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.
Maybe the average of the users (from past24h) total earned merit.?
If thousands of newbies start spamming" good project", the average user merit will go down, reducing the score.
Those Airdrops with proof of authentication could disappear, as they will reduce score. Or maybe create an especific session for them, if you believe they are useful for the forum...
I have noticed also that usually when a project is better than the others, its announcement is usually highly merited. Community support usually rewards merit to the project. This could also be considered in the score, however it would probably lead to merit selling...
Probably every method will be abused. But you can make it so expensive that few people will abuse it.