During my years at the forum, the only reduction in signature capacity for existing accounts was when theymos
Enhanced newbie restrictions & requirements:
All existing Jr Members who didn't meet the requirement were demoted. Also, newbies can no longer set any signature or personal text.
I'm talking about that kind of people who have not been able to earn a single fucking merit in 5 years should not be entitled to wear clickable signatures by the simple fact of their registration date.
Allow me to quote theymos (again):
The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.
It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.
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The low signal-to-noise is a real issue which seriously annoys me and is often on my mind. But as you mention, fixing it non-destructively is difficult.
If you want solutions, there are solutions. The forum could put a signature ban until people earn 10 merits and in those cases that you are saying, those who returned to the forum would be able to earn 10 merits in no time. They would have their merits and rank intact and their clickable signature right away.
So the shitposters buy 10 Merit with the account they bought, and continue.
If he didn't log in, his signature would be lost forever, and if he did log in, he would have to jump trough the hoops to make at least a couple of posts just to gain some merit to see a privilege he has earned restored.
Sometimes it feels like theymos is years ahead:
When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc.
Maybe Theymos would start thinking at least on slowly decaying the airdropped merit (and related rank), and that's for everybody, no exceptions.
I don't expect old accounts to ever lose their "perks". Reducing "grandfathered" Merit has been suggested many times before. Losing 1 Merit per year would be enough to downgrade many old accounts. Or 1 Merit per 100 Activity, or 100 Posts. But none of this would stop the spammers: they'll just buy/use a higher ranked account and continue shitposting with one rank less. A current Legendary would take
forever to lose enough rank to reduce signature value. Or they'll buy a few Merits somewhere.
The only way to get rid of their spam, is reporting their posts. But to do that, I'd have to actually read it first, and I can't get myself to do that. So I've given up on reporting them, whenever I see a user with that scam-casino's signature, I click
Ignore. On the Gambling board, many topics now have many Ignored users posting in a row. That makes the whole place quite useless.
I would go further. I think the solution lies in removing airdropped merit from everyone. They have had enough time to earn merit.
Allow me to be the first to complain: why should
LoyceBot drop back to Jr. Member?
