If we restrict newbies and jr. members to wear signatures, the forum will lose a lot of traffic, which could downgrade it's rank e.g. in a google search, so there's no 100% good solution, unfortunately...
Hi mate, I dont know on what forum you have been recently but newbies and jr members signatures have been disabled since january and the forum hasnt lost a lot of traffic. They can buy a copper membership but most of them dont do.
I have to say though, that Ive always defended that too drastic measures would affect the traffic, this is not a matter of opinion but of empirical evidence.
We are talking about going further, maybe disabling signatures until full member would be a big step but if they were disabled until member status Im sure a lot of traffic wouldnt be lost.
You know what, I didn't even realise Juniors couldn't have a clickable signature since then. I swear I've still seen Juniors with them. I'm a strong proponent of removing signatures completely from lower ranks and also requiring at least one merit to become a Junior, but I don't think it would effect traffic one bit. People come here en mass to join signatures and bounties and something tells me they're not going to give up just because they can't have a signature straight away or need to earn one merit. People have to put in the time and effort to rise through the ranks anyway and you can only do this with activity and merit so users have to wait and stick with it in order to get anywhere, but this is how it should be to stop the colossal amount of abuse that is going on and I don't think people should be able to come here and join a signature campaign straight away, especially if they're a shitposter with little to no interest or knowledge of bitcoin.