Before January 2018, actmyname and I started tagging shitposters around the time both of us got added to DT.  This created a firestorm in Meta, since having red trust from a DT member disqualifies a lot of campaign participants.  I've since admitted that it was a bad use of the trust system, but you have to understand that the situation was out of control and nobody had any tools to combat shitposters. 

Theymos did not approve of our actions and "requested" that all those feedbacks be removed or else I'd get removed from DT.  That message was relayed through my DT1 sponsor at the time.  Then the merit system was created (or it could have been before; I can't recall exactly), which was a huge relief to me, because I was spending a considerable amount of time seeking out the worst posters and giving them negative trust.  After the merit system was put into place there was no need for negging spammers/shitposters.

That probably had nothing to do with preventing sig campaigns from being erased, but my actions along with actmyname's at least lit a fire under some people's asses and made people realize that something had to be done, that the quality of the forum was becoming unbearable.

Hell yes it was a good step.  It's one of the best improvements I've ever seen here, and I'm very grateful to Theymos for coming up with something so clever.  And while there are still tons of shitposters, I've definitely seen a lot of improvement in a lot of members' post quality as a result.  If you have some incentive to rank up in the form of earning more money in a campaign and the only way you can do it is to improve your post quality, you know damn well a lot of members are going to step up and try harder.  And they have.