It's obvious what will happen
- spammers will create new topics and abandon them when the quota is near
- they will flock to other topics that are building slowly and start spamming stupid things about sports they don't even know how are played
The 1000 barrier is also way too high for some and for some other sports or competitions it might be too low.
Unfortunately, the only ones that can do something about it are mods and more importantly campaign managers, but the second ones don't seem to care that much.
Solving the spam is not partially. I suggest that there should be a minimum level to show the signature in all forums, such as 1 merit per month or 20 per month in some spam boards, if you do not get those merits, the signature will disappear.
Sounds nice but I'm pretty sure in reality a lot of them will manage to get enough either directly or by trading it.
Even the red-tagged 1xbit spammers are getting 1 or 2 merits, so for the more advanced spammers capable of writing 5 not 2 lines of text 1 merit will be reachable. Also, I don't think the WO members will be happy with that, that topic will be flooded with merit begging.
I'm not misleading anyone but most mega thread contains a lot of spam, compared to smaller ones.
If you lock those megathreads, where do you think those spammers will write? Do you think that they would stop posting or suddenly increase their post quality because of that measures? Of course not, they would just share their nonsense in other threads so I don't really see how what's proposed in your first post would help the forum.
Don't lock, only disable signature from the 1000th pages onwards. It would filter signature spammers from posting shit.
I think that the battle for the whole board is lost and there is absolutely no possible way to control it, so it would be better to simply keep your own topics clean by having them moderated. After all, if we think this from the user perspective, they could spam all the s** they want in mega threads while real gamblers who make real posts will stay in those self-moderated ones where they can actually communicate.
But out of pure curiosity, what would a bumping rule do to that board?
It's a bit hard to grasp all the impact but if topics with shitposter are not getting bumped by low-merit spammers while self-moderated topics with users with higher activity are being kept on the front page, wouldn't that cause less exposure to mega threads and finally make managers realize they are paying for bottom page zero views posts?
I know there are flaws here also but at least the code is already done and it takes just a minute to include the board.