It has become an absolute joke

[chriswen]

Yeah, you used to be able to actually put ad code in your signature so your signature was a banner spot.  So, you would also get paid for the highest paying banners.

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[Phinnaeus Gage]

Buying out users signatures as advertisements is being taken to the next level. There is far too many of them. Literally every 2nd post contains a signature violently advertising a gambling site or something along those lines.

To a newcomer this honestly makes the forum & Bitcoin as a whole look like one big joke. A bunch of people who have such little self respect that they use their signature to advertise for a measly $20 or so worth of BTC.

Not to mention the negative affect this has on the management team of the forum in relation to the ad revenue. Why would you want to buy a couple of ad's for a week when you could buy 300 peoples signatures for a month for half the price.

Thoughts?

Edit: It has now come to the point where people buying these signature based advertisements are paying higher to people who make more posts in a select period of time. This is encouraging spam & now not only taking away from the forums from a visual perspective, but a content perspective.

Am I the only one not getting paid for everything I do pertaining to Bitcoin?

[sevenVII]

Thank you for increasing my post count.

... Sarcasm aside, why does it make that big of a difference? The internet is full of advertisements - after all, I'd bet you a majority of the newbies who got into this love their btc faucets. Why should this be any different?

[btcton]

I don't see anything wrong with advertising in sigs, especially if you support it. Plus not all sigs are big colorful eye-hurting ones, take a look at mine for example, or even the Inputs one others have.

[phillipsjk]

I thought about putting advertising in my sig... for about 3 seconds.

The only reason I considered it is that my sig was bad-mouthing Eligius for too long

With the NSA revelations, EVERYBODY should be putting their OpenPGP fingerprint in their sig; just like me

Disclaimer: OpenPGP does not prevent metadata analysis.

[b!z]

Yeah, you used to be able to actually put ad code in your signature so your signature was a banner spot.  So, you would also get paid for the highest paying banners.

Really? Can you show me to any reference so I can read? I did not know this was available in the past.

[btcton]

Literally every 2nd post contains a signature violently advertising a gambling site or something along those lines.

"violently advertising" wat?

They're not simply "Bit777 - Bitcoin casino" It's

BIT777 ONLIEN CASINO LOTS OF GAME HEAPS GOOD HOUSE EDGE COME MAKE MONEY COME COME COME

That's an example & I don't mean to single out Bit777 what so ever. They're also heavily formatted to really "Jump" out at you. I consider this a fairly violent form of advertising, in the sense that it's very much in your face.

This, I agree with.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Yeah, you used to be able to actually put ad code in your signature so your signature was a banner spot.  So, you would also get paid for the highest paying banners.

Really? Can you show me to any reference so I can read? I did not know this was available in the past.

IMG tags were allowed previously, you could link to a URL with a redirecter.

[gourmet]

Sigvertisements have never bothered me, I think it's cool that people can make a little money for something small and easy.  There can be confusion about what is a sig ad, and what is a forum ad.  This could make theymos's job harder if something illegal/viral is advertised, but as long as those are deleted I don't see a problem.

Maybe provide your own bitcoin forum that doesn't allow advertisements?  I hear that reddit is popular.

I won't leave a previously good forum and "provide" another one just because somebody tries to destroy the original one. The vandals should be eliminated, not us.

There is nothing wrong with sig ads IMO.

There is. OP has described it quite well.
But you couldn't have writen anything different than you did, no surprise. :-(

You should respect where bitcoin economy currently is. For now we are in casino stage. Hopefully we'll go further and we'll establish higher levels of system.

That's right. It is helping members with little BTC to earn more, and helping the economy.

The most important point of the OP is that the sigvertisers make their posts as frequent as possible even when they have nothing important to say, diluting the forum contents that way. And I personally hate wading through a junk contents just for some advertises' pleasure.

[gourmet]

I don't want to ignore all signatures, because something they contain useful information. So I just ignore any poster whose signature reduces the readability of the page. If their judgement is poor enough that they will attach an ugly signature to all their posts, then I'm probably not missing much by not reading their posts anyway.

Exactly. I don't see why everyone has to disable their signatures to simply get around this issue. It's a very poor fix to such a problem.

I agree. Ignoring particular poster is much better solution.
And, maybe, the ignore count will make some feedback to the advertisers also.

[justusranvier]

And, maybe, the ignore count will make some feedback to the advertisers also.

Exactly.

[niko]

Why not cut the bullshit and stop referring to them as signatures if we allow any content and formatting in that space? It's more of a footer that currently users can customize any way they wish.

There is no need in this footer for colors, font size options, and even links. Text only, convey the information you wish to convey, and that's it.

[jackjack]

Why not cut the bullshit and stop referring to them as signatures if we allow any content and formatting in that space? It's more of a footer that currently users can customize any way they wish.

There is no need in this footer for colors, font size options, and even links. Text only, convey the information you wish to convey, and that's it.

It's been months that people are proposing this. The deep silence from the staff means this will never happen.

[viboracecata]

Not exactly.

why waste your sig space when you can do something funny and get paid.

for my sig ad, it's easy to make 50 posts per month as I should post in this forum.

I just feel well.

[b!z]

Yeah, you used to be able to actually put ad code in your signature so your signature was a banner spot.  So, you would also get paid for the highest paying banners.

Really? Can you show me to any reference so I can read? I did not know this was available in the past.

IMG tags were allowed previously, you could link to a URL with a redirecter.

Yeah, I know that. I think he was trying to say that it was possible to use your signature as an ad area, display forum ads and get paid. Never saw that happening, and I've been watching the forums since 2011 or so.