Quote from: mailmansDOG on May 03, 2014, 12:56:44 PM

It seems like BadBear handled out the bans for all members other than newbies. The points he makes are fair, but here's what frustrates me:

He gives no warning before he bans people
There are no clear guidelines on how not to get banned meaning that anyone would be banned without any given warning or reason

If BadBear wants a personal all out attack against signature campaign participants he can have it. But to me, this should not be the way to solve his personal issue. Given the above, he is able to ban anyone at anytime for any reason he thinks is apropriate. And that's something that shouldn't happen that easily.

He's just baning accounts by following his own opinion blindly. Do you really believe that he should be able to ban people just because he hates the fact they're participating in a signature campaign?

I don't want to ban people, I quite dislike it actually, I think everyone should be free to express themselves here with minimal restrictions. I've declined to ban people many times up to now for this, and I've been wracking my brain thinking of ways to deal with it without having to ban people. The longest running thread in the staff forum besides the ban request thread is a thread about the paid signature campaign and how to deal with it. It's a huge issue. This spam has to stop, people are making worthless post after post and drowning out good discussion with complete garbage and it's ruining this forum.

The only thing that has been done about it is this.

Quote from: theymos on February 26, 2014, 09:15:18 PM

Perhaps the allowed signature styling should change with activity score / membergroup. Like:
- Newbie: No styling (including links) allowed. Max 40 characters.
- Jr. Member: Links allowed. Max 100 characters.
- Member: Unlimited length.
- Full: Color allowed.
- Sr. Member: Size allowed
- Hero: Background color allowed

Then newbies will be less effective advertisers, which would hopefully significantly reduce the incentive for low-content posts. And when people become capable of effectively advertising through their signatures, they'll have invested a lot of time into their accounts, and they won't risk being banned by spamming.

After this, they just upped their payments in order to attract more of the higher ranking members. And the risk? What risk? It's really hard to get banned here, you have to be a spambot or a complete idiot to get banned here. There is no risk, which makes this measure completely and utterly worthless, and that obviously isn't what theymos intended if you read that post. There needs to be some risk, and I'm going to make sure there is, or else I'm failing everyone on this forum in my duties as a moderator. I've made many posts with suggestions on how to fix this issue without having to resort to banning people, but in reality none of them really work without punishing everyone. I don't like that it's come to this, but it's necessary.