Now: one of the biggest problem I see, is the fact that - to receive a merit - you need not only to write a good post, but also to have the luck that it will be read by someone that appreciates it and has merit to give.
This is very difficult, due to the enormous number of posts and threads: even with the new system, lot of people still write a big number of useless post just to respect the commitments with the bounty, and your "wonderful" post will be lost between them.
Well, I see that there is a zone of the forum, the "Serious discussion" where there is no signature and your posts don't count for the campaign.
Optimally, the "Serious Discussion" section should only be needed in the phase until the spam has decreased significantly. But until that happens, it's a nice "workaround".
But the goal must be to clean the whole forum from spam. I guess some weeks will be needed for that, because there are still many spammers enrolled in bounty campaigns.
I have two ideas how this process can be accelerated:
1. Signature campaign managers could be "approved" (or instead, "disapproved") manually by staff.
There are very good, strict, quality-loving managers and other ones that really don't care at all about post quality (mostly in the altcoin section). There could also be a lighter, "opt-out" model: the spam-tolerating managers could be given a warning and then be banned if they continue to manage signature campaigns without improving the control over participant's posts. With the merit system, their "alt accounts" won't rank up that fast - so they would be incentived to really improve their spam control.
2. Feature to ignore entire threads. There are lots of "spam megathreads" still, and other smaller threads that are pure advertising or nonsense, above all in forums like "Bitcoin Discussion", "Speculation" or (above all) "Altcoin Discussion". If this feature is enabled, I could visit "Bitcoin Discussion", for example, and ignore all these megathreads, It would be much easier for me to find posts that deserve some merit, and I would also be more likely to visit that forum again and contribute something.
There is a SMF module
for that purpose, but I have read that it leads to performance problems on big forums. Maybe there is another alternative.