Why aren't you making the case that we remove signatures from Bitcoin Discussion since that's the sub board with the most spam and has been ruined the most? Removing signatures from there would surely resolve that?
I have made
post about that for disable signature below member rank all over forum. To be honest , removing signature will not resolve spam but it will reduce. Whatever you make rules there will be few rules breaker. Never mind how strong your rules. But remove signature no one will make unnecessary post.
Removing signatures will stop signature spam, which is probably 99% of the spam here. I wouldn't be against removing signatures, but I don't think it's going to happen. If we were going to remove signatures though then I don't think we should do it for everyone as that's unfair to those who have actually contributed something here and it's the spammers who will leave as soon as that happens and will have then ruined it for everyone else. Remove signatures from everyone and require a ridiculous amount of
earned merit before you can get one. That seems more fair. You could also let people purchase more donator ranks in addition which get you the benefits of signatures, but I would only be for that if they were sufficiently expensive, so either earn your merit or cough up for a signature. Or go away. Either way you can still post as normal so nobody is effected from that.
But I very much doubt that the increase in the distribution of merit in the beginners sub will have a positive effect on reducing the amount of spam.
I agree with that, and some of your subsrquent comments. However, there are two issues here. One is the reduction of spam, and this seems to be the main focus for everybody. Of course this needs to be controlled, but it may not be the major factor that will restrict the growth of the forum. I think the encouragement and development of new members is far more important, and I have noticed that a few of the spammers seem to have moved away from the darkside, and be joining the bright future for Bitcoin.
If we can start some decent discussions, and make them self-moderated to chuck out the spammers and low value posters, then perhaps we can breathe a bit of life into a couple of the heavily polluted boards.
You simply need to clamp down on the people who are paying people to spam as that's the cause of the issue. If a user signs up here and spams then they get a ban. If these people who keep getting banned are on the same campaign then that campaign should get the ban. Once ICOs start getting banned from activities here they'll soon change their ways because this forum is too valuable to them. They get away with it at the moment because there's no repercussions for them doing a lousy job so they're not magically going to change because that's far too much work for them that they just don't need to do right now.