Now that I know hillarious and co can reinstate banned people we could probably do something like this simple and fast solution
This is not simple and fast at all. You're basically letting plagiarists to buy their banned accounts back from the forum for 0.5 BTC and with strings attached (signature not permitted).
First of all, there is no "customer base" for that. Too expensive and too restrictive for shitposters, who can buy another sig-capable account for far less. Not needed for mistakenly banned users who should win their appeals. This appears to be targeted to the elusive "only plagiarized 1 post out of 1000" demographic, of which I've seen perhaps 1 or 2 examples.
Second, even if the "only plagiarized 1 post out of 1000" is an actual problem that we want to solve and we lower the cost to an affordable level, this is a horrible way of doing it. Somebody needs to be the escrow, somebody needs to watch the signatures, somebody needs to enforce the zero-tolerance policy for each previously banned account. It doesn't scale. Yahoo's solution makes far more sense. Don't copy-paste, not even 1 in 1000.
If theymos could implement an actual enforceable signature ban then I'd be ok with it for certain cases. Better yet, make it a max(500, merit_score) merit penalty and if the score is negative after that - permaban stays. That way it can only be used by high-rank accounts and would automatically kill the signature.
I don't see that happening anytime soon though so why don't we focus on solving the shitposting problem rather than helping shitposters.
Except perhaps pure crazy copy and paste pure ico sig spammers
And who decides all those exceptions?
That is quite true especially who decides who are the crazy copy and paste shit posters.I guess they would not bother to appeal anyway so perhaps no need to add that exception. If they can buy other accounts for cheaper they will do that anyway.
I agree this only really targets people who really are not spammer and are real enthusiasts who have made a mistake in a 1000 and want to retain their accounts here and their ID here. I don't really care that much about others that dont fit into that bracket anyway. Non enthusiasts can just go spam other forums.
However to the scaling...
1. Do we think there will be that many that apply for this ?
2. The work you do now would be paid in theory ( i know you don't care about that) but others might start helping with financial incentive. This also provides incentive to the mods to escrow and the reporters to keep any eye out for sig ban evaders. I think if anything you will get more people looking for bad guys and watching they stay in line if they are paid from the fees.
3. after the get to go back to normal then they will just get caught again and their usernames will be on the thread prior so go to insta perm ban.