Quote from: DdmrDdmr on September 25, 2018, 05:53:42 PM

Quote from: stompix on September 25, 2018, 05:23:37 PM

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Which goes to prove that the 1 merit rule is up to some extent easy to bypass by farmers, but even so, many will not be able to even achieve it (not enough merits to cover all the Alts from the father account). A step-up in the criteria could, at a later stage, be obviously requiring more merit but from x distinct people (i.e. 5 merits from 5 different people). Not impassable, but certainly tougher to overcome. Anyway, weve just changed the rule, so that is going to stay for a while. At best, people can work on the diverse lists for suspicious clear cases, and farmers know that they are being watched

It's sadly too easy to bypass especially for those who are abusing it the most. The biggest abusers of the forum aren't just going to give up because of this requirement, but we're already seeing how they're dishing merit between alts their dozens of alts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037225.msg46135292#msg46135292

That's why I think it should be more than one. One is fine for moving from Newbie to Junior but it shouldn't get you a signature. Remove signatures from Juniors and then you have to get ten Merit and become a Member to get one. Getting ten merit is ten times more difficult and costly and also much easier to spot abuse. Anyone can get one merit just for bothering to make one decent post that they could have copied from anywhere. Ten merit is much harder to get and that would at least be some sort of competency test for whether you should be allowed to earn via signatures here (and not everyone should be).