Their IP only really gets banned from creating new accounts on that connection. Their 2/5/100 other accounts they were already farming on that connection will still be fine and free to post especially when there's no admins looking into ban evasion or alts. People can also just go to their local McDonalds/Starbucks/whatever to create new ones or just use a proxy anyway. I think limiting one account to be created per IP should be considered and would cut down on a lot of the abuse as there's only so many connections/proxies in the world and fresh/clean ones would quickly become increasingly difficult to find. Alternatively, as already mentioned (and expanded on below) paying for the signature would help with this issue considerably.
But again, it all comes down to theymos right? If he doesn't even want to think about banning signatures for shit posters, then how is it going to help?
Yes, it's all down to theymos now but I don't think he's unmovable on his stance. Besides, he has proposed several things previously such as blacklisting signatures from problem campaigns and spammers and also requiring merit points to have a signature. He's also open to suggestions from other users but he just needs to actually take action and commit to these things otherwise we're going to be in the same exact place years from now. Things like punishing campaign managers, removing certain boards from activity/post count and disallowing certain ranks from posting in other boards are all relatively easy to implement. Allowing users to buy certain ranks alongside being able to rank up naturally shouldn't be an issue either especially now that we have the Copper Membership so there's no reason why we can't have Silver and Gold ones.
$10-$50 would be too cheap to be effective. I think it would have to be $100+. It won't stop people having multiple accounts completely but it will significantly reduce abuse and the number they can have because nobody is going to pay $100 for their 100 alt accounts. People currently farm hundreds of accounts because it's free and relatively easy to do so right now and that's part of the problem. If signatures are removed from ranks and people have to pay for them then account farming would stop pretty much instantly. Most people would then only have one or two accounts and just concentrate on those one or two rather than looking to abuse campaigns en mass with multiple ones because it's just not worthwhile or feasible, but as long as people can create an unlimited amount of accounts for free then they will continue to do so.
Agreed to some point, people would be hesitant to pay 100$ for one account, that too in a forum. I just realized one more thing, since a lot of shit posters are from India, not all of them but most. Paying a 100$ would be a little too much, here's the math:-
1$=63 rupees or so. 100$=~6300 rupees. I have heard a lot of people get food for around 30-40 rupees per meal, a lot of Asians would be grieve-struck, if they have to pay a 100$ for such. Also will legitimate users would also have to pay for this?
But this is partly the point. It would price a lot of people out of buying a signature and it's those sort of people who are mostly causing the problems in the first place. I don't think $100 dollars is that out of reach to someone who has access to a phone/pc and the internet either and if they want to earn from here then they will have to beg borrow and steal to try get that money in whatever way they can and if posting here is your only way out of poverty or to earn money then I'm sure they'll be able to achieve that amount if they put their mind to it. People would probably value their accounts here much more if they have invested money in it but they certainly don't value them when it's free to create dozens or hundreds of accounts because people get lazy and greedy and exploit it any which way they can and that's something that has to change.