After new restrictions for ranking, most of the bitcointalk members are moving to moonforum.net new cryptocurrency forum for signature bounty.Moon forum is more advanced and most informative and future of cryptocurrency is now Moonforum
Nobody will miss them anyway. Those members who moved are the ones who think that earning ONE merit is a hell of a burden and only want to make money whatever it takes, even if it means spamming the forum and degrading the overall quality of discussion here. I could say that the forum glad that these spammers are moving away.
Though I don't see moonforum or any other clones of bitcointalk an immediate competitor of it but if the forum continues to make such decisions without any prior research about the effects it has on it's use. The forum is essentially forcing new users to buy membership and hence moving towards a format of paid forum.
No, you're getting it wrong. No one is forcing to buy memberships. What theymos is forcing is earning 1 merit to get to Jr. Member. This is to ensure that those newbies aren't getting anywhere before they show they could make a quality post in this forum. This has nothing to do with money. Do you know that the forum already holds
BTC1500+ in cold reserve? Even if the forum stop selling its ads space, it will still able to support itself for many years.
If the forum continues to do nothing to the spammers, the quality of this forum will go down to zero and members who don't care about bounty, who just want to have a meaningful discussion, will stay away from here.