What I propose is that everyone gets to suggest improvements to the forum. Please make them in this thread and I will add them to the list. After a couple of weeks or so I will compile them all into a new thread and let users vote for which ones they think are a good idea and I will gradually arrange them in order of votes so the most popular ones will be pushed to the top. Hopefully theymos can use it as a sort of 'to do' checklist, but at least he can see what is popular amongst the community. Please keep your suggestions as concise as possible and try to stick to one or two sentences if you can. Here are the various suggestions I've made in the past (in no particular order):
A newbie welcome message or link to a welcome thread upon sign-up explaining the basic rules and links to everything they need to know including the full forum rules, helpful guides and FAQs etc. No excuses for not knowing the rules then.
A publicly displayed 'banned' rank under a person's username for permabanned accounts (people are wasting both theirs and staffs time reporting already banned users and bots).
Implementing a redirect notice/landing page for when users click an external link urging them to double check the url for phishing and possibly warning them of the dangers of buying things from autobuy links and that they should likely use a trusted escrow etc).
Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted).
Remove signatures completely from lower ranks (at least Juniors). Purchasing a Copper Membership (or higher) could still get you one.
More donator ranks such as Silver and Gold Member that come with additional perks such as avatars and Full/Hero member-sized signatures etc (which will severely curb account farming and sales). You could also even have an expensive premium 'Platinum' rank (bling bling) that comes with further benefits (for example: image banner in signature, animated gif avatar, custom title, ability to change username etc).
Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).
Dedicated sub board mods for most boards that don't have any mods or non-global mods already assigned (Bitcoin Discussion, Beginners & Help, Off Topic etc).
Posts from lower ranked accounts don't bump ICO threads to the top (which would then render paid bump spam useless).
More patrollers/mods who just handle sig spam or farmers.
Restoring the memberlist search and stats (very useful for finding huge farming abuses).
Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.
A 'bump button' for the marketplace that only allows you to bump your thread once every 24 hours. Manually bumping by posting will then be disallowed. As mentioned above, posts by lower ranked accounts could not be able to bump threads thus curbing potential abuse.
Two report buttons/queues: one for sig spam and low quality posts and one everything else that is more urgent (hundreds of reports on spam posts are currently burying more important reports).
A report queue for reported messages. Currently every global and admin are spammed by any reported message and half of the time when you go to handle it it has already been handled, thus wasting everybody's time.
A sub board for highly merited users to encourage constructive topics only by users who have proven their worth here over time (or make the Ivory Tower merit requirement much higher [OMG ITS LIKE SOVIET RUSSIA GULAG]).
A new member rank after Legendary as it is becoming far too common now and will only become more so as time passes. I would suggest fixing Legendary at 960 activity and the new rank is double that at 1920. You could also make the merit requirement very high for this rank so it's only for the crème de la crème of users [OMG NAZI RANK ITS LIKE THE RICH KEEP GETTING RICHER].
Additional perks for Legendary accounts or a higher rank if added (for example: custom title, image banner in signature, clickable link in personal text, access to exclusive sub board etc).
Charging ICOs a fee to make their ANN here. You could even get rid of the ANN board completely and give them their own sub once they've paid the fee. If there's no Ann board then there will probably be no paid bumping because it will be useless, but let them spam away in their own slum and squalor.
More admins or demi-admins added to help with account recoveries and other admin duties.
A captcha added to a user's first post or two/three etc to curb bot usage (purchasing a Copper Membership could remove these).
A captcha added to deleting a post.
Require email verification for new accounts.
Require email verification first before passwords/emails are changed.
A Beginners and Help board for the Alt Coin section (the bitcoin one is mostly swamped with alt coin and bounty-related issues).
A dedicated Marketplace for the Alt Coin board that would be used for currency sales/exchanges and advertising/requesting services etc (the current one has no description and is being used as catch all for anything and everyting and not what it was intended for).
Add badges as a reward for high reporters and/or merited users (some perks would also be nice). Maybe we could have a 'most merited' user of the month badge. Prizes or awards could be given at the end of the month/year for the biggest rats/grasses/ass-kissers merited users or reporters.
More options for self-moderated threads (being able to limit participation to certain ranks ie no Newbies or Juniors etc or banning certain users from being able to post in your thread at all to stop trolls and personal attacks etc).
Requiring manually whitelisting of all new accounts before they can post. All new users will essentially be shadowbanned until they've been verified by a mod. This will eliminate 99% of bots and spammers before they even start. Spam threads can be trashed on sight before they even become spam megathreads.
Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.
Press board locked/archived as it's served its purpose and now is mostly just used to get away with legalised copy and pasting or blog spam, or:
B) Sticky some guidelines that only notable bitcoin Press hits are allowed from non-bitcoin related websites (IE articles from cointelegraph and cryptocrapnewsdaily.net aren't allowed).
Some local boards have Press and Off topic subs. They should be removed as they're hotbeds for account farmers/spammers and are not necessary here.
Certain sub boards shouldn't count to post count or activity (Bounties, Games & Rounds and possibly Off Topic).
Disallowing lower ranks from posting in Off Topic (this is bitcoin forum, why would they head to that board straight away other than to easily farm their accounts (alternatively, posts not counting towards postcount or activity there would also work).
If a post is removed then so is any merit awarded (I think some users are deleting posts to hide evidence of abuse).
Awarding merit doesn't take you to a new page. Clicking the merit button multiple times could pump up the merit one by one. This would make awarding merit much swifter and less annoying.
More advertisement slots. This forum is badly under-monetised in my opinion and we likely lose hundreds of thousands in lost revenue to signatures and lack of ad slots and visibility. Many people don't even seem to know we have adverts or assume they're just another sig ad. What I've suggested before is that there are a few 'premium slots' that are displayed at the top of certain sub boards like Bitcoin Discussion, Gambling, Services etc. Companies would pay a lot for these as you could target your audience and you could run them for a month or even longer for a fixed price rather than having to bother running auctions every week.
Warnings in red displayed to lower ranked users when they go to post alerting them to the most commonly ignored/broken rules. They should be specific to the sub board that they are going to post in as well. Ie Press: Alt Coin articles do not belong here. Alt coin Anns: Please don't post generic posts like "good project" "watching", "looks promising", "waiting for the airdrop", "any bounties?" etc as they are not permitted. Maybe in the Marketplace we can have a warning to Only bump once per day and remove old bumps etc. Bitcoin Discussion: Do not post topics on the value of bitcoin - they belong in Speculation etc. A lot of people break the rules because they're just not aware of them so they would then have no excuses.
KYC for all new users. Just kidding.
Lamborghinis for all staff as a Christmas bonus (will also accept an Audi R8). Not kidding.