I would like to hear of a better solution to the evil score problem - how else do you ban mass waves of rule-breakers when they sign up?
Thing is, those that are creating accounts en masse always find a way to circumvent that evil fee thing and keep on creating the accounts either via VPN or something else, while legit users most likely won't bother with that when they get the message that their IP is banned due something they didn't do. They might even think that this is some kind of scam and won't come back ever again. Especially now when there are so many different platforms and forums are not as popular as they used to be so they have choices.
I would actually argue that the evil score system is incredibly generous as users can pay for those specific accounts to be unblocked and for the evil to be removed - typical permabans for IPs aren't usually that friendly.
I wonder how many users that had no previous contact with bitcoin, never bought or sell any would do that for the first time just to get an access to this forum. By the way, how much is that evil fee at the moment?