Merit system causes more SPAM not less

[Crypto Girl]

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Because of this new formula/pesticide, farmers (theymos and other mods) can easily remove or way of removing the pests(shitposters and account farmers) so that the tree/plant(forum) will grow and all people will benefit from it and I think it will work sooner or later.

Ok. You misuse the word farmer, you refer theymos and other mods as farmers.
I got your point but using the word farmer here is just for people who farmed accounts. Be careful.

This is nothing new and have been discussed several times.
This fact will not make merits go away, it would most likely make other changes to be made.
Several high ranking members have already discussed some ideas in META, whihc in my mind would be a HUGE plus for forum:

• Disable signatures for all Jr.Members who have no merit at all.
• Or disable them for good.

This will be good for long term situation here and it should start with all the campaign managers in their respective bounties. They should be actually cooperating like we've seen some managers that didn't accept lower than member rank and the result was good besides spammers can affect the image of their icos. Let's not put everything to Theymos.

[tranle1267]

i think with the new merit system, we can reduce spamer.

In the old systerm, many Jr. member joined in sig campain, and they start to spam something to get enough post to complete mission in a week, or some people try to creat so more account and they start spaming when the account go to Jr. member, but now it has reduced.

Now the people need to improve knowledge and thinking about crypto before they can publish a quality post and they can get merit. This is a forum where people discuss about bitcoin and Crypto, not spaming place.

[patz22]

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Noted. But what I meant for that is that they're the ones who's in charge for the growth and improvement of community and forum. A gardener probably? 

At some point with this new rule also affected low ranks (jr.members) which are honest but on the other hand it will be easy for them to get a merit or rank up as long they have helpful and quality posts.

[squatter]

We probably have hundreds of people spamming the hell out of this board with multiple accounts and the merit system does nothing to stop the spam and it may actually cause more of it.  

I suppose that's why Theymos took it a step further by removing Newbie signatures entirely and demoting Jr. Members who haven't received merit. Now all those farms of Newbies and Jr. Members have no incentive to post garbage. They have no signatures.

It at least forces the costs of spamming higher. Spammers either need to buy merit -- which is in lower supply now that the initial airdrop is long over, so it should be harder to get for shitposters -- or they need to buy a Copper membership for 0.002+ BTC.

Are the costs high enough yet? Maybe not, but I think we should wait and see. In my own observation, the forum's been getting more readable now that the merit system is established. I think that trend will continue under this policy.

[sinachy]

You are right about the merit system causing more spam in the forum and that's exactly the reason why mods implemented the 1 merit requirement to participate in the bounty, So even if you have multi-account, you still need merit to upgrade to the Jr member, I think the mod did a great job on the implementation, and i am thinking if more members upgrade to jr member and the spam continues, I see mod increasing the merit requirement further up.

[coolcoinz]

I suppose that's why Theymos took it a step further by removing Newbie signatures entirely and demoting Jr. Members who haven't received merit. Now all those farms of Newbies and Jr. Members have no incentive to post garbage. They have no signatures.

It at least forces the costs of spamming higher. Spammers either need to buy merit -- which is in lower supply now that the initial airdrop is long over, so it should be harder to get for shitposters -- or they need to buy a Copper membership for 0.002+ BTC.

Are the costs high enough yet? Maybe not, but I think we should wait and see. In my own observation, the forum's been getting more readable now that the merit system is established. I think that trend will continue under this policy.

There are certain threads that still are a spam fest, but there's less of them in general than before. Many potential spammers and farmers got wrecked by trying to merit their own alts or buy merit and that definitely levelled the playfield even more than the merit system itself. There was (and still is) a lot of sold accounts that were eligible for signatures and they didn't have to worry about getting merit.
The situation would be much better if somebody were to deal with all those hacked accounts that are being traded.

[Sova_tmb]

I think need a ban for creating a new merit posts if we want to stop new spam posts. Can write on the exaple only in one merit thread.

[Vickyrichy]

I don't agree with you on the fact that the merit system is causing more spam.  All you need to know is that, this forum is like a society and every society is governed by a set principles and rules. The merit system is like rule to reduce some kind of unpleasant behaviors of members and also present some kind of restriction to the forum. The forum needed this new restriction. I  will advise that we accept this new system and avoid spamming.