Just remove signatures already. As in delete, disable, gone.

[alc]

The SNR is beyond fucked at this point, and the inaction on this one very basic issue makes it clear that the staff are unwilling to take even the simplest step toward remedying the situation.

Shame, really. I certainly find myself visiting less and less; I never posted much anyway, but it's just too much effort trawling through the reams of garbage to get at the interesting stuff.

[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
it's just too much effort trawling through the reams of garbage to get at the interesting stuff.

Check this out. It has made all the difference, and I actually enjoy this forum and find it useful again.  It has nearly eliminated the garbage.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973843.0

[galbros]

- snip -
it's just too much effort trawling through the reams of garbage to get at the interesting stuff.

Check this out. It has made all the difference, and I actually enjoy this forum and find it useful again.  It has nearly eliminated the garbage.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973843.0

Even though I am (obviously) on it, I think Danny's solution is a great one.  It's user driven, free market, and easily reversed if you want to see someone's posts again.  If more users adopt it then the signature campaigns will lose their value and die a natural death. 

While I think low value posts are the issue not the signature campaigns his solution is clearly working for him and I imagine would for many others.  It at least guarantees you'll never see another signature ad.

[alc]

With sincere respect to Danny's efforts, he is attempting to win a game of whack-a-mole, which history and logic warn against. I wish him well on his war against the moles, but consider it a distinctly Sisyphean task - and more to the point, it shouldn't be necessary. (He also apparently shitcans people for other, more subjective transgressions, such as profanity, which leads to the amusing possibility that, were I to adopt his list, I'd be unable to see my own posts.)

In any case, it's a heavy-handed, all-or-nothing approach to treating a complex symptom, when there's such a simple way of tackling the cause. Nobody needs ad signatures, they communicate nothing of any merit, and it's evident beyond any reasonable doubt that the quality of posting on the forum would be improved by their absence. I just don't understand why the glaringly obvious solution continues to be ignored.

[DannyHamilton]

With sincere respect to Danny's efforts, he is attempting to win a game of whack-a-mole, which history and logic warn against. I wish him well on his war against the moles, but consider it a distinctly Sisyphean task

Clearly, but until/unless some other solution is presented, this solution at least keeps me from abandoning the forum entirely.

- and more to the point, it shouldn't be necessary.

Sure, but at the moment it is.

(He also apparently shitcans people for other, more subjective transgressions, such as profanity, which leads to the amusing possibility that, were I to adopt his list, I'd be unable to see my own posts.)

You are mistaken.  You are not on the list.  I do not ignore people for using profanity.  I ignore people for "exceeding my patience with posts that contained profanity and offensive language".  I've got a LOT of patience.  There are probably less than a half dozen users on this forum since June 2012 that have been ignored by me because of their offensive language.

In any case, it's a heavy-handed, all-or-nothing approach to treating a complex symptom, when there's such a simple way of tackling the cause.

But it's the best solution I have available to me at the moment.

Nobody needs ad signatures

Nobody needs a bitcoin discussion forum at all.

I just don't understand why the glaringly obvious solution continues to be ignored.

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that the forum administrators and moderators don't want to have the responsibility of trying to decide which signatures are valid, and which are part of a campaign.  Furthermore, it's the low quality posts that are the problem, not the sig ads specifically.  The sig ads unfortunately create an incentive problem that leads to low quality posts, but perhaps the site administration feels that high quality posters should be allowed to benefit financially through advertising for their participation.

[alc]

You are mistaken.  You are not on the list.

Apologies if the intended humour wasn't obvious.

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that the forum administrators and moderators don't want to have the responsibility of trying to decide which signatures are valid, and which are part of a campaign.

Removing sigs entirely would obviate this responsibility, no?

perhaps the site administration feels that high quality posters should be allowed to benefit financially through advertising for their participation.

Most people perceive and expect a clear distinction between advertisement and content, and ad sigs blur this significantly. If advertisers want to advertise on the site, they should do it through traditional channels, that don't introduce obvious conflicts of interest.

[shogdite]

No, why would anyone want to do that.
1- Its a money maker for us users
2-its a cool way to get your service out there
3-I make money from it.

If the mods are considering listening to the OP, please reconsider.

[Athertle]

No, why would anyone want to do that.
1- Its a money maker for us users
2-its a cool way to get your service out there
3-I make money from it.

If the mods are considering listening to the OP, please reconsider.

I agree with you, but your 1st and 2nd points are literally the exact same point.

[shogdite]

No, why would anyone want to do that.
1- Its a money maker for us users
2-its a cool way to get your service out there
3-I make money from it.

If the mods are considering listening to the OP, please reconsider.

I agree with you, but your 1st and 2nd points are literally the exact same point.

They are not even close. One is us making money, the other is a service provider getting his service or product out.
2 different things, not even remotely similar.

[hedgy73]

How many people actually click on signature links? I can probably count on one hand how many times I have.... and never spent a penny on any of them.

However, I understand companies need to advertise somewhere and in this case bitcoin related companies need to advertise here so I'm not that bothered really. I just see past them most of the time.

We live in an advertising frenzy world. Everywhere you look is advertising even in the bottom of beer glasses and on pumps at the petrol station, here is no different.

[DannyHamilton]

How many people actually click on signature links? I can probably count on one hand how many times I have.... and never spent a penny on any of them.

However, I understand companies need to advertise somewhere and in this case bitcoin related companies need to advertise here so I'm not that bothered really. I just see past them most of the time.

We live in an advertising frenzy world. Everywhere you look is advertising even in the bottom of beer glasses and on pumps at the petrol station, here is no different.

The ads aren't the problem. The problem is the incentive for unknowledgeable people to post as much useless drivel and inane nonsense as they can to increase their post count (and therefore their income). If a bitcoin based company wants to advertise here, they can simply purchase ad space from the forum directly. It's already possible to turn off signatures if you don't want to see them, but it isn't possible to turn off the rediculous amount of nonsense posted by sig ad campaign participants.

[hedgy73]

How many people actually click on signature links? I can probably count on one hand how many times I have.... and never spent a penny on any of them.

However, I understand companies need to advertise somewhere and in this case bitcoin related companies need to advertise here so I'm not that bothered really. I just see past them most of the time.

We live in an advertising frenzy world. Everywhere you look is advertising even in the bottom of beer glasses and on pumps at the petrol station, here is no different.

The ads aren't the problem. The problem is the incentive for unknowledgeable people to post as much useless drivel and inane nonsense as they can to increase their post count (and therefore their income). If a bitcoin based company wants to advertise here, they can simply purchase ad space from the forum directly. It's already possible to turn off signatures if you don't want to see them, but it isn't possible to turn off the rediculous amount of nonsense posted by sig ad campaign participants.

I agree there is a lot of drivel posted here to bump post count. Its a shame advertisers require a certain amount of posts per week / month for people to get paid but that's just the way it is.

Unfortunately its just the world we live in, some members are probably making a living spamming forums like this and many others, at the end of the day if its putting food on their families table then that's fair enough.

The internet is full of spam, facebook , twitter, instagram and hundreds of other websites you visit is full of spam. Its shocking really but something we have to come to terms with sad as it is.

[R2D221]

Removing sigs entirely would obviate this responsibility, no?

Exactly. That's why I also support removing signatures.

[BitUsher]

- snip -
there is no participation here from intelligent people any more,
- snip -

Have you found somewhere else I can go where I CAN find conversation with intelligent people?

Feel free to send your response via PM if you don't want the local riff-raff to find out about it.

As far as I know there is some intelligent conversation within the unsystem forum - https://forum.unsystem.net/   which appears temporarily offline .
The problem is a chicken vs egg dilemma because you need some traffic and posting to make contributing and interacting with a forum worthwhile.

Judging from the quantity of shill accounts/hacked accounts/spam accounts recently It really wouldn't take many of us to start a new forum together and scrape some quality posts from this one like http://bitcointa.lk/ did as a good base and build from there with different set of rules to discourage trolling/spamming/shilling.

If you guys want I could pay for the costs of setting this up out of pocket and get some of you guys to help moderate it if interested. I am thinking for consistency using SMF as well but 2.0.10 instead of 1.1.19 here. This isn't made to compete with this forum because the current rules have some advantages of incentivizing more traffic and higher posts(albeit lower quality posts) and it would be great to have another forum as a backup when this one occasionally goes down.

Would this be something people would be interested in participating with or helping moderate?

[CIYAM]

@BitUsher I would be interested to be a part of a new forum (and would likely help with moderation).

Also note that http://ciyam.org/open/ could be used if others were okay with using a completely new forum software platform (which forum members would be able to help develop which perhaps could hold some sort of "nerdtraction").

As I am already paying for the hosting it would require zero cost or effort from others but if an SMF forum is preferable then let's do that.

[BitUsher]

@BitUsher I would be interested to be a part of a new forum (and would likely help with moderation).

Also note that http://ciyam.org/open/ could be used if others were okay with using a completely new forum software platform (which forum members would be able to help develop which perhaps could hold some sort of "nerdtraction").

As I am already paying for the hosting it would require zero cost or effort from others but if an SMF forum is preferable then let's do that.

Your forum looks great. I will signup and participate soon. You definitely will be welcome to become a moderator on the new forum if I set it up.

I think there needs to be a few things to make a new forum viable however.... 1) Using SMF and making it very familiar with minimal differences and upgrades... Like mobile friendly. This helps with usability and easing the transition.

Secondly, there needs to be a baseline of content and posts because this forum has built years of great content before starting to go downhill over the last 2 years.

The plan is to have an alternative site with different incentives and rules which we can figure out together and not compete directly with this one. bitcointalk.org despite its recent problems remains the original, and one I will continue to contribute towards, and even promote as well.

Some ideas I had floating around in my head-
1) Allow bitcointalk.org users to migrate and retain their rank and usernames , but only for legit accounts that aren't trolls/shills
2) Sandbox new users in a section for a longer time period and possible make them pay a small btc fee to discourage spamming
3) Share all control and potential future profits with all contributing members where the users own and control the forum
4) have clear rules that prevent signature campaigns and spamming
5) Only focus on bitcoin, and bitcoin related alts and assets.(I.E.. BTC, namecoin(merged mined), counterparty, colored coins, future sidechains, ect...) This is to prevent the encouragement of the cycle of scam artists that infect this forum and shill accounts constantly attacking bitcoin to pump their own alt. (Some alts are fine but I want to create a bitcoin related forum for people to talk)

Since the traffic will initial be very low I will probably start of with a VPS but if the server started getting busy I would build a custom server and colo it for better security, than build a caching and load balancing  frontend server and other improvements in the future.

Are there any other things that I should consider?

[tspacepilot]

[snip]
1) Allow bitcointalk.org users to migrate and retain their rank and usernames , but only for legit accounts that aren't trolls/shills
[snip]
Are there any other things that I should consider?

I think that (1) is going to be problematic, deciding who is/isn't a troll/shill is a huge matter of debate and it's not clear who should make the final decision in a "user-run, user-owned" forum that you describe.  If you don't want to be the new theymos (ie, a benevolent dictator), you'll have to have some unimpeachable empirically verifiable criteria for deciding things like this.  I suspect that this slippery-slope is one of the main reasons that the current forum staff allow what they do allow---they don't see how to get in the middle of this stuff and make decisions based on criteria that are enumerable and easy to evaluate.

There's a similar slippery-slope with signature ads (your point (4)), do you disallow all signature advertizing (then people can't even promote their own personal website or service) or only paid-advertizing (then how do you tell who's getting paid and how much---it's easy to arrange things privately)?

Just my 2 satoshis.  I think your inspiration is good, but I don't see the implementation working (yet).

[BitUsher]

Excellent points, I too as well share many of your concerns and have considered them over. Just like bitcoin creating the right balance and incentives may be difficult and even if the forum works fine it may fail because the "network effect" found here. I think I understand some of Theymos' motivations for allowing the signature campaigns and other behaviors to persists as taking steps to stop them will certainly lower traffic and post count considerably. This is why I don't think an alternative forum will replace this one as the high turnover, drama , and activity found here attracts many people.

I think that (1) is going to be problematic, deciding who is/isn't a troll/shill is a huge matter of debate

I don't want to create another hashtalk-like forum with censorship and arbitrary decisions being made about what posts and users to delete. Preventing many shill accounts can simply be done by :
1) Quarantining them longer in a subsection with other restrictions as well
2) Removing the incentive for shill accounts in the first place by making the forum focused completely on Bitcoin and bitcoin assets thus any account that promotes an alt can be banned
3) Possibly creating a cost in BTC to sign up to lower spam accounts(but existing users here can claim there username for free)

Sorting out old troll accounts that claim their username and rank will take a bit of initial discretion however, but at least there would be a wealth of posts here as data to investigate if needed.

"user-run, user-owned" forum that you describe.  If you don't want to be the new theymos (ie, a benevolent dictator), you'll have to have some unimpeachable empirically verifiable criteria for deciding things like this.

Creating a completely decentralized forum would indeed be difficult and has been dreamed about and discussed over the years. I would essentially like to find some old "hero/legendary" accounts that wish to share some of the responsibility and privileges of controlling the forum(existing moderators here can do both if wanted too) where we use multisig to control the assets of the forum and a fair percentage of BTC to share in any rewards earned from adverts and new signups with all the users fairly. This will have to be balanced correctly as we don't want to turn the forum into one big signature campaign so users would be rewarded but not based upon post count or total accounts.

There's a similar slippery-slope with signature ads (your point (4)), do you disallow all signature advertizing (then people can't even promote their own personal website or service) or only paid-advertizing (then how do you tell who's getting paid and how much---it's easy to arrange things privately)?

There is no way to be prevent custom and private signature campaigns. What can be done is prevent public promotion of such campaigns and have a policy of only allow signatures that referenced the users personal project or if they were working for such company directly. This may get a bit tricky and I haven't decided to remove sigs altogether or simply have a policy of no sigs for simply a set of categories of signatures not allowed. It may be better to leave of signatures altogether though.

I am under no presumption that I will be able to stop all trolls, spammers and shills... The objective is just to make it much more costly for that behavior to exist than here ... I expect 2 consequences , much lower activity on the forum and higher quality posts.

[TheRealSteve]

The problem is the incentive for unknowledgeable people to post as much useless drivel and inane nonsense as they can to increase their post count (and therefore their income).

One of the issues - as already mentioned - is that sometimes it's not easily classified as useless drivel or inane nonsense.

But based on analysis of a few users who I saw posting repeatedly in threads I follow, it is rather obvious that they post for signature sake.

One example: the entire week before joining a particular signature campaign: 0-7 posts per day, median of 2.  On the day of joining: 67 posts.  The next day: 19 posts.  total post count for 16 days following that registration: 227 posts.  After that? A whole bunch of days with zero of few posts.  This is, sadly, fairly indicative for most people who are very active with signature campaigns.  You can quite literally grab a user's post history, plot a graph of number of posts per day, point to peaks and suggest that this is where they signed up for a campaign, and more often than not you'd be right.

From reading some actual posts, it's also sad to see how well aware they were of having to play by the rules, that signature campaign managers supposedly check all the posts to make sure it's not spammy ... and thus knowing that they can't just post "lol", and have to at least write something that seems like it might make sense in the thread, even if it adds nothing.

Literally, one of those posts reads:

Going to improve the quality of my posts now that so many people are being banned for spamming

This is sad.  The quality of one's posts shouldn't be for fear of getting banned.

Nor should the reason for posting be in order to participate in a signature campaign.  From a campaign manager:

You were on pending because your post history is not very good [referring to low number of posts].

Of course it's advertising, so they want you to post as much as possible, yet at the same time they want you to not be spamming for fear of themselves being shut down.  These two goals are already at odds with each other.

Moreover, many of them understand that higher level members - say, legendary - may get higher payout.. so not only are they posting in order to get more payout, they're also working to get into a position to get a higher payout.
At the same time, that 'legendary' status can land them other perks (forum and offers), so they're getting rewarded left right and center for this behavior.

I'm using the signature blocking script, and that at least blocks or lessens the eyesore - unfortunately this doesn't help against the collateral damage.  Ignoring users altogether is another approach, but there are sadly good people making good posts also filling out their signature campaign requirements that would be caught in that net.

[CIYAM]

Having been a forum member before ad-sig campaigns even existed I find it hard to actually believe that "any serious forum members" actually *need to do that* (they managed to post before those even existed without a problem so why do they suddenly "have to be paid" to post now?).