It's true.
Nevertheless, the solution is the last choice as @Theymos stated months ago.
The one sure way to stop spam on this forum is to stop the signature campaigns.
Moderators, staffs are simply human, as all of us. Therefore, we all can not require or expect them to glance around the forum, topics by topics, threads by threads to find out and deleted non-sense, spamming ones.
It's unrealistic.
If the moderators were truly serious about the spam on this forum this is how you stop it.
You are wrong. Deleted threads will not stop spamming endemic in the forum. One of the reasons is mods/ staffs can not find and delete all spamming threads.
Instead, merit system will do it, have demonstrated its good capability to do it at some extents.
Months after the start day of merit system, since January, the system has shown lots of positive impacts.
By deleting posts and threads in an attempt to contain the spam the signature campaign bounties hunters are forced to create even more posts each week than is required so as not to go under the total needed to receive stakes.
Easily ranking up to Junior member is a fault of merit system, really?
I don't think so, mate.
Someone suggested that it should have required merits to rank up to Junior rank.
I support the idea, but I would like to raise my viewpoint that you are totally wrong by blaming to merit sytem.
Another issue is the merit system. Now that it is very difficult to raise up past jr member guess what happens. People create multiple accounts and spam even more to get the stakes they would have gotten by ranking up by the old method we used to have.
Hate to say this, but you are one of members who contributed to make the Meta board a little bit looks like a shitty place by non-sense, crying topic on Merit system like this.
Dozens of available topics on the same issue as yours. All of them failed, ignored by forum users due to those ones are actually spamming topics which contribute nothing to the forum and potential improvements of merit system.
I feel like we have done nothing but created more spam in the end. The signature campaigns must end if we want to stop spam. If signature stay the rules should be continued to be studied because I do not believe this is working. I do not have a solution unfortunately and appreciate the work the mods do to help fight this situation.
Bonus:For the OP author,
There is link to a Theymos' thread on his thoughts about bounty industry:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg29540717#msg29540717I quoted part of the thread for your interest:
It's too early to get a clear picture, but my thoughts so far:
First, most people complaining about merit are constantly posting garbage, and should not rank-up.
You should discover more by yourself with full original thread.
I very much do not want to destroy the sig-ad/airdrop/bounty "industry". But I am not going to tolerate people posting garbage upon garbage. If the merit system completely fails and I can't think of anything else to replace it, then my next step will probably be to completely remove all ways for forum users to make money from posting (eg. removing signatures entirely).