To be honest, what you just said is a load of rubbish. At the time it was considered to ban signature campaigns or disable signatures but to stop the spam problem in the forum where you had a lot of people writing rubbish to rank up and earn money.

As theymos is smarter than that, he came up with the idea of the merit system, which reduced the spam problem a lot because before it was introduced people would rank up simply by seniority, and many would just do it by writing rubbish one-liners in mega-threads and stuff like that. I was on the forum during the changeover, when the merit system was introduced, so I could see what happened.

What you call genuineness I'll explain it to you: if theymos ends with the signature campaigns today, tomorrow traffic would be reduced so much that you wouldn't even recognise the forum. I've seen other forums die but for other reasons, and that's when you go there and you think about replying to a thread but you see that in most of them the last reply was a few days or even weeks ago.

On the other hand that would be giving away traffic to other forums, where the genuineness you are talking about would go, and if this forum is mainly to preserve Satoshi's writings I think it is better if it remains an active forum than if it looks like a tomb or a desert.