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

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'm all for finding a solution, and this will stop a majority of the people, it will likely stop the account sellers to a degree, but I think the people buying accounts for signature campaigns will still likely be willing to pay a fee, as they are theoretically doing that now by purchasing accounts, but instead of purchasing the accounts they'll just level them up themselves.

I do think this will limit the much lazier people and the people who aren't willing to invest anything and simply make dozens of accounts just to level them up and this should reduce the amount of accounts which are being sold. Having said that though I would be willing to support this as it would reduce the amount and could potentially make the moderation easier as well as general viewing more pleasant. It's certainly going to do more good than the current system.