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Restrictions are likely the best option in the case of bounty campaigns, and the current spam problem that these things encourage. However, introducing a fair merit requirement might be more difficult that rounding it up to nice numbers such as 5. To be honest 1 merit point would likely reduce the amount of users spamming by a significant amount.
I believe it would do wonders towards reducing spamming, although bots are another related front that would perhaps try to grow even more to gain merits by sophisticating post content in search fooling us into stray awarding them merits (at the cost of automation sophistication but not human time invested per account).
Of course for the (gained) merit requirement to work, if added as a requirement for Jr. Ranks as suggested in the thread title, it goes without saying that one would hope that campaign managers would not lower their requirements and accept Newbies based on activity or nothing at all, in order to comply with their quotas of enrolment.
The lateral effect of requiring earned merit as a requirement for Jr. Members (or Campaigns as a general norm), is that the pool of candidates would be reduced drastically (see
re:Disable signatures/bounties til a user reaches full member status), baring not nearly enough signatories for all the current active campaigns. This could go one of many ways after that, ranging from a higher degree of value for merited accounts, to campaigns moving away for not getting enough marketing attention through signatures.
I guess that this is the real keystone to consider from the forum’s (theymos’s) perspective. From the spam point of view, it would be a done deal for most of us (non-spammers implicit).
