I've only known this forum when I accidentally went to an event while looking for investments about new technologies. The event host raised a question, how did they know about cryptocurrecies, one guy answered this forum. The host bluntly said; do not click anything below every posts you see on that forum or you will be a victim of scam ICOs, scammers came that forum.
If this merit system is all about signature bounties, would you trust an ICO based on someones post, or his rank?
One of the things that is often missed about advertising is that value of name recognition. I remember reading a study on why people pay 10x the price for branded painkillers for a headache rather than buying the generic one that is chemically identical. You can tell people not to trust or click on the signature adverts but if you asked most people on this forum to name one mixing service I can a have a good guess which one it would be and that's the one they will most likely end up using. That doesn't really mean anybody trusts it based on whose signature it is in, it's just the familiarity with the name. Advertisers then want to choose the people whose signature get the most exposure.
We all know that this merit system is to prevent people from ranking ups based on their activity on this forum, but will it prevent the scam ICO?
theymos banned ICOs from bidding on the forum banner space auctions for this reason but I don't think he wants to get in the business of censoring what we can advertise in our signature spaces.
Before every high ranking members single out the shit posters, they should have cleaned up the mess on altcoin announcement thread section where you will see low ranking members posting- Great project!, The best platform ever!, I like your idea/ project!, This will surely moon!, posters like this should be removed for they only bumping and piling up a good post.
If more people used the 'Report to moderator' link in the bottom corner of the posts then more of them would get banned. Not that I'm any help there as I have that on my ignore board list.