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A more strict rule would be to limit the signature campaign to members who earn >10 or more merit regardless of their ranks. Campaign manager can use the data from Bitcointalk Merit Dashboard or another merit database.
I’d say that theymos knows pretty well by now just how many of us here vouch for a minimum gained merit requirement for signature campaigns. Quite a lot of threads treat this topic, and he recently responded to @hilariousetc on his thread on "
community generated suggestions to improve the forum", indicating that the idea to "
Require at least one merit to become a Junior Member (bots will never rise past Newbie status then and can be nuked once spotted)" is a "
No. Or not yet. Or the idea would need to be significantly modified."(see
re: Community generated suggestions to improve the forum (+ eventual voting on them)).
I believe it is pretty clear it would improve the forum noticeably by reducing spam substantially, but this is one of those things that, rather than a butterfly effect, could have an "elephant effect" as I'll explain in the rest of this post.
Now what would happen if the 1 or 10 gained merit requirement were to be rolled-out ?
I looked at this some time ago, but I’ll redo the exercise with current data and a more optimistic value for average signatories per campaign.
This is the current merited user base on Bitcointalk:
Merit nUsers %MeritedUsers
1 6.137 32,45%
2 2.634 13,93%
3 1.253 6,62%
4 831 4,39%
5 1.040 5,50%
6 597 3,16%
7 439 2,32%
8 306 1,62%
9 204 1,08%
10 1.952 10,32%
>10 3.522 18,62%
Total 18.915 Merited users
We also know that the merited user base increases at a slow pace. The
Merit Dashboard tells us on the Global Summary tab, that each week we get, as of late, roughly around 215 newly merited users (never merited before). This is something like 1% weekly increment in the merited user base.
On the other hand, looking at the active threads on the Bounty section, there are something like 24 active pages with last date modified in the last 48 hours alone. That is roughly 960 minimum active campaigns give or take.
Now let’s say each campaign has a minimum average of 50 users bearing their signature (probably quite a lot more, but I want to be rather conservative this time of my hypothesis). That would mean that around 960*50 = 48.000 forum members are needed by the active campaign.
We also need to consider that, in practice, something around 75% of merited forum members are wearing a signature (see
re: Is it easier to earn Merit without a signature? )
- Now if we delimit campaign signature to forum members with 1 earned merit, we would have 18.915*75%= 14.186 users for 48.000 slots (29,55% of campaign slots would be covered).
- If on the other hand we require 10 or more gained merits, then we have 5.474*75%=4.105 candidates for the 44.000 slots (8,55% covered slots máx).
The above goes to show the "elephant effect" that it would have from the numerical point of view, although it does not talk about the fact that merited people tend to be the best posters and therefore give more real visibility and even credibility to some extent to the campaign.
The exercise goes to show that the mesure, although highly desired, is also disruptive and could cause campaigns to have a low amount of signatories for their campaign, well below expectations. That could have an effect of campaigns willing to roll-out on this Forum, and therefore reduce traffic and income. Balancing it all out is not easy, but from a personal point of view I’d love to see restrictions of a kind implemented.
