Agreed. Patrol could be a great resource, both for reporting spam and for finding good newbies to award merit. As it currently stands it is next to useless, as of the 200 newbie posts which are displayed, you are lucky if 10 of them aren't some altcoin bounty trash or posts from local boards. No one is going to bother wading through all that noise.

As I mentioned above, I'm not sure just how many newbie posts the forum stores to populate the patrol list from, but it's not a lot. For example, if you go to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;boards=1;patrol right now, you only see two posts. I'm not overly familiar with SMF, so I don't know how easy it would be to increase the number of stored posts so you can get at least a few dozen newbie posts per board, but that would be great if it could be implemented. The other option which occurred to me was to have patrol not show boards which you have on ignore. This already happens for "recent" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent), so I assume it would be possible to implement the same for patrol.