What are everyone's ideas for improving post quality?
I have mostly ruled out:
- Requiring payment to wear sig ads.
How about instead of requiring a payment for all signatures, you only require a payment for Member/Full time member and above. That way people may still have their basic signatures for what ever they want, but to have a more advanced and flashy signature they would have to pay. This could also be incorporated into the lesser donation ranks that have been discussed before.
- Banning account sales.
Would you be able to explain why it is exactly you are against this? This policy alone encourages hackers, scammers and farming. I imagine a lot of accounts have been compromised for the sole purpose to sell on. Banning this, at least would make it more difficult and less popular. Yeah you would still have them selling on external sites but, it may reduce the amount of accounts being compromised/sold. Unless you are keeping tabs on the accounts being sold then them moving to external site to conduct their business won't have much of an impact. I haven't always been against account sales, but it's very clear that it's a problem these days as a few years ago it was just to avoid newbie jail, but now it's mainly for entering signature campaigns and spamming or scamming users. Which I think needs to be actively fought against.
1. To attain ranks above Member, you'd have to earn some number of merit points. Merit points would be awarded in a monthly vote on best posts of the previous month, with various measures (TBD) to prevent gaming of the vote. Winning merit points might also come with a BTC prize.
I'm not totally against this idea, because you haven't expanded enough upon it. But, In my head I don't believe this is going to work as well as you think. I imagine the same people all the time would get the votes, as well as not constructive or well thought out responses but, a lot of people who offer their services would likely get voted on. Which I believe the trust system is for, but people would receive votes just for their service or goods they are offering. Like hilariousandco mentioned, this would also cause spam by people asking "why aren't I yet?". Would you elaborate on the measures to prevent gaming of the vote?
2. Create or designate some sections as "serious discussion" sections, with no signatures. In those sections or maybe in different ones, also have poster restrictions such as Member rank or above only. And/or allow topic-creators to set these restrictions on their topics, similar to selfmod topics.
This has been discussed multiple times and the majority of users actually support this idea. Even if this isn't the answer to spam in other sections, this should be introduced anyway. Sections which don't count activity, posts and doesn't show a persons trust. So that users can at least have a genuine discussion without having to filter the spam out.
it would be best to allow a single account for each person only (I know it will be hard with the use of similar VPN's and etc... but there are other forums that actually identify each users regardless of them using similar VPN's and etc...). Not sure how hard that is to get implemented, but I think it will be worth the hassle. Also certain users can have their accounts reviewed (by mods) and if their behavior fits within the forum rules, they could create other accounts (for the right reason and not for joining in other signature campaigns), something like only a single account (per person) is allowed to have a paid signature.
Mods have mentioned that they have a huge workload right now, and having to whitelist members manually for alternate accounts is just going to add more work, as everyone and their mother who has alt accounts now will be requesting and they would have to look at each case individually. I'm not against someone having alternative accounts, for example a few people have a business account, and then a personal account because they don't their personal opinions to be mixed in with their business which I think should be allowed. A lot of gambling websites do this.
2) Newbies having to get their threads/posts moderated before they are visible. It increases the work of mods but it can prevent them from spamming to some extent.
All this really does is prevent the spam reaching the public, but the mods still have to deal with the spam. Maybe, that's partly dealing with the issue. But, is isn't just the newbies contributing to the spam. It's all types of ranks that spam. Especially in the alternative coin section.
On a unrelated note, I see that "technical support" has been renamed "Bitcoin technical support" due to the amount of off topic posts it got there.