From a newbie perspective they're generally going to trust those higher leveled accounts.
It is the fact. Honestly, I fall into that trap too when I was noob.
It is true that newbies will sure admire Senior Members and above (as I was), because their badges, their ranks, their rights to wear signature, avatars.
Furthermore, some scam projects build their bigger and clever traps by sending bunches of sMerits to OPs of scam projects. Newbies are easily to think projects that have OPs received bunches of merits from other high-ranked users are really potential projects.
A project with 100 merits from 10 Legendary members. Damn it, at first glance, they are likely good projects.
Then, they move next to bounty thread that managed by another Legendary account. What a perfect trap!
This then begs the question, should we tag those that are advertising these projects?
Participants should not be tagged, if those scam projects and OPs have not yet get negative trusts and Active Flags from DT members.
I do agree that the moderation of the current signature campaigns from the signature managers point of view is an issue. However, I feel combining copper membership, and the required to pay the forum a yearly amount or something to be able to post their thread would prevent most issues. Although, not all startup projects are going to have the funds necessary for this, and they might well be decent projects.
I think if there are required fees to run signature campaigns. It should be bi-weekly or monthly-fees.
Fees should be determined based on companies plan to hire how many participants, and how many maximum posts their participants might make and get paid per week/ per month.
If one company plan to run a campaigns with 100 participants, and maximum posts per week are 600; fees should be different from campaigns that ask their 100 participants make only 250 posts per week.
I knew a project that run by one person, run their campaign here with a few cents for participants, but they ran it seriously.
Microlancer.io