Your poll was over 2 years ago. You should lock this one and start a 2025 version to see how things have changed. 
You're right, I could do that, but honestly I find it effective to just berate or shame merit farmers right in the thread itself. Or like the above-instance that persuaded me to reopen this thread, leaving them a neutral tag over the matter seems to be at least somewhat effective.
Also, and somewhat contradictory to my suggestion, I spend a decent number of merits in that thread, although I will seldom give them to new, new-ish accounts, or accounts I suspect are one of many in a farm.
Finally, there are some longtime WOers that I respect that don't have a problem with the whoring. They are unbothered and just choose to ignore them without even putting them on ignore. Mind over matter, or something.
Why not let’s cut the root that cause this situation?
All this account farmer aim to join on signature campaign while there’s only few active campaign manager right now that accept participants.
Since they are considering merit counts on accepting members why not establish a rule that merit gathered through this method merit jerking, spam thread and other merit sharing thread(except merit source thread) shouldn’t be considered.
If campaign manager will just based on post quality only, all this merit whore will be ignored. Bring back the old way that campaign manager check post quality instead of merit. It’s funny that some campaign manager give priority to user that gain most of merit from these questionable thread that is not related to the project they are promoting and keep ignoring those user that regularly contribute on discussion to the board which their project is suitable.
We should accept the reality now that merit is not always the right basis to consider a user as constructive poster especially for those new account that rapidly rank up due to this merit farming through their merit butt buddies.