Theymos put that in his 'maybe' camp. I doubt it will be implemented on this forum but maybe on the new one.
The new forum software coming in 2061? I got the impression from that post that most of the things in the OK list were very unlikely to happen within a year or so.
My pessimism aside the rest of your post I would agree with. The best way to stop bots is to remove the financial incentive that brings them here.
From theymos' list the following were in the 'no' camp:
Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member
Remove signatures completely from everyone (or everyone only has a basic signature) and to get one you either need a very high amount of activity & merit or:
B) Buy them via new donator ranks (theymos did initially comment: "This may be a good idea. Though I do think that people who don't pay should be able to get a small signature." [though Newbie signatures have been removed completely since this comment was made]).
But in the 'OK' camp:
Enforce the sig campaign guidelines. If a campaign is spotted that is doing little to nothing and is abused en mass by spammers, farmers, bots and copy and pasters they are warned. If nothing changes then they are punished with such things as bans, threads trashed, signatures blacklisted site-wide etc.
Signature bans. Bans that remove the signature for x amount of time or even permanently (actually proposed by theymos but never followed up on). Being able to blacklist an entire campaign's signature would also be helpful for those campaigns that refuse to do anything about spam.
Maybe those are the ones to push for.
