I AM GONNA NEED
ABOUT TREE FIDDYAlready made that joke

Personally, about tree fiddy.
No one will risk their hero account if they ranked up from newbie with the current merit system involved because I know that it is not an easy job and it can be considered as life achievement as well so they won't risk even for $1000 I guess.
Sometimes they don't know about it or don't care. Some will just take whatever they get, especially since decent sig campaings are both rare and hard to get onto.
Hero & Legendary accounts that were hero & legendary before the merit update shouldn't be regarded as something unique.
Right--and I also don't even recognize most of those members, and I don't think they're among the most trusted in the community despite their ranks (I have not checked any of their trust pages, though).
bryant.colman usually only pops up when there's a lucrative sig camp. I think that account may have changed hands as well though it's hard to say whether it just goes inactive when he can't monetise it.
I know theymos is trying to avoid this, but he seems to be open to the idea of potentially disallowing signature campaigns, and lets be honest it would improve the forums signal to noise ratio by a whole lot, although we would be removing a rather interesting eco system which has developed because of it. Unfortunately, whenever you have something good, it is always abused by the masses until it eventually ends up being tossed out.
We have to agree that the majority of traffic comes here for signature campaigns and other money earning services. The moment signature campaigns are stopped, the traffic will look for alternatives and this will give rise to another forum where signature campaigns will be accepted. Due to the lack of traffic, services will gradually move to an alternative as well. Yes, we would not have spams but it will affect the forum's ad revenue as well.
I'm not so sure. You could argue that it might increase it. Most businesses here don't advertise via the ad slots because it's more effective to pay users. It might even be cheaper in some instances. Also, theymos doesn't seem to care that much about forum income so traffic probably isn't that much of a concern either. At least if sig campaigns were banned then the quality of discussion would go up exponentially. Though as I've always said, quality discussion and sig campaigns can coexist with better management on their behalf. Imagine if every campaign was run like Darkstar's. We would then have no problem with spam and they would actually help improve the quality of content.