I also noticed some newbies, the other day begging for merits and this is against the rules of this forum. Earning merits is very easy when you create good posts. Don't try to cheat the system by begging for merits as this will definitely get you banned.
You won't be banned if you exchange merits with others but it is only discouraged by forum admins and community. You will be tagged by forum members, DT members if you do that. Tags can be negative or neutral depends on the member who tags you.
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
Do not beg for merit excessively.
- Giving negative trust for merit trading and deceptive alt-account use may be appropriate, but you should use a light touch so that people don't feel paranoid.
The current status quo seems OK. If you have to pay $20 per merit plus a risk of getting red trust, then that's a situation that doesn't concern me at all. I'm not going to lose sleep over people going to ridiculous lengths to buy merit, since only a small number of people will be willing and able to do that.
As long as merit sales are a black market, I'm happy, since that makes it far more difficult and expensive to buy merit. If that's the case, then the small volume of black-market merit trades don't themselves bother me much, and I think that it does more harm than good to get too witch-hunty about it.
If a DT member tags you for something stupid involving merit (ie. probably anything less than selling merit), then they're not going to be a DT member for much longer.
4. No referral code (ref link) spam. [1]