Nobody is going to pay 0.5btc to get their account back. It'd have to be a reasonable fine relative to what their account is worth. Somewhere between $100-$500 maybe. I possibly wouldn't be against some sort of fine but not sure it going to staff or the forum would be a good idea. People will just whine we're banning people for the money. We could tell them to donate it to charity which at least then some good would come of their behaviour and nobody but a good cause benefits. You could maybe give people two options: You can either have a sig ban indefinitely and earn your signature back by getting sufficient merit (say maybe at least 100) or pay a fine (that goes to charity). As I've mentioned before I'm strongly in favour of more donator ranks that give you a bigger signature and maybe they could get their signature back by purchasing one of them. I think we should also give them the option or earning it back via merit so at least they have two options and if they don't want to pay anything then they can earn their signature back by contributing something worthwhile.
Wouldn't the sensible solution be to NOT COPY AND PASTE?
This. I would personally prefer that users just stop doing the plagiarism then we wouldn't have anything to worry about. I think theymos should probably link to the rules somewhere so new users are made aware of them or even better constantly reminded of them somehow. I think some bright red warnings when they go to submit a post like
DO NOT COPY AND PASTE/PLAGIARISE CONTENT OR POST REF LINKS would also help.
These are all actually very good ideas. There are many ways to tackle this with out losing net positive members to head shots. Carrot and stick to keep people net positive is best. Perhaps 0.5btc is too much although we need to remember those that are within the ratio will get it all back. Those that actually lose it even after sensible consideration are actually quite worthy of some punishment if not total deletion.
The reward money will just go to any person finding extra copy and pastes open to the entire board to be split with original finder and escrow fee for mods. So anyone can claim. But your other ideas sound quite fair too as good alternatives.
If we could arrive on this thread at a few different ideas then set them up as polls all over the board.
1. shit posters will freak and start deleting their own spam
2. they will be very aware we dont tolerate financially motivated copy and paste spam.
so that alone is part of curing the issue too.