Greetings!
So I had two things to say, but since I didn't want to spam the board, I decided to put them both in the same thread.
Here they are.
1 -
Copper Membership Requires some tweaking (Suggested here as well by Vod)After the recent changes/restrictions in lower ranks, people have started to buy Copper Membership in order to be able to wear signature and take part in Bounty/Signature campaigns. Since the user with Copper Membership can wear the signature assigned to him/her, he is not subjected to acquire the rank required to join
some Bounties/Signature Campaigns. Therefore, they simply buy the membership in a few bucks to spam the shit out of the forum and earn way more than what they spent on it.
The basic reason for introducing the Copper Membership was to allow lower ranks to post images and reduce some other restrictions, like the time interval between PMs or such, but the usage of it today is totally abusive. Look at
this user, who
doesn't even know how to reply to a quote properly, but he has bought a Copper Membership and is now a participate of a Bounty Campaign named Apollox (whose manager is also a Newbie with Copper Membership and zero Merits). I, and everyone else as well, I'm sure, would definitely not like to see this happening. That is why I wanted to suggest a little tweaking with it.
Since a Newbie cannot wear a signature after the recent changes, I suggest that a Newbie should not be able to wear it even after buying Copper Membership. A Newbie who buys Copper Membership should only be able to post images and it should remove the other restrictions associated with it, but their signature space should still be restricted for as long as they don't earn a Merit and rank up to Jr. member. This way, they won't be able to buy a Copper Membership and use that as a way of participating in those Bounties/Signature Campaigns again which is what the changes have been implemented to stop.
2 -
Posting restriction for Newbies in "Meta"Every time when there is a change, we see the amount of spam increasing for a few days in almost every section, but mostly in "Meta". There are numerous reasons behind that, and we know them all. But, the recent changes have given everyone a new reasoning to post in "Meta", that is: they think posting in "Meta" would undoubtedly earn them Merits, which is a misconception, but they believe so. This thinking has almost turned "Meta" into a new "Bitcoin Discussion" because of the amount of spam every threads posted here is receiving, and the useless threads that are being made every hour. I know these things mostly calm down after some time, but this wouldn't, because the new changes have demoted all the Jr. members to Newbie, and now they all, plus every other Newbie, require at least one Merit to rank up, and they would keep trying to get it, even in this section.
I think restricting Newbies from posting in "Meta" would reduce this from happening to a large extent. A Newbie should only be able to read everything in "Meta" but should not be allowed to post in here. Once they earn 1 Merit, they would have no such restrictions put on them. If someone says, "This would be injustice to genuine users" then I would simply answer it with: A genuine user should have no problems earning at least one Merit outside "Meta", which would lift the restriction.
In addition, Copper Membership should also lift this restriction, since "Meta" is also used for hacked accounts and stuff. So if a user's account gets hacked, they should simply buy Copper Membership with the account (Since the accounts used for recovery requests are mostly Newbies, and they would not wait to earn a Merit to post their request) they want to request a recovery with, and then post that in "Meta".
I don't think that anyone would not be able to afford buying a $10 (or even $20, or more, if the price of Bitcoin increases) membership in order to recover their precious accounts. And such cases anyways are a rarity, so that should not be a problem.
I would love to know the viewpoints of people on these two issues.
Questions and arguments are welcome too.