I suggest that you use the CFNP tag in the thread title if you want to mark the campaign as closed.  It stands for Closed For New Participants and this is what most of the other campaigns do.  You had a great start with the (OPEN) tag, just use CLOSED or CFNP instead.

If you are looking for quality over spam and to avoid the multiple account abuse, I suggest you either have very strict qualification conditions for the Member rank.  Seems like a rank that is easy to abuse using alts.

Also, I suggest adding to the original post a default campaign application format for easier management.  Some of us even posted earned merits in the last X days or other information you may not actually need.  A default format may be handy.

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Regards,
PrivacyG