theymos, this is a perfect example of the beast you have created by linking signatures with activity. Remove signatures from activity and this nonsense stops immediately. How can we compete against bots doing this? Currently anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and when users are using bots like he is to just copy a post and change a few words for synonyms it's often very hard to notice. I've just banned this account but how many others does he have doing the same? It's utterly pointless banning accounts if he's got 200 others that I've missed that will still be botting away. Things need to change. Do me favour and look into this user and just tell me how many alt accounts you can find. There are dozens upon dozens of individuals farming thousands of accounts this way and it's only going to get worse over time. The worst thing about this is once they hit a sufficient rank they can get paid by lazy ICO campaigns for merely copy and pasting and they'll never notice the abuse.
if theymos could implement a script for determining something along the lines of 'merit points' asscoated with general post quality, i wouldn't be against the idea of signatures being linked to those points instead, it would provide an initial incentive for good post quality from the start an account is created, and provide a long term incentive for maintaining a good post quality. if theymos can also implement other factors in, suchas deleted posts for not following forum rules, it'll also push members towards following the general forum rules. maybe even diminishing returns on merit points (or whatever they're to be called) can be used for people with alt accounts, or accounts on the same ip. just some rambling thoughts.
Or just simply make a subscription fee for all the users or just for participation in spesific forum sections like the bounty and signature once. So in order to participate in a bounty or signature campaign the user have to pay some fee to the forum and those money can be ivested in moderators. The high rank members can have lower fees, higher for newbies. It's just an idea. The forum is a grate place for me and I am willing to pay what it takes to make it even better.
fee or not, as long as the spammers can still net a profit from shitposting with their 100 accounts every day, they'll continue to do so. there wouldn't be any incentive here to make better posts, since they'd pay a fee anyways. they'd make a bit less, sure, but that's not what the goal is here.
theymos, this is a perfect example of the beast you have created by linking signatures with activity. Remove signatures from activity and this nonsense stops immediately. How can we compete against bots doing this? Currently anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and when users are using bots like he is to just copy a post and change a few words for synonyms it's often very hard to notice. I've just banned this account but how many others does he have doing the same? It's utterly pointless banning accounts if he's got 200 others that I've missed that will still be botting away. Things need to change. Do me favour and look into this user and just tell me how many alt accounts you can find. There are dozens upon dozens of individuals farming thousands of accounts this way and it's only going to get worse over time. The worst thing about this is once they hit a sufficient rank they can get paid by lazy ICO campaigns for merely copy and pasting and they'll never notice the abuse.
if theymos could implement a script for determining something along the lines of 'merit points' asscoated with general post quality, i wouldn't be against the idea of signatures being linked to those points instead, it would provide an initial incentive for good post quality from the start an account is created, and provide a long term incentive for maintaining a good post quality. if theymos can also implement other factors in, suchas deleted posts for not following forum rules, it'll also push members towards following the general forum rules. maybe even diminishing returns on merit points (or whatever they're to be called) can be used for people with alt accounts, or accounts on the same ip. just some rambling thoughts.
How would this work though? Wouldn't that just be gamed? People could still just copy and paste 'quality' posts in order to get merit points, right? I think it would just cause more headaches than problems it solves to be honest.
i realize that for this idea to actually work well in practice, there would have to be a lot of other additions, such as better quality control of users (which could just translate into more staff), which i could see as the biggest issue with this. it's not a great idea, but it's not the worst either. if the issue of users copy pasting posts could be handled in the first place, this idea might seem a bit more viable, but there isnt a sure way of combating that without a script in the site's server checking every submitted post for that (and this would consume way too much resources for it to be practical).
It can easily be done with bots if all they do is copy a post from earlier on in a megathread. There are numerous individuals that have been caught with hundreds of accounts and many more that I suspect are doing it that have been reported but not looked into by an admin going on all year (some use bots and others just post of copy and paste manually). One Russian guy had a little over 200 accounts and all they did was rehash their previous posts reworded slightly post after post account after account. The entire Vietnamese sub board thread had to be locked because 99% of the accounts posting in there were just copy and pasting random text from online and of course to anyone not speaking Vietnamese nobody was any wiser....until I noticed it of course. The worst thing is Sylon (the worst campaign manager on these forums despite what his avatar claims) was paying them all to do it and continues to pay spambot accounts because he never checks anyone's post quality at all.
i dont like this idea much personally, but maybe maintaining a staff - approved sig campaign manager list could be an effective measure. this would require both additional work from the staff (and probably occasional, regular monitoring of these approved users) and the staff essentially having a small link to the campaigns, which i suspect is something theymos does not want at all, but it would eliminate most spammers from even being allowed into campaigns. i realize this isnt a great idea, or one that might even be considered, but im just throwing ideas out there.
more so than post quality, i think one of the major issues that need to be addressed first is the copy pasting; if solved, it could weed out a lot of the shitposters, and possibly make the issue of low post quality easier to solve. we really do need more mods tho.