Imagine if only Hero or Legendary users were the only people who could advertise here. That would certainly have a drastic effect on the spam and stop all the shitposters just signing up here just to shitpost because they would get nowhere and only the very top contributors would get anywhere. If you hadn't paid your dues here by gaining the required merit over time then you can't earn here. In addition and if that was too extreme, you could allow members to buy the signature with Silver/Gold ranks, but only if they're sufficiently expensive as to stop people from just buying them on their dozens to hundreds of accounts (something in the range of $100-1000 would be ideal). Farmers really would be priced out of the market because it just wouldn't be financially viable to spend so much on each one and most users would be limited to one or a few accounts at most. Nobody would be penalised from posting here in the process as well but if you want to earn here then either earn that right through merit and activity or cough up for a Gold/Silver rank.
The merit system was introduced in order to minimize the amount of spam on the forum. Six months later we continue to face this problem and understand that just merits are not enough to eliminate the issue of shitposting. I like the merit system, I believe that it encourages forum participants to make great efforts and improve their knowledge in the crypto sphere. But we shouldn`t forget that this system is still only in the development stage. Many members of the forum became heroes and legendary before the introduction of the merit system. And therefore, I think it isn`t fair to single out participants only according to rank.
I believe that the merit system should not only maintain the existing system of ranks, but also qualitatively differ from it. After all, we can see that sometimes members of lower ranks receive more merits than heroes or legendary ones. Therefore, I believe that it is necessary to look first at the number of merits and the quality of posts, rather than on rank. In this regard, I fully agree with the fact that if participants want to earn money, they should do it correctly, through merits and activity. But merits are more important to me than activity, because they show how acknowledged and useful are your comments for other forum participants.