theymos, this is a perfect example of the beast you have created by linking signatures with activity. Remove signatures from activity and this nonsense stops immediately. How can we compete against bots doing this? Currently anyone can create an unlimited amount of accounts and when users are using bots like he is to just copy a post and change a few words for synonyms it's often very hard to notice. I've just banned this account but how many others does he have doing the same? It's utterly pointless banning accounts if he's got 200 others that I've missed that will still be botting away. Things need to change. Do me favour and look into this user and just tell me how many alt accounts you can find. There are dozens upon dozens of individuals farming thousands of accounts this way and it's only going to get worse over time. The worst thing about this is once they hit a sufficient rank they can get paid by lazy ICO campaigns for merely copy and pasting and they'll never notice the abuse.
if theymos could implement a script for determining something along the lines of 'merit points' asscoated with general post quality, i wouldn't be against the idea of signatures being linked to those points instead, it would provide an initial incentive for good post quality from the start an account is created, and provide a long term incentive for maintaining a good post quality. if theymos can also implement other factors in, suchas deleted posts for not following forum rules, it'll also push members towards following the general forum rules. maybe even diminishing returns on merit points (or whatever they're to be called) can be used for people with alt accounts, or accounts on the same ip. just some rambling thoughts.
Or just simply make a subscription fee for all the users or just for participation in spesific forum sections like the bounty and signature once. So in order to participate in a bounty or signature campaign the user have to pay some fee to the forum and those money can be ivested in moderators. The high rank members can have lower fees, higher for newbies. It's just an idea. The forum is a grate place for me and I am willing to pay what it takes to make it even better.