We have been talking about this for a long while. We are looking for an effective compromise between removing Sigs all together, disallowing Signature advertising, allowing signature advertising, and allowing you to advertise your own things.
I still think allowing signature advertising, but basing payouts off of activity is the way to go. That way it leaves signature advertising for those who dont abuse it, it makes it so spammers only need to spam 7 posts per week for maximum profit, and it allows people to keep up signature advertising if they want.
I think one possible compromise is to make it against the rules to have consistently content-less posts (as determined by the moderators) while advertising in your signature.
The problem is that this is tough to enforce for every user.
Ideally, advertisers would pay bitcointalk.org for adspace.
It seems that a good number of posts here have ads in their signature. While it is annoying to be bombarded with ads, I don't see being advertised to as a problem in itself.
The problem is that these advertisers pay users per post usually, so users will try to get in as many posts as they can. This leads to low quality, short, and often meaningless posts.
There are many examples of users polluting this forum, one user consistent enough for me to have ignored is Bitpop
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=14283;sa=showPostsUsers normally wouldn't be allowed to include ads in their posts, and most other forums disallow ads in signatures. Overall, this change would have a positive effect on this community by filtering out poorly thought out, short posts that are 20% content and 80% ad.
you don't know what are you talking about .... I am a sig seller and I can tell that you MIGHT have right for some of sig sellers but not for all of US.
We are paid to post CONSTRUCTIVE posts.
If our companies will see that we make only short-nonsense posts they might say bye bye to us.
So good sig seller is someone who is writing many posts (yes) and he indeed want his posts to be creative.
For example - science I am a sig seller I read a tooons of posts from all users, and I learned so many new things about bitcoin and not only.
So I improve my knowledge, reply to posts, and earn some BTC at 1 time.
What's wrong with this?
Anytime you see a post that is off topic you can report it to mods and post will be removed and guy will be not paid for this post.
So good sig sellers are just people who LOVE this forum, love to post in here and need some cash....
Eh..
That is good. The problem is that there are users that abuse the system. I clearly do know what I'm talking about because I linked an example of such a user. Reporting the user doesn't do anything because even if he is breaking a rule by not contributing, he won't be banned.
If you are monitoring your users and making sure they have quality posts, then I commend you, but there is an obvious difference between the posts of those here because they love Bitcoin and those here because they love money.