50 Of The Funniest Pics From The ‘Useless, Unsuccessful, And Unpopular Signage’ Facebook Group

We managed to get in touch with the administrators of 'UUU Signage' and they were kind enough to tell us about the inner workings of the group.

Currently, 'UUU Signage' has 410,000 members. "We never wanted it to be this big," they told Bored Panda. "We started out as a small corner of the UUUniverse, even though some people refer to Signage as 'the original group.'"

"The UUUniverse began with a now-archived group known as 'Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes' which spawned a community that went on to form many groups. There's one for just about every topic, including UUU Cats Refurmed, UUU License Plate Spotting, UUU Cook, and even very niche groups such as UUU Standpipe Spotting!"

The admins said these splinter groups' membership usually consisted of people from the UUUniverse. However, for whatever reason, UUU Signage exploded in popularity and began reaching a wider audience.

"Membership requests have only increased exponentially since then," they said. "The important thing to remember is that 'Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular' is more of a 'brand' than actual criteria for submitted content. We welcome all contributions as long as they comply with our rules, which are pretty straightforward"

"As far as the community itself, we moderate pretty strictly when it comes to join requests. We have a set of questions that lay out very clearly what the group is about and what we will tolerate," the admins explained. "If a potential member doesn't answer all of them, or fails to answer them to our satisfaction, we deny their request for membership. This helps keep out potential trolls and spam bots, too. We don't have any statistics but we get thousands of join requests daily and we deny more than we admit."

Facebook communities this big often become chaotic breeding grounds for trolls, and some slip into 'UUU Signage' even with its strict admission policy. However, the chances of them causing any trouble are minimum, since they get kicked out the second they show their true colors. "We get plenty of trolls and we moderate pretty strictly. We have zero tolerance for any sort of bigotry," the admins said.

"We shut down arguments as soon as we see them and mute people who participate in them (regardless of what side you’re arguing for). We preemptively close comments or delete posts with topics that we know from experience will make people argue. Over time, we've put rules in place to help prevent people from sucking the fun out of the group (by ruining jokes by repeatedly explaining a sign when no one asked, or dogpiling the OP for not knowing something, etc.)."

Some of the most common issues within the group are: 1) people not reading the rules and then being surprised when they get suspended or blocked from the group for breaking those rules, and 2) people who want to debate politics and/or insult each other in various ways, which is related to the first one.

"We also run a separate group, Signage Help Desk, where we invite members and even ex-members to post everything from technical questions to the inevitable 'Why did I get banned/muted?' Members seem to get angrier with being muted than being outright banned so we get a lot of people asking why. We also get a lot of members asking why their particular post was deleted and we are happy to offer them an explanation, although they are not always receptive to our answers," the admins explained.

From toilets to stadiums, as you can see, the signs that get featured in this group come from a lot of different places. "With [so many] members, it's hard for us to pinpoint any particular member or location as a frequent contributor because they do come from all over," the admins said. "We don't allow 'viral content' – the pictures of the signs must be taken by the person who posted the image."

"If we did not have this rule, the group would be overrun by people sharing images they either 'found in the wild' or just plain didn't take themselves. This helps keep the content fresh and avoids people spamming the same 'funny sign' they found on Reddit or The Chive that day." And that is precisely why the group has caught our eye. It's original. Not just another content recycling 'factory'.

"Target has a sign on their individually priced bananas that reads 'Banana's by the each' (the apostrophe was eventually corrected) that had been posted dozens of times," the admins remembered one of the classics. "By around the 20th or so time we had seen it, we were so sick of it that we decided that we would delete future posts of it on sight. Later, we discussed applying this principle more broadly to curate the group and keep the content fresh."

"We named this policy the 'Bananas by the Each Referendum.' Now we maintain a list of signs that we've seen too many times that are now considered 'bananas' and we delete them if we see them. This prevents the group's content from consisting of the same pictures over and over again and keeps it fresh."

'UUU Signage' was created all the way back in 2014, however, while a lot of similar groups get shut down by Facebook for various violations, this one continues to thrive. Now that you've heard the amount of love and attention the admins pour into their work, it becomes kinda obvious why.

"We encourage use of the 'report to admin' feature which allows us to find and remove problematic content quickly," they said. "Contrary to the popular rumors, use of the feature does not get groups shut down. In our experience, the groups that find themselves getting repeatedly shut down and forming backup group after backup group are the ones with admins who ban and bully people for trying to help."

"We don't tolerate bigotry or hate speech or people being huge jerks to each other. We don't like the 'drag OP' culture of many other large groups. We don't care for the concept of 'dirty deleting' and we are happy to delete gross comments rather than having some weird compulsion to preserve someone's bigotry forever." In the vast sea that is Facebook, such dedication is hard to come by. And you can definitely tell when someone cares about what they do. It shows, first and foremost, in quality.