Was going to release today but realized a way people could exploit the automated payout system through deleting posts & reposting. It's a quick fix we'll have sorted ASAP.
i wonder what Stunna's ASAP means.. xD
As doggieTattoo already mentioned, it should be fairly simple to patch this "exploit" by simply counting the posts at the end of the sig period.
Deleted posts don't add to the post count, so they wouldn't be counted. It wouldn't have to be manual either. Something like this could easily be done via a script. Heck, I could probably write it myself in a single day.
Actually it is possible (though not common) for deleted posts to add to post counts, a bug I found a while back. Recalculating forum stats will fix it, that's not done regularly though, just whenever I think about it.
I don't think that posting and then deleting posts is technically against forum rules, however it is certainly a waist of forum resources and doing so in any kind of massive scale would be in some way punished (aka banned), correct?
I would also think that if you were to monitor the number of pages worth of posts a user has this would be easy to detect from a non-moderator point of view. For example a script could check to see that UID 41911 (aka BadBear) has 162 pages of posts as of 12 Jan 2015, then if their post count went up by 100 posts in the following week then they should have exactly 167 pages of posts. If they do have as many pages then payment could be made automatically, if they do not then it would be an "exception" where posts could be counted manually
It's impossible for a user to cause this bug on their own, that would be a waste of time.