I knew someone was going to comment this, that's why I quoted 'inbuilt' word.

I don't understand what so hard about implementing it? Users won't have to find these tools and it will help in keeping track of discussions.

More importantly don't forget every single feature added is a potential back door security risk for the forum. Making sure it is not also takes time. I would be happier with a stale featureless SECURE forum than an unsecure one with lots of bells and whistles.

It is the second forum for bitcoin, only after this one:
http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/boards/index.php
Welcome to the new Bitcoin forum! (by our beloved @satoshi)
The forum plays important roles to help bitcoin's spread over the world over years.
It is the elder usually don't like new style forum, and funny things inside, which they consider as annoying stuffs.
However, everything has to adapt to new trend, new style, I think.
If the forum, or anything else lack of ability to adapt changes, trends, it will be wipened out, or degraded gradually over time.
It happen in all areas, not only in crypto, and crypto forum.
However, bitcointalk is the biggest crypto forum for ages, and for now, and to be honest I feel very unrealistic to say the the forum will be suprassed by other later-born forums.

I will modify two of my previous suggestions.

1. Private message


Update: Add checkbox "Notify the sender that you have read the message." The recipient can click it at will.

I suppose, Bitcointalk employees could use this option as well because they're receiving a lot of messages from different members every day.
And the recipient's last login date, in many cases, don't say anything to the sender whether the message has been read or not.

---

2. Banned accounts


Update: Show the 'Banned' marks to the members which have more than 1000 good reports.

I believe that reporters with such statistic are not so many but with this implementation their effectiveness will significantly raise.

@ Veleor
I wanted to create a thread in Meta a few weeks ago discussing a scenario similar to what you mentioned in your post above.
I backed out and decided not to as it could be a bit controversial and would look like free advice on how to frame someone. I will probably just PM theymos and discuss it over PM.

A question before I do that, can admins see the original post before it was edited?

5 minutes, but perhaps this is outdated information.

The main difficulty in finding useful forum comments, in my opinion, lies in the initial uneven sMerit allocation between members and that the whole work of the Merit distribution falls to a few dozen sources at most.

Along with Merit, it would probably make sense to introduce additional assessment points (voices) for all forum users, starting with Jr. Members.

These voices could be sent for the comments you like, but they must not affect the number of Merit.

On the base of such system it would be possible to organize a regularly updated list of popular comments, with the help of which it will be more convenient for Merit sources to detect good messages on the forum.

The picture below shows how the post with received Merit and votes might look like.

To avoid abuse, votes may have a limited amount (10 for example) which will be replenished every 24 hours.
The number of received votes is the same for all ranks from Jr. Members. Unused votes cannot be accumulated.

I've read a topic that hundreds Bitcointalk users can participate in the paid signature campaigns, but at the same time they don't have any earned merit, except airdropped (10, 100, 250, 500, 1000).

When users receiving money for posting, then I believe their comments should have at least some value for other forum members.

So I have a suggestion: if a forum member didn't get any merit in the last, for instance, 90 or 120 days, then such user will not be able to change the signature.

It should be noted that users without new merit still might have been able to continue wear their old signatures.

I would suggest pinning this thread like some other useful posts.
It has everything that needs a discussion of has been already discussed thousand of time on the forum.

Nice work by hilariousandco