I do agree that it's already affected legit and serious jr members but what the new rules helped us is to lessen spamming and bounty farmings, it also lessen the creation of multiple accounts.
I agree that my proposal does not target the "multiple account" problem directly. There would be no problem to simply try to create another account once your signature has been removed because of spam. This is why I agree that in a situation like now, with spam still dominating in several subforums, a harder measure like the one merit requirement for Jr. members was needed.
But I expect the "probation period" proposal also to be effective with respect to spam reduction by multiple accounts. The reasons are:
1) like I already wrote, the "probation period" per account, when spamming becomes dangerous for your profits, is potentially much longer than the period needed to get a single merit. This should cause almost all spammers to be "caught" before they can really profit, and thus the period to profit from a single spam account would be very short. Most spam accounts would be caught before the first payout.
2) spammers that change the account must also re-apply to bounty campaigns. This is probably not easy to be done automatically. If you must re-apply for every 0.0001 BTC (or so) you could eventually get if you're not caught, the incentive to do that isn't very high.
These two effects should drastically reduce the incentives to create multiple accounts. It may be not so effective against "manual spam" than the Jr. Member Merit requirement, but regarding copy-and-paste bots it's maybe even more effective.
@cryptovigi, I forgot to reply you earlier:
It could be good solution but not for such a big society. For me it sounds more like tons of work for admins - how many newbies and jr. there are? Tens of thousands maybe hundrets of thousands - so think about amount of complaints for admins:
"Admin Why did I loose my signature?"
"Somebody reported me of spam which I didn't - please admin check it up!",
"Who reported me? Why? Admin help!",
When a post is deleted and your signature removed, the offender could get automatically a personal message with a copy of the deleted post and the reason why it was deleted.
The rest of the "complaints" you mention (e.g. spammer soliciting data about the person reporting it) is simply illegitimate PM spam prohibited by the forum rules, so admins can ignore it and even ban the offenders if the problem becomes an issue. This should be clarified in the PM about the deletion ("Don't PM the mod or you will be banned"), and there can be an "official thread" for complaints, but without any obligation for admins to take action as the punishment is not harsh at all - you can start a new account or collect 10 merits.
I also think the main issue of tons of spam are not single bounty accounts but MULTIPLE bounty accounts. I find using multiple account as cheating which is hard to prove but I’m pretty sure that 20%-40% of accounts are fake/multiple.…
Yes, in fact, this is a problem, but I think my proposal would solve it, too. See my answer to wolffy0216.
That's why I think that beside this merit revolution very good idea would be upgrading a verification policy by adding telephone number verification. Let's say Jr Member upgrade needs to verificate telephone number.
That should be only a measure of "last resort". I hate giving my phone number to an online service, it's intrusive in my opinion, because e-mail spam can be filtered but if you're harassed by vendors by phone it's not so easy.
Edit (@Barcode_link, you posted just when I submitted this post):
For your information, users who are chosen as Merit sources does not belong to the only group of people who are able to send merit to other users on this forum. Every users on this forum who manage to receive 2 Merit will be able to send 1 sMerit to another user.
True, but merit sources are the only "regenerating" source of merit. As you show with your table, every Merit generated will generate approximately one additional merit. (1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16 and so on).
While my calculation based on
this olde thread (at that moment there were about 400 merits generated/day by merit sources, so I guess now it should be at least 600, which results into a total of ~1200/day) is even more optimistic than yours, I am a bit pessimistic about the effective 30% sent to Newbies. AFAIK it was near 10-15%. The other problem is that users often "hoard" merits, intentionally or unintentionally, so many Merits simply are "lost".
In the last months, only 100-150 merits per day were
effectively distributed (the strange thing being that this is
much less than what Merit sources generate according to the thread I linked). One of the new Merit sources I know
is limited to 10 new sMerits/month for now, so I guess this should be the normal rate for "beginner Merit sources". That doesn't add much, considering that these days about 40-50 new Merit sources were added.
Anyway, I see this proposal has not been very popular. I won't insist on it. But I'll observe the Merit stats and if I see that Merit distribution isn't improving, I may bring it back on the table some day. 
