What are your ideas for new ordering methods? My current idea is:
1. For each topic, get a list of the distinct users who posted there in the last 24 hours.
2. Give the topic a score equal to the sum of each such user's total earned merit.
3. Sort by topic score descending, and secondarily by the usual last post time.
With that, you still have topics with recent conversation listed first, but it requires more resources to manipulate, at least, and newbies have no influence. Maybe it'd give certain users overwhelming influence, though.
I want to think about it quite a bit more, so I probably won't do it soon.
This would be the IDEAL situation.
However there are only a handful of persons that can screen a projects design and make useful analysis. Also with ico distributional processes having capped limits reached in seconds it is impossible to tell if that was just a very popular project or just a 100% instamine by colluding whales.
The paid group would also be under huge temptation to push forward projects brimming with ico bitcoins for back handers so this is quite a risky thing too.
Better to use age of account + merit (capped at 200 earned) for cumulative value of topic. The opt out button mentioned by suchmoon would be good idea too to avoid contributing to perceived value when posting to inform people it is a scam or questioning the dev team to get much needed answeres.