Now that we have a 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members, I suggest to extend this to anyone who wants to post on the Altcoin board. My original post including Veleor's suggestion to post it here:
The main idea isn't to stop real users, and I do realize they'll be "collateral damage", but this may be the only way to stop paid bumping bots. Copper Members shouldn't be restricted either. This will give the spammers something to lose. Currently, a spammer can create 6000 accounts in a day, which is enough to bump many threads for a very long time (and earn a lot of money from it).
Just 1 Merit (or 0.00208333BTC for Copper Membership) per account can still be abused, but not at this magnitude.