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Actually, the OP has a point, maybe it should be useful to stop counting in the spam boards, along with the merit system, of course. But by cutting the count on those boards, we will have as result "forever newbies", instead of "forever juniors".
To OP, the spam problem is not related to the altcoin section only. Just take a look at other sections, and observe how many people just go into a topic, maybe by reading the title and never the content or quotes in it; select a random one-lined phrase, as "Bitcoin will go to the moon, sir", or "Thanks, very informative" and that's all. Even if the topic is about sandwiches, they will say "Bitcoin to the moon", for they don't even care in reading the thread, of course, the quotes are a mystery to them, all those words to read!! Uf!!! Must be exhausting!!!
So the real problem is about the attitude towards the forum, in short. Of course, these people shouldn't rank-up, no matter how many times they tip "Interesting, sir, thanks", or "Bitcoin to the moon", no matter, they should never become legendary by doing so, and it has been achieved by the merit system.
Man, you are in a really competitive place. No matter if the internal function is used in other forums, in here, there are more than 2 million users, thousands new per day with the only goal of earning some bucks from here. They are drying the cow by spamming all over, for they don't really have a true interest in the forum, but on what a friend-of-a-friend told them: earn money by doing literally nothing. For those unable to even read the thread, to enroll the discussion, must not be any chance of ranking-up- For it would be truly unfair for the ones putting their grain by effort and hard work.
Nevertheless, Even when I can see the point on the first suggestion (stopping counting activity on the spam-fest boards), probably the result will be other boards becoming spam-fests. The issue is the lack of interest on the forum, that's all.