What do the people who operate these bounties think of the newbie invasion?
If I had to guess, they probably fool themselves into thinking they're getting the right kind of attention.
An idea I had in this vein was that upon registration you'd have to pick one of two paths:
- "I want to discuss things"
= Banned from all money-making/spam-hotbed sections until Jr Member
- "I want to make money"
= Banned from the more serious sections until Jr Member
= You have to pass a quiz before posting which tries to inform you about basic forum rules, how not to get banned, maybe some basic English knowledge, etc. (Quizzes are pointless to stop dedicated spammers, since an answer key will quickly be compiled, but it may help in cases where clueless people are ending up here.)
I'm of the belief that the more dedicated spammers are the problem, it is no coincidence that LoyceV can pull up a list of 300+ newbies spamming the same phrase in multiple ICO/Bounty threads. This might be a good opportunity to allow the merit system to act as a gatekeeper for the "paths" (or these sections in general, and do away with paths). Consider having a threshold separate from those tied to ranking up, and that would be the criteria for entering the section(s) not allotted by your path.
Alternatively you could change the questions on timed/random intervals, potentially having members submit questions to be added into the next rotation, at least re-formatting the questions in such a way that an answer key would be obsolete or counter-productive.
With only 1% of the forum having received a single merit, I would say this is a rather impressive indicator that those with a merit are the users willing to operate and discuss in good faith (with a margin of error, of course). Allowing merit to be the litmus test for access to the bounties/altcoin/spam-hotbed/money-making sections almost certainly would do significant damage to our spam problem.