Once an account has amassed 1000 comment karma and 500 post karma (easily achievable with a month or so of contributions) they should gain the ability to bestow a BrownStar on those accounts they deem to be shills. One BrownStar can be given to a user by each “accredited account”.

Accounts would then have a count of how many brown stars had been bestowed upon them near their name on all their submissions, making those here to shill and forum slide even more obvious.

You may imagine this to be wasted effort as any smart shill would quickly change accounts after being identified, but I’d wager some non zero portion of those degenerates would wear it as a badge of honor.

I think a similar system for high quality posts and comments would make sense to implement but that’s less pressing than marking the shills for destruction and ignoring.