Quote from: brush242 on February 27, 2014, 02:27:31 AM

Quote from: SaltySpitoon on February 27, 2014, 01:51:57 AM

We state it as true, by observing spam variances since paid advertising's induction to now. It is absolutely conclusive that paid signature advertising has increased spam to an astronomical level. People that do paid signature advertising as the only way to earn Bitcoins, rather than spend 20 hours per day forumlating hundreds of thoughtful posts, spend 30 minutes posting hundreds of times per day, giving the moderation staff hundreds of posts per day to delete and users to ban.

That you list my comment in bold, does not make it any less true. The prior statement remains false on its face simply because it expresses an erroneous conclusion, most simply because advertising in signatures has both positive and negative aspects for the community. It is not universally a negative, for reasons previously stated.

As far as what moderators do? That is what moderators do. As a moderator myself (not here), it truly takes very little time to moderate people, and if I was ever unsure (and about spammers, I never was) I would just ask someone else's opinion as well.

Quote

If you think the sponsor has time to look through tens if not hundreds of thousands of posts per month to judge if they are spam or not, you would be incorrect. They can say they only pay for substantial posts, but they dont have the staff nor time to read through everyone's posts.

You cannot possibly hope to speak for any sponsor, you have no idea what time they do or do not have, let alone how much time they chose to spend reviewing their employees. By extension, they have every incentive to insure that their paid sig users are doing their best for the community. Similarly, they have zero incentive to pay people for posting idiocy. Much like moderating, it just doesn't take that long to scan through someone's post log, especially if they wish to better their business.

None of this, of course, is meant to downplay the negatives, but to suggest that some heavy-handed statement that all ad sigs are bad for the community is mindless hyperbole.

No, it is quite true actually. The negatives to paid signature advertising far outweigh to positives. Of course we understand that its nice for people to be able to earn a bit of coin while posting as usual, however the sheer volume of spam is almost uncomprehendable. You are correct, it takes maybe 30 seconds to 1 minute to properly moderate a post on average. That involves checking the post for prior context, etc. Now multiply that times a few thousand over a short period of time, and it quickly becomes something that is difficult to keep up with. Your points are valid on a small scale, but we are talking about tens of thousands of posters. The forums has 255k members, taking into account that many are inactive, and many dont partake in signature advertising, we are still talking about hundreds of man hours per day to clean up and ban the many users that are causing the problem. The fact of the matter is that many of us have been moderating for years, we saw the report volume before signature advertising, and now after and have concluded that it is a generally negative. I can speak for the sponsors of paid signature campaigns on this matter, because for the larger ones, for example primedice, it wouldn't be humanly possible for Stunna to sift through every affiliate's posts to judge what is worthy and what isnt. We spend a good chunk of time moderating and reviewing these posts, and thats with a 40+ person team. I'm sure if they see something fishy they will review an indviduals post history, but what about when that person makes another 30 accounts to spam with. Chances are some of them are going to get through.

The only reason paid signature advertising wasnt banned looong ago, is that we generally believe that punishing the whole for the missdeeds of the few (in this case far more than a few) isn't fair.