There's a strong incentive to spam replies to topics in altcoin announcements and a few other sections because there's a lot of activity and competition for eyeballs there. This spam should just be deleted, but I'd also like to remove the incentive by changing the default ordering of topics in those sections from "last post" to something new. (You'll still be able to click/bookmark something to get the old ordering.)

What are your ideas for new ordering methods? My current idea is:
 1. For each topic, get a list of the distinct users who posted there in the last 24 hours.
 2. Give the topic a score equal to the sum of each such user's total earned merit.
 3. Sort by topic score descending, and secondarily by the usual last post time.

With that, you still have topics with recent conversation listed first, but it requires more resources to manipulate, at least, and newbies have no influence. Maybe it'd give certain users overwhelming influence, though.

I want to think about it quite a bit more, so I probably won't do it soon.