions for those not willing to obey the rules.
 
The first thing on my mind is to oblige signature campaign managers to control participants posts a way better, secondly to restrict or lower significantly minimum post amount requirements.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.org, now i know this is not 100% accurate, but it gives a pretty good indication of what the traffic has been up to lately.

I don't think it's in the best interests of the current owners of the forums to change anything at all, hence why they try to ignore the issue as much as possible..

Signature campaigns are one of the things which keeps this forum relevant, it brings in alot of posts = views = money.

If they would follow your suggestion, they would go out of their way to

 A. enforce rules which are, with the current mod team, unenforcable (Checking the post quality of thousands of posts daily?), and
 B. destroy their own "business"/ forum. Activity / Posts would obviously decrease by alot, which means less traffic, less adrevenue, less rankings in google searches, name it all.

[BRNSTYLE]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

I believe the staff are aware of the problem, but lack a solution.

What do you suggest we do?

We could’ve draft some kind of petition to head moderator or which is more preferable due to new forum development, moderators might want to stick a thread in Meta section for example, where anyone could freely offer or promote their opinion on how to improve rank system and bounty regulation, as well as discuss sanctions for those not willing to obey the rules.
 
The first thing on my mind is to oblige signature campaign managers to control participants posts a way better, secondly to restrict or lower significantly minimum post amount requirements.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.org, now i know this is not 100% accurate, but it gives a pretty good indication of what the traffic has been up to lately.

I don't think it's in the best interests of the current owners of the forums to change anything at all, hence why they try to ignore the issue as much as possible..

Signature campaigns are one of the things which keeps this forum relevant, it brings in alot of posts = views = money.

If they would follow your suggestion, they would go out of their way to

 A. enforce rules which are, with the current mod team, unenforcable (Checking the post quality of thousands of posts daily?), and
 B. destroy their own "business"/ forum. Activity / Posts would obviously decrease by alot, which means less traffic, less adrevenue, less rankings in google searches, name it all.

Wait, why should I as a forum participant care about someone revenue? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that any project as long as it not non commercial, should gain income. But bct is a forum first of all isn’t it? Well, repurpose it into a marketplace or something like that or at least create special sub forum, people might understand these moves.
Once again I’m not agitating to ban bounties, signature campaigns and etc. Regulate it in appropriate way, that’s all. The majority of users will be grateful.
Ignoring this issue will bring only negative consequences in the long run.

P.S. traffic gains are significant indeed

[Joel_Jantsen]

Wait, why should I as a forum participant care about someone revenue? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that any project as long as it not non commercial, should gain income. But bct is a forum first of all isn’t it? Well, repurpose it into a marketplace or something like that or at least create special sub forum, people might understand these moves.
Once again I’m not agitating to ban bounties, signature campaigns and etc. Regulate it in appropriate way, that’s all. The majority of users will be grateful.
Ignoring this issue will bring only negative consequences in the long run.

P.S. traffic gains are significant indeed

We all know the benefits of decreasing spam on the forum ,can you propose an idea which realistically has the potential to decrease spam without hampering the things as they're now ? For instance,take SMAS initiative by Lutpin/Lauda.You can think of something similar which doesn't need involvement of moderators.

[infinity33]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

While im reading some information this is caught my attention so now i just want to ask some questions is there a required length and quality that we need to post?

[Pearls Before Swine]

Wait, why should I as a forum participant care about someone revenue? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that any project as long as it not non commercial, should gain income. But bct is a forum first of all isn’t it? Well, repurpose it into a marketplace or something like that or at least create special sub forum, people might understand these moves.
Once again I’m not agitating to ban bounties, signature campaigns and etc. Regulate it in appropriate way, that’s all. The majority of users will be grateful.
Ignoring this issue will bring only negative consequences in the long run.

P.S. traffic gains are significant indeed

We all know the benefits of decreasing spam on the forum ,can you propose an idea which realistically has the potential to decrease spam without hampering the things as they're now ? For instance,take SMAS initiative by Lutpin/Lauda.You can think of something similar which doesn't need involvement of moderators.

Create specific sections of the forum for things like 'signature campaign discussion', 'how
to earn bitcoin', and similar topics that keep getting created.  Then campaigns should not pay for
posts in those sections.  This will be of benefit in two ways: 1) Members could use the ignore board
function to block those spammy sections, and 2) It would discourage people from making spammy
topics like those. 

I agree that signature campaigns have all but ruined this forum.  This is what happens when you
pay people to post.

[EpicFail]

While im reading some information this is caught my attention so now i just want to ask some questions is there a required length and quality that we need to post?

Well, one thing I noticed is that the shit poster would reply to the first thread with a post that is not necessarily short or bad. However, the answer to the OP's question or point has already addressed many times before the shit poster's reply. So one measure of quality should be the uniqueness and originality of the reply. A response that is correct but is just a repetition of what somebody else has said is for the most part a shit post.

[BRNSTYLE]

Wait, why should I as a forum participant care about someone revenue? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that any project as long as it not non commercial, should gain income. But bct is a forum first of all isn’t it? Well, repurpose it into a marketplace or something like that or at least create special sub forum, people might understand these moves.
Once again I’m not agitating to ban bounties, signature campaigns and etc. Regulate it in appropriate way, that’s all. The majority of users will be grateful.
Ignoring this issue will bring only negative consequences in the long run.

P.S. traffic gains are significant indeed

We all know the benefits of decreasing spam on the forum ,can you propose an idea which realistically has the potential to decrease spam without hampering the things as they're now ? For instance,take SMAS initiative by Lutpin/Lauda.You can think of something similar which doesn't need involvement of moderators.

SMAS is great! But what a pity it’s never going to solve the problem and I’ll tell you why. As long as it is self regulated community based on voluntary formation, truly honorable SMAS participants can’t force one to enroll. Actually I see one way for it to become more effective and it’s about implementing SMAS as a common courtesy to each campaign, so it could obtain something like a Michelin stars for restaurants status. From that side, SMAS would become a supervision institution for campaign managers and campaigns which could be for example labeled in appropriate way rising trust level of a whole project.

[BRNSTYLE]

Wait, why should I as a forum participant care about someone revenue? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that any project as long as it not non commercial, should gain income. But bct is a forum first of all isn’t it? Well, repurpose it into a marketplace or something like that or at least create special sub forum, people might understand these moves.
Once again I’m not agitating to ban bounties, signature campaigns and etc. Regulate it in appropriate way, that’s all. The majority of users will be grateful.
Ignoring this issue will bring only negative consequences in the long run.

P.S. traffic gains are significant indeed

We all know the benefits of decreasing spam on the forum ,can you propose an idea which realistically has the potential to decrease spam without hampering the things as they're now ? For instance,take SMAS initiative by Lutpin/Lauda.You can think of something similar which doesn't need involvement of moderators.

Create specific sections of the forum for things like 'signature campaign discussion', 'how
to earn bitcoin', and similar topics that keep getting created.  Then campaigns should not pay for
posts in those sections.  This will be of benefit in two ways: 1) Members could use the ignore board
function to block those spammy sections, and 2) It would discourage people from making spammy
topics like those. 

I agree that signature campaigns have all but ruined this forum.  This is what happens when you
pay people to post.

I generally like an idea of creating specific sections. Could you improve your idea with more details? Maybe someday our suggestions will be heard 

[Lauda]

Create specific sections of the forum for things like 'signature campaign discussion', 'how to earn bitcoin', and similar topics that keep getting created.  Then campaigns should not pay for posts in those sections.  This will be of benefit in two ways: 1) Members could use the ignore board function to block those spammy sections, and 2) It would discourage people from making spammy topics like those. 

I have a much better idea that this useless diversion: Trash both and ban people who persist in opening those threads/posting in them. For example, if you open a "How to earn Bitcoin?" thread in Beginners & Help you are either an illiterate idiot (as a thread summarizing this is the 3rd stickied thread of the section) or you're intentionally doing this to spam post / help your other (or just others) accounts rank up by spam-answering.

I generally like an idea of creating specific sections. Could you improve your idea with more details? Maybe someday our suggestions will be heard 

The idea is inherently useless. Real world equivalent to the *idea*: "We have a trash problem; there's so much of it. What do we do?!? I know, let's take all the garbage from place A to place B so that we can't see it each day. That's a great solution!".

[Wendigo]

Is the difference so big between a short crappily written post and a 2-3 paragraphs long sugar-coated post which contains nothing of essence but sports perfect grammar? Because I have seen both and honestly as long as people get paid to post around here the barrage of pretended replies will continue.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Is the difference so big between a short crappily written post and a 2-3 paragraphs long sugar-coated post which contains nothing of essence but sports perfect grammar? Because I have seen both and honestly as long as people get paid to post around here the barrage of pretended replies will continue.

So you mean to say banning signature campaigns is the only way to solve this problem ? I think not.

SMAS is great! But what a pity it’s never going to solve the problem and I’ll tell you why. As long as it is self regulated community based on voluntary formation, truly honorable SMAS participants can’t force one to enroll. Actually I see one way for it to become more effective and it’s about implementing SMAS as a common courtesy to each campaign, so it could obtain something like a Michelin stars for restaurants status. From that side, SMAS would become a supervision institution for campaign managers and campaigns which could be for example labeled in appropriate way rising trust level of a whole project.

Either way SMAS has reduced spam to a certain extent.Not all campaign managers choose quality participants as of SMAS standards.They do keep an eye for participants banned by SMAS but still that doesn't guarantee the replacement participant accepted has good posting quality.

[LTU_btc]

We all know about signature spam problem. There was hundreds proposals how to solve it, but almost zero actions. There are many more or less effective ways how to reduce spam: Give negative trust ratings to spammers, ban them or remove them place for signature. I can continue, but such offers was posted many times in past andnothing has been done to stop spammers.
And I think that worst thing which happened to this forum is Altcoin signature campaigns. Literally, every spammer is free to join it. No matter, how terrible quality of your posts will be, you will get paid. And people spamming with tens or even hundreds alt accounts.

[BenOnceAgain]

Hey guys, I’m not an old-timer here, but posts quality problem is so evident and eye-catching even for me though.
80% of threads consist of pointless posts simply simulating discussion and activity. When I saw few paged threads with paraphrased replies my first impression was like WTF is going on, really doesn’t look like a normal talk. Didn’t take too much time to sort things out and realize where a problem is. IMHO, signature campaigns should be better regulated, maybe limited and users rank system is quite imperfect. I’m not against campaigns at all, but you cannot force one to post regularly and maintain meaningful conversation, it’s frankly incompatible, otherwise you undermine forum the very aim to let people discuss and share useful information.

So do we need changes?   

I believe the staff are aware of the problem, but lack a solution.

What do you suggest we do?

Maybe add a feature to up or down vote a thread?  Then users could scan the list and see the threads that have been given up votes.

Moderating such an active forum is virtually impossible.  Up/down voting could get the users to take a more active role in helping moderators triage their limited time.

[Pearls Before Swine]

I have a much better idea that this useless diversion: Trash both and ban people who persist in opening those threads/posting in them. For example, if you open a "How to earn Bitcoin?" thread in Beginners & Help you are either an illiterate idiot (as a thread summarizing this is the 3rd stickied thread of the section) or you're intentionally doing this to spam post / help your other (or just others) accounts rank up by spam-answering.

That is indeed a much better idea, and I think it would be a much fitter
ending for these lame excuses for human beings.  But you know as well as I do
that the powers that be don't want to do that. They (or he) wouldn't even implement
my suggestion or any variation thereof.  Feels like wasted thought and typing.

I liked your previous suggestion that theymos should turn the forum over to people
who care about it.  That's not going to happen either.