I have mostly ruled out:
- Removing signatures or sig ads globally.
- Requiring payment to wear sig ads.
- Banning account sales.
A couple of ideas that have been floating around in my head:
1. To attain ranks above Member, you'd have to earn some number of merit points. Merit points would be awarded in a monthly vote on best posts of the previous month, with various measures (TBD) to prevent gaming of the vote. Winning merit points might also come with a BTC prize.
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
What do you think of these ideas, and what other ideas do people have?
Creating the "serious discussion" section can be good idea before removing signature globally. If it can be done without this poster restrictions then that would be better (everyone should have equal right).
Before removing the signature or sig ads globally we need to have a practical idea of the possible output we could expect on the entire forum from it. - No doubt signature and ranking up are connected with each others and people want to rank up because they will get better payment from the signatures campaigns. Removing sig ads may drop the traffic of the site dramatically. Provably you will see only those people who will constantly post or participate on the "serious section" only.
By the way, I see merit as a success to improve post quality. It's doing a great job. The only problem we are seeing is - people are misusing it. If we can figure out how to stop misusing merit then we won't need any other fix to improve post quality (If that is the only concern for the time being).
I wounder if you were able find any use from these suggestions.