Scratch

That's too bad. Couldn't you make it so that forum moderators and the Scratch Team could go around and disable only the inappropriate signatures, just like projects?

andresmh wrote:

Yes, we are trying to do that, there has been a surge of spammers that we cannot keep up them. I am thinking that with the holidays the moderators and the rest of the team are going to be having to spend less time and the problem might exacerbate. Additionally we only look at content that has been flagged and since signatures cannot be flagged then its a lot harder to find the inappropriate ones. If we had more people and/or more developers we could come up with better solutions, but we are very limited in both of those.

I'd gladly help in flagging signatures if I ever saw one. Maybe make a topic where people post if they think that someones signatures is inapproiate. Please don't take away signatures, they are one of the main ways of getting people to view your project.

Maybe you could make it so that you can only have signatures if you have a certain number of forum posts or projects. Most spamers have no projects and very few posts.

Not to mention, that if a person has made 50 or so posts you can see if they intend to sell you stuff or something unwanted like that. I don't think that spamers would put in the effort to make 50 forum posts to make 1 or 2 posts to advertise their own things.

Last edited by archmage (2008-12-12 13:36:03)

I understand. However it's painful to hear    (I spent a lot of time creating that JSO banner and fitting it within 400 characters :S )

I don't know enough php to do such kind of thing, but it shouldn't be too hard. Just add it on the profile page - when a user has less then 50 posts he/she is not allowed to post a sig. It is actually just copy-pasting, the post count is displayed somewhere on the profile page...

andresmh wrote:

After JSO put it in such simple terms I was inspired and decided to spend no more than 1 hr in doing the change. It turned out to take just a few minutes. Thanks JSO! 

I changed the code so the signature would be displayed only accounts with more than 50 posts. Let me know if it works well and hopefully I didn't break anything.

It works, also you should update the FAQ to explain why some people won't get sigs.

JSO wrote:

I  don't know enough php to do such kind of thing, but it shouldn't be too hard. Just add it on the profile page - when a user has less then 50 posts he/she is not allowed to post a sig. It is actually just copy-pasting, the post count is displayed somewhere on the profile page...

andresmh wrote:

After JSO put it in such simple terms I was inspired and decided to spend no more than 1 hr in doing the change. It turned out to take just a few minutes. Thanks JSO! 

Great solution! Thank you both! You can see: It's often valuable to let multiple people think about a solution before rejecting an idea or immediately start programming.

With no use of signatures, won't these people just create posts to advertise instead?

So if I had 30 posts before you disabled it, once I get 50 posts will I get a signiture again?

All those full stops make me suspicious

Zelda123 wrote:

Also, if there is an inappropriate signature, is it ok to flag a post by that person, typing the reason as "Inappropriate Signature?"

I think that would work just fine.

It'll take me ages to get 50 posts and have a signicture    (I've only 9 posts)

Sigs are great ways to express yourself, and once you have 50 posts you will probably know enough about Scratch to have a cool one