Services board is very hard to browse

[alani123]

When you hear of a forum having a board about services, what springs to mind should be posts about hiring people and looking to get hired.

The board for services in bitcointalk is literally flooded with posts about signature campaigns however. And as these posts get constantly bumped by new responses, they come on top all the time while any poor person trying to advertise their service can only post one bump a day...

A possible solution would be to simply create a new board for signature campaign topics. Let's call it Forum Campaigns for example. Review and signature campaigns can be posted there.

Another thing to maybe make the services board more lively would be to create a new section for those seeking to hire people to do tasks. This way it's easier to browse sections separately based on if you want to hire or get hired and it would also make posting more attractive due to increased visibility.

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[decodx]

There's gotta be like a dozen signature bounty campaigns going on in the services board right now.  (I didn't actually count them.)  The way I handle it is to just ignore the topics I don't care about and  that way I can focus on the topics I think are interesting.  The forum gets more customized to what you're into when you ignore stuff you don't want to see.

[shahzadafzal]

When you hear of a forum having a board about services, what springs to mind should be posts about hiring people and looking to get hired.  

You're absolutely right! When you hear "Services" you expect a marketplace of talents and opportunities, like a job fair that revolves around bitcoin. But, lo and behold, our services board often looks more like a signature campaign parade. I mean, are we hiring crypto enthusiasts or creating a crypto keyboard warriors?

Your idea of two boards is right, but do you think it will work? I mean, aren't we going to give a tougher time to moderators? Because I'm sure you can't force people to follow the rules (what ever you write); they will do what they want to do.

[alani123]

When you hear of a forum having a board about services, what springs to mind should be posts about hiring people and looking to get hired.  

You're absolutely right! When you hear "Services" you expect a marketplace of talents and opportunities, like a job fair that revolves around bitcoin. But, lo and behold, our services board often looks more like a signature campaign parade. I mean, are we hiring crypto enthusiasts or creating a crypto keyboard warriors?

Your idea of two boards is right, but do you think it will work? I mean, aren't we going to give a tougher time to moderators? Because I'm sure you can't force people to follow the rules (what ever you write); they will do what they want to do.

Well, moderators have chosen to do a job and theymos could always opt to hire more forum users as moderators. If we could get some staff or admins to chime in about how the workload is these days it would be very insightful. However I don't think there's as much spam lately as there used to be.

[SamReomo]

That's a nice idea and I think that would be more helpful for signature campaigns since people will easily find which campaign is accepting new participants and which one is closed for new participants. But, recently we have seen some contest related posts on that board as well then for those contests related posts we may need to have another child board.

The signature campaigns and review campaigns are highly related to each other and can be posted into signature campaign board while other posts have no relation with each other and they can be posted in main services board I believe. It will be helpful for many members and it will also be helpful for campaign managers as most of their open campaigns will get easy exposure.

I don't know about others but I mostly visit Services board to check signature campaigns, review campaigns, and sometimes contests. But, I believe that services board should be limited to service providers only and signature campaign threads, as well as review campaign threads should be in another sub-board that would be entire created for such posts.

[Nwada001]

I also support the motion of creating another board for only signature campaigns, as they have more threads than every other service on the service board, and the signature campaign is really big enough to have its own board, and people will know where they are actually going and what they are going to such a board for.

Your idea of two boards is right, but do you think it will work? I mean, aren't we going to give a tougher time to moderators? Because I'm sure you can't force people to follow the rules (what ever you write); they will do what they want to do.

Having a board of their own will make it a bit easier. We know we can't control everyone's choice of where to post, but most of those posting campaigns have old and experienced managers, so keeping each post on the right board, I believe, won't be an issue.
 
Another thing is that when there is a designated board for a particular kind of topic, reporting the post to moderators will also be easier to do, and the work won't be that much for them either, just as they handle other boards. It will take time, but if such a board actually comes into existence, then people will adopt.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

Well, moderators have chosen to do a job and theymos could always opt to hire more forum users as moderators. If we could get some staff or admins to chime in about how the workload is these days it would be very insightful. However I don't think there's as much spam lately as there used to be.

I can not remember who was the last mod but I can clearly see that so many of them are not active in moderation. The forum moderation is not incentivize much too, I get this idea from some other mods who actually think it's a volunteering job. It may sound exciting to be a forum mod but when you are not receiving much in return then basically you become slow. Feeling less responsible ultimately disappears the enthusiasm.

We can create many sub-boards but getting used to with the new boards and moving topics to the new boards is going to be a lot of work. The culture we created does not look, it has a good potential.

[Stalker22]

That is not a bad idea at all!  I can see how it would be annoying for people who have service threads to have to keep bumping them to compete against signature campaigns, which get free bumps from participants.  You make a good point - the admins could do something to address this.

[Latviand]

While reading the post, I said to myself that this is dumb and a bad idea but then I went to the Services board and saw that yes, it's not a dumb or a bad idea after all to have a dedicated sub board for Campaigns but then again, I've seen another problem, it's the people that are using the Services board wrong, there's a lot of people there that don't know how to properly post to attract users to their post or some just spams and acts as if they didn't do anything wrong. I would like to add that if the campaigns will have their separate board, hopefully that in the Services board, there should be a pinned message that says what exactly you need to do like the proper formats for hiring a service and selling your service to someone so that way, there's some form of uniformity.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

The board for services in bitcointalk is literally flooded with posts about signature campaigns however. And as these posts get constantly bumped by new responses, they come on top all the time while any poor person trying to advertise their service can only post one bump a day...

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. Considering the fact that we have a board titled "Bounties" in the alt coins board, I was also wondering why we never had a specific sub-board for signature campaigns. I think it will be better if there's a separate board where only signature campaigns will be launched. Although the old pattern of launching signatures under the service board has been there for so long, and I don't think theymos have the intent of changing that anytime soon, if the matter is being delegated to see if people are interested in why the signature sub-board should be created, then he might consider adding it anytime he finds time to do any small modification on the forum.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

When you hear of a forum having a board about services, what springs to mind should be posts about hiring people and looking to get hired.

But that is exactly what signature campaigns are.

Services looking to hire advertisers make Announcements (signature campaign threads), and then you apply because you feel your signature space is worth the money they offer. How different is that from someone looking for a content creator, a translator, or a developer to hire for a fee in Bitcoins?

Someone help me understand this.

[DYING_S0UL]

When you hear of a forum having a board about services, what springs to mind should be posts about hiring people and looking to get hired.

But that is exactly what signature campaigns are.

Services looking to hire advertisers make Announcements (signature campaign threads), and then you apply because you feel your signature space is worth the money they offer. How different is that from someone looking for a content creator, a translator, or a developer to hire for a fee in Bitcoins?

Someone help me understand this.

I may have understood what OP tried to explain. Signature campaign are forum's own dedicated services/features to promote crypto projects. Aren't they? A lot of signature are active at this moment. I think OP wanted a separate child board for signature. I don't scroll service board a lot. But from my seeing I see there are a lot of job related threads apart from signature. By job I meant, where someone wanted to hire a programmer, or a video editor, or a content writer for their website, page etc? These aren't related to forum or crypto in any way but the forum is filled with people of this specific set of knowledge.

If all the thread were to stack together, don't you think it'll create a mess? Signature related thread always gets a upper hand. People constantly reply and engage in these threads. But when someone makes a thread to hire people, how many sees that or how many able to respond to that? As OP mentioned one bump a day.

I don't know if I'm correct about OP's intention. OP might be able to shed some light to it. And clear what he actually meant.

[Despairo]

I'd second with your suggestion.

Services
Buying/selling services.

Service should be something that you offer e.g. design, advertisement, programming, art, etc. Although buy and sell signature or avatar space is a form of advertisement, but there are already 29 active campaigns which I think it's really big and deserve to have it's own section like bounties.

[Upgrade00]

I may have understood what OP tried to explain. Signature campaign are forum's own dedicated services/features to promote crypto projects. Aren't they?

Signature campaigns are not forum dedicated or related to the forum at all. More than half of them do not promote crypto projects and are gambling related.
Of course the projects have to have some appeal to the audience here, so the casino houses are mostly those that accept cryptocurrency, other popular services are mixers for crypto and Bitcoin wallets, but their are not forum related in any way, just regular services being advertised.

Anyone looking to hire or be hired should be able to read through 2-3 pages of threads, but maybe the services board should have a child board to advertise a service that one offers and the current one will be to hire people to work on a service, that can help declutter it a little bit.

[LoyceV]

I don't think signature campaigns are the "problem" here, the "problem" is that not many other services are being offered.

On the first page of the Services board, excluding anything signature related, these are the first 10 topics:
📢📢I am interested in becoming a CM or Moderator on a crypto project.
[ viewbot.gg ] The most stable Live Viewers for Twitch & Kick
🟣 Twitch Subscription Gifting 1 SUB = 0.8$ 🎁 Fast Delivery
🔥[DESIGN SERVICE] ICALICAL x Zenland, get $10 Discount for your Design Order 🔥
[PR SERVICE] WW's SERVICEs- we will publish in all top media outlets!
Im trader been trading long time Im looking for partners
TWITCH SUBS | BEST QUALITY | GET PAID BY TWITCH | VIEWBOT.GG
TELEGRAM AND DISCORD CHATTER FOR HIRE
SMS / OTP VERIFICATION CHEAP REAL NEW NUMBERS VERIFY ANY ONLINE ACCOUNTS
Professional Virtual Assistant

80% of those topics is created by users with a total of 0-4 earned Merits. That tells you all you need to know about how valuable those topics are. Without signature campaigns, the Services board wouldn't be worth checking anymore.

[Faisal2202]

You spoke to my heart. I also have the same ideas to propose here so that the section would look cleaner than before. But I don't think if there are that many service providers and service consumers providing and looking for services on the Service board (respectively). I mean, there are not that much of ads for services by providers so if one wanted to search for content writing service, then he can easily find it by using the ctrl+F function or by giving a glance at each topic name (I think there are 40 topics per page).

ctrl+F function works fine for me but it does not mean, the board should not be managed in a mannered way so that the flow of searching things would increase there. But I don't think moderators are in any mood to make it happen if they get some time other than deleting posts.  (No offense just kidding).

[The Sceptical Chymist]

OP, there are a lot of aspects of bitcointalk that have broken or at least become extremely clunky over the years, and you definitely noticed a big one.  The jobs and other related offerings were probably what the Services section was supposed to be about early on, but after signature campaigns got invented (when was that, 2011?) everything just changed and Theymos didn't quite organize everything as he perhaps should have.

In other words, I agree with you.  However, my guess is that you're probably not going to get tons of support from the community or any forthcoming changes from El Heffe.  Why?  Because most members are in a signature campaign and many have only known Services exactly as it is today.  I do think more child boards would help with people like you who are frustrated that their thread keeps getting buried under the mountain of campaign threads, so you've got my vote.

Then again, I think more child boards/subsections are kinda-sorta needed in general, because the structure of this forum hasn't kept pace with how topics and trends have evolved over the years.  This isn't the first complaint I've read of this nature by a long shot.  Unfortunately they haven't handed me the keys to the kingdom, and it's not a democracy either. Pffft.

Edit:  Guess I was wrong, you are getting support.  Maybe Theymos will swoop down from the heavens and heed your cries, young pleb.

[FatFork]

I don't think signature campaigns are the "problem" here, the "problem" is that not many other services are being offered.

--snip long example--

80% of those topics is created by users with a total of 0-4 earned Merits. That tells you all you need to know about how valuable those topics are. Without signature campaigns, the Services board wouldn't be worth checking anymore.

Based on example you mentioned, few of them probably should be moved to either Digital goods, Invites & Accounts or Service Announcements board.

I think that's the whole point here. With all the signature campaign offers, low-quality service listings, and off-topic discussions in the mix, the truly valuable offers often end up buried and lose their well-deserved spotlight.

Here are a couple of offers I found on the second page with just a quick glance, all posted (or bumped) by senior/reputable members in the past few days:

[HIRING] Utopia P2P - Channel Moderators
[SERVICE]Hire A Assistant Manager For Any type of Campaign!
[Moderator/Chatters Service] Discord | Telegram | Reddit | Crypto & Non-Crypto
[FREE HELP/SERVICE/TRANSLATION] - "You choose and I will translate"
[TRANSLATION SERVICE] WW's SERVICEs - ALL LANGUAGES AVAILABLE
[available] Web Development & Technical Services
GRAPHIC DESIGN JON | TFT PROP FIRM

[libert19]

I don't think so, I check services board once a day for new posts, on checking back next day, posts are still read (i.e. Unbold) on 2nd page, If someone is interested in hiring you enough I'm sure they would check at least 2 pages. If you bump once a day, your post still should hold onto fron page for good hours.

If signatures and services are separated, services board will be dead, pretty much like marketplace altcoins. 

[Majestic-milf]

That is not a bad idea at all!  I can see how it would be annoying for people who have service threads to have to keep bumping them to compete against signature campaigns, which get free bumps from participants.  You make a good point - the admins could do something to address this.

That is quite true. Most times, because of the frequency of these applications into sig campaigns, those who have good services to render tend to get their services swept under the carpet and it becomes difficult for someone who is need of such service to see except he uses the search button. A separate board for signature campaigns will be appreciated too because sometimes, some users in order to promote their work, display their services in a campaign thread.