Definitely no money, that would only make the problem worse. The problem being (or one of the problems not the only one) that in too many countries there's just one team with x riders that has the win assured if he/she just shows up. So makes no sense for others to even try, if you're online, look, oh, he's there, leave. Or oh, isn't there, attack. And that's it then... Add money and there's an other incentive to "buy" NCs by having a high number of riders in one country, won't improve the racing at all.
Categories? At this point I think putting all to cat 1 makes more sense than keeping the different categories.
What I would propose on the other hand is:
Don't ride certain NCs.
Countries with less than 10 riders from at least 5 teams with points=no NC. If the "countries" thing in statistics is correct, right now there's 55 countries with 10 or more riders with points. Out of 80, so at the moment we'd cut at least 25, probably more due to the "from 5 teams" extra rule.
Ok, just checked, that statistic is eternal points, I of course meant current points, so we would get rid of even more NCs.
If in an attack of common sense you decide to follow the enlightened advice of the celestial Donkey then:
a) You will get criticized by a minority who will feel cheated out of their deserved epic
sucksesses.
b) The majority won't care or even support the common sense solution.
c) Make the deadline for the 10 riders/5 teams thing on Wednesday 10/23rd. Put the qualified NCs online then too. If you know you'll have time for it then, if not one day early/late ok too.
d) Make a better captcha, since the Donkey has been deleting 2 spambots per day on average, not that he doesn't enjoy the destructiveness of deleting users, he does, he does, but genocide of spambots really isn't as much fun if it becomes a habit.
d you might actually think about even without the common sense NCs
Times:
a) adjust to when you get up and plan to be online on that day. Bug stuff.
b) If you manage to get up early, starting at 9 going on till 23 wouldn't be wrong either, if we have 80 NCs. Right now it's 10-22, 80/13= a bit over 6 per hour, making that 15 we go down to 5.
c) If you have this urge to use common sense that I mentioned above, the 10-22 is ok of course, we'll probably end up with 40 or so NCs...
