The current status quo seems OK. If you have to pay $20 per merit plus a risk of getting red trust, then that's a situation that doesn't concern me at all. I'm not going to lose sleep over people going to ridiculous lengths to buy merit, since only a small number of people will be willing and able to do that.
As long as merit sales are a black market, I'm happy, since that makes it far more difficult and expensive to buy merit. If that's the case, then the small volume of black-market merit trades don't themselves bother me much, and I think that it does more harm than good to get too witch-hunty about it.
Look at the problem you have created from resolving the previous problems.Statistics of spam has lessen but those account farmers wpnt stop farming ,even your DT members cant be controlled,abusing the red trust which you have created for scammers,now it is being used for non sense.If you do want spam to stop take out the root of all the problems which is the signatures.Or lock some discussion board for signatures,so that the spams will be in a single discussion make it "Shitposter Discussion" and tell those bounty managers to require hunters to post in that discussoin.
Merits sucks you know that ? so biased to the high rank members,you know it yourself it is too much for the new members,those who are here for about a year are in good position,sr. member? and how is that fair to those newbies in this forum? the max that they can get would be member rank.
Dont tell us all of your merit sources are going to give some merits to those people,the trust system has been abused,you know that,thepharmacist ,lauda and other shit people here who are using that ability to tag people,causing another problem because those people who got reds are going to create more accounts to cover those accounts that has reds.
Its all about you,come to think twice, if there will be no signatures there will be no spams,its purely discussions.
If you dont want to remove the signatures,make another discussion board for the signature participants require all the hunters to do shitosts on that discussion = problem solved.