This forum can be saved from signature spams only when crypto is in bear market. Once if btc starts to reach out to a wider public and gets into the limelight, we would face an insanely tough situation preventing spams and saving this forum. With increase in btc prices, there would be a steep increase in ICO generation rates resulting in increase of spammer registrations in this forum. Even systems like Merit and implementing new Guidelines won't save this forum from spams and the situation would be uncontrollable as it was prevailing during 2017-2018 era.
For instance, let us take a simple scenario. Around 958,576 users have registered in 2018 and 493244 have registered in 2017. It's around twice as much as the users have registered. More than 50% of these were spammers, not really active or were just tired of spamming and left altogether during the bear market. Considerably the spams increased during this period. Either way bear market is a good time to implement any such new rules to the forum such as banning of alt related stuffs or signatures or implementing new rules as this would act as some kind of weapon during the upcoming spam war. Some prevailing problems which must be seen through,
[1] Signature spams starts with manager. They are the one who hire spammers to promote their project. If so, why not restrict topic starters in Bounties section to some sort of paid membership ranks like "Manager" Ranks and the prices should be around $50 or somewhere near. This would make the companies to hand over their bounty management to only people who have bought those ranks or some good Managers who are affording to pay.
[2] People here keep reminding me that we are in a bitcoin forum and not in a altcoin forum whenever someone requests for some additional sub-boards in Altcoins. If it is so, then why should we allow the promotion of alts here? We could ban them altogether.
[3] theymos could easily implement a new rule such like, only those who received 10+ merits in the last 120 days could use signature? Will this work really? I need community suggestions. But there seems to be another negative aspect such that merit abusers would get those.
The only other suggestion I can think of, is something I've suggested before: only allow signature campaigns that pay in Bitcoin. The ones paying in made-up tokens have no real cost for the ICO, and thus don't mind "paying" for spam. If the campaign pays in Bitcoin, at least they have something to lose.
These were mentioned already, and seems to be a working idea. But practically it costs thousands of USD for the company to pay in btc considering the amount of registrations being done by bounty hunters which these companies are not ready to pay
Almost all the cryptocurrencies were useless in the beginning, but they gained popularity and prices based on their use cases. Similarly tokens while they are announced in this forum for bounties have no real value but they might gain value in the future. I am not completely against usage of alts for bounty payments, but saying them useless is kinda incorrect.
I did not notice that Jeremycoin did not promote any business in his signature.OgNasty promotes his business, alanst is a newbie, cryptohunter should also be included, but with the neg trust, I do not know if he does not promote by choice or lack of.
I promote btc in my signature, satoshi pays for me.