IMPORTANT: User Signatures

Hi, all.

As some of you may have noticed, signature spam (basically SEO spammers making inane posts to degreeinfo and promoting some shady product with a URL in their signature line) has become an epidemic problem.

Tonight I went through and removed hundreds of spam signatures from user profiles. While I did look at each signature I was removing, it was a somewhat wholesale process and I may have accidentally removed a handful of legitimate signatures.

DegreeInfo in general does not allow signatures referencing commercial sites, nor commercial sites or blogs relating to distance education. If you have a blog or site that's primarily informational (i.e, not full of ads for schools), then it's probably OK.

I have also, for the moment at least, severely restricted what sort of signatures are allowed. Basically, no code or HTML is allowed at the moment; this will help to foil the SEO spammers.

Unfortunately, this may also result in some signatures looking "messy." As I get time, I plan to remedy this problem for existing posters. Newly joining posters will probably not be permitted to have signatures at all, simply because it becomes prohibitive to try and keep the spammers out.

It is unfortunate that a bunch of greedy assholes in India and the Phillipines (90% of all signature spam comes from one of those two places) are essentially forcing us to take features away from the large percentage of users that use signatures legitimately, and it annoys me beyond belief to have to do this.

But I believe that keeping DegreeInfo spam free and as close to noise and inane post free as possible is a very worthwhile endeavor, and it is something that I and the rest of the mod and admin team will continue to tweak and work on in coming weeks.

In the meantime, here is how you can help:

When you see a post, particularly from a new poster, that says very little, is slightly or very off topic to the thread at hand, or is otherwise rather pointless, please report the post. That will alert us to the poster, and we can investigate, and if it is a spammer, ban. Your help in doing that will enable our moderation team to continue doing a good job.

Feedback, as always, is appreciated. Thanks for your continued support of degreeinfo!

- Chip

 

Done cleaning up my signature!

 

The SMU logo will be missed, but really, the Marine Corps line is the best part.

 

sig images probably aren't gone forever, it's just a little more work to deal with the situation to make it so the spammers don't benefit.

 

Did you know that for whatever reason they are limited to three lines now? It's a bit limiting for those that have more than three degrees as many people list one degree per line. I'm just thinking ahead to when I start my next masters in Fall of 2011.

"Your signature contains too many lines and must be shortened. You may only have up to 3 line(s). Long text may have been implicitly wrapped, causing it to be counted as multiple lines."

 

I totally feel your pain. That said, I hope that you can figure out how to enable signatures for everyone (and more than 3 lines) as I think they are VERY useful on a site like this. It helps other posters see what schools you have experience with and helps people find members to PM if they have a specific question about a program. They have been really useful for me on this site and I'd hate to see them go away, even for new posters. On 99% of forums, signatures are useless but here, they are like a little mini-resume of our educational background which is immensely helpful.

 

Oops. That was another anti-spam sig measure.

How many lines do people think would be reasonable and appropriate?

 

I'd say no more than 6 unless that is too many and somehow it allows spammers to insert junk into their signatures. I've seen the spam problems you mention but usually it was urls in the signature, not a large block of text. Now that you've turned off html, maybe this problem will go away and the number of lines won't matter.

 

I don't think there's a one size fits all answer to how many lines there should be in a signature line. There should be, for each individual, enough lines for your name, each degree you hold or are working toward (and possibly also for degrees washed out of). Thus, an individual with 23 master's degrees and 8 doctorates would get 33 lines on his sig line (assuming that he/she had 1 bachelor's and 1 name).

 

I guess that would make sense, the signature lines I mean.

 

It's too bad that idiots have caused this to happen. You have my support, Chip.

 

That's a GREAT idea actually. I support that 100%. Too bad he can't turn on html sigs for certain users. Can you do that Chip? I bet it's all on none with that, however.

 

Of course, I can't get that goal of 23 master's degrees and 8 doctorates out of my head!

 

This is exactly what I'm planning to do, but it's not super easy because what it requires is transitioning all the users who exceed the post count over to a new user category which has those permissions, and then the basic member category will have those permissions rescinded.

And yes, this will also give us the flexibility to let different users have different signature options... just takes time and as large as our database is, it also requires processing time as well. But we'll get to it soon enough

 

Make it a high number (800 sounds good) and cut down on the number of users needed to move.

 

I'd lighten up a bit imo on the "greedy assholes" from India and Phillipines. These are the two main poorest countries that have a high English speaking population, and therefore take these spamming "jobs" (usually funded by Americans, other westerners, etc.) from places like freelancer.com or getaguru.com or whatever for a dollar or two hour.

 

Well, certainly people with 8,000 posts should have unlimited sig lines.

 

Ted, You're funny!!!

 

(8000 sounds better)