I think 2 BTC would be more appropriate if the forum was in some kind of need for additional money and it was for something other then to enable signature features.
There are plenty of ways that the money could be spent.
If this is the case then I would suggest that you educate theymos on this so he stops telling people that the forum does not need money.
I might speculate that the volume of accounts traded might go up as people might be interested in buying accounts at fire-sale prices, hoping that signature campaigns would make a return appearance, giving value to accounts once again.
So, the right approach is not to completely ban them, but go in the lines of OgNasty's suggestion.
Again, I think that the price is too high and would result in excluding the majority of people who are not already wealthy.
I also have observed many signature spammers decline to "invest" the small amount of time required to even briefly read a small number of posts in a thread prior to posting nonsense.
That is one of the main problems in their posting habits. They don't read posts, end up rewriting what someone else already wrote and they keep repeating this cycle. Their overall posting quality becomes trash.
I am not sure what your point is here. The statement that you quoted was giving evidence that I do not think the signature spammers will "invest" in the "fee" required to unlock better signature features.
Why is that foolish? If you charge an amount that is greater then someone can reasonably expect to earn via their signature over a medium amount of time then no one will pay the "fee" and you are essentially banning signature campaigns.
That is a hasty generalization. You can't know this, as an example I choose myself, assuming that staff members also lose this functionality, I would pay the 2 BTC fee.
Maybe "no one" is not entirely true, however anyone who is acting economically rational will not pay a fee that is designed to prevent anyone who pays said fee from ever earning a return on said fee.
If you pay 0.05 btc every month on the 1st, then you will be risking that 0.05 btc in the event that you post enough crap so that you get banned.
Risking 20$
Whoa, now I'm scared; I shall not spam anymore!
If they have 10 accounts then they are risking $200 (plus the value of their accounts). Also note that many (possibly even most) of the signature spammers live in parts of the world where $1 is a lot of money.
Exactly. There should be no ROI at all.
Why do you think this?
As long as people see posting as some kind of investment, and buying accounts in order to ROI, this will be a problem. The point of this forum was to initially discuss Bitcoin related stuff and provide help for people, not make 100 pages of posts in threads like 'Why is gambling bad?0 (note: 1 post was sufficient to answer this question).
If people are investing (and risking) their money into an account then they have incentives to not spam useless crap because if they do then they are risking getting banned and loosing their investment. It has already been
clairified that low/no value threads are not allowed, so if you see one then I would suggest that you report to so a moderator with authority over that section can lock it.
When measured in number of threads, the market place sections is by far, the most active part of the forum (this would be even more so if the marketplace sections of mining were included in this), and the most important question that someone will consider when thinking about trading is how they will earn money with the trade.