Well obviously I can't put an exact figure on the percentage of people that would leave and can only guesstimate but just look at how many people have signatures on the forum and especially in all those shit threads. Do you think they would be there if they weren't getting paid to post? Ban campaigns and you remove their incentive for posting and the people who are only posting to get paid would leave as they likely have no reason to waste time here so in that respect it would be a good thing. Bad for traffic to the site but certainly good for content. With that being said, there's also probably a lot of 'great' posters that would probably eventually leave too or the amount of time they spend here would decrease significantly over time. I'm all for trying to improve the post quality and discussions but at the same time a dead forum would also be pretty boring. It's just gonna be be a shame to all the quality posters though who just appreciate being able to get a little bitcoin for something they would do anyway and unfortunately it's gonna be the shitters that spoil it for everyone else.
If someone leaves the forum because they're not getting paid... I can't make myself feel any regret about that. Death by drowning in cow manure isn't any more appealing than death by lack of traffic, IF that's really an issue - not convinced about that. Traffic created by shitposters doesn't sound like something worth having.
Well you could certainly make that argument but if you think about the forum as a business a customer (user) is still a customer and traffic is still traffic. Hits/traffic are vital to websites and the revenue they receive and I would guess that signature campaigns account for half of the new sign ups here so it's a big factor in the continued growth of the forum. I guess you could compare it to someone owning a business such as a bar or a nightclub and you're getting a lot of rowdy undesirables in. They might be annoying and piss all over the toilets and spill beer everywhere but they're still spending (or bringing in) money there at the end of the day. There is also the point about signature campaigns contributing to the bitcoin economy and helping new users get introduced to it and getting their hands on their first coins. Many people are apprehensive or don't have the money to gamble on what is a risky venture and at least people can get to try out bitcoin this way and all for free. It's just a shame these idiots don't appreciate the gift they've been given because they'll sure as hell miss their cash cow once it's gone and regret their behaviour.
Perhaps there is a compromise, e.g. kill the fancy signatures for anybody below legendary, or some more sophisticated criteria to weed out shitposters.
I have thought about and have suggested that we consider removing signatures from some of the lower ranks before. If we encourage/force campaign managers to only accept quality posters shitposters would have no where to go unless they significantly improved the quality of their posts. Things can be done but there definitely needs to be some repercussions for people running lazy campaigns.