Quote from: hilariousetc on November 10, 2017, 09:10:29 PM

Quote from: Gandalf86 on November 10, 2017, 08:31:43 PM

Any ideas for how we can deal with this problem are welcome!

I have the perfect - and probably only - way that we can finally put a stop to this sort of account farming bullshit almost completely: Remove signatures from ranks entirely. What I have suggested is that users who sign up here either have no signature at all or at most a small one like the current Junior to Member one and to get a Senior or Hero-sized signature with colour etc you have to donate to the forum to get it (say something like $50 for Senior and $100 for Hero). This would instantly make accounts almost worthless and thus kills the account farming and hacking market and the money that would have gone to a scummy account farmer or hacker will then go to the forum instead. If we did this we would then have no more people just using bots to copy and paste or shitposting as fast as they can in crappy off topic threads just to rank up and farm their account in the quickest and laziest way possible which leads to the utter degradation of the forum. People also then cannot just sign up to this forum in droves with half a dozen (or in some cases hundreds) of accounts like many Filipino and Indonesians do just to bleed campaigns dry, because if they don't pay the $50-100 fee for a signature the accounts will be largely worthless. I think if we don't remove signatures from ranks somehow this problem will never stop and will only get worse as more and more people purely sign up to this forum just to earn as much money as they can from bounties and campaigns. When you're an impoverished non-English kid from a third world country there's only one thing you can do and that's at best shitpost and at worst copy and paste and we can already see this behaviour becoming more and more prolific as every month passes.

I am all for this too. But if getting access to higher ranks means paying, then we might need to add secondary security on our accounts such as 2FA. Them hackers would most likely target the paid accounts since those will be the most coveted ones so securing them with 2FA is not a bad idea.