But really, people should just superbump good topics whenever they think to do so, and not worry about this sort of strategizing.
I'm not concerned that much about my own bumps, just looking for loopholes that farmers could exploit. It looks like if they have ~30 high-merit accounts they could keep one or two threads super-bumped to the front page. Likewise if they have a bunch of high-merit accounts they could also mini-bump multiple threads. That might be more feasible since mini bumps don't cost anything (other than maintaining earned merits) but they would need a lot of accounts to overcome the 7-day limit.
Those sound like very costly scenarios so likely not a big deal.
~30 high-merit accounts does sound very costly, close to impossible.. I think most people are lucky to have a single account with any significant amount of merit, and this is merit earned in the last year, so old farmed merit will go out of date and they will have to keep farming 30 accounts with fresh merit..
What they will need is a constant stream of fresh merit to retain their bumping power..
I think this also means your last years accumulated activity, like you have to have actually hit all of the activity periods in the last year to get your 365 max..
I should be careful where I post if I disclose a spam or scam so I don't unintentionally bump their topic.
my post now has a much higher bumping power. It would be nice to be able to turn that off for certain posts. Or I may need to use my LoyceMobile or even LoyceBot for certain posts.
I think Theymos could add a way to sage your post if he wanted to..
Just like Merit, Trust and Flags, theymos managed to come up with something that I have to read several times to fully understand it's potential! I'm curious to see how it works out long-term.
It's getting to the point to where one needs to be quite educated in all of these systems to really understand how the forum works.. The users manual is getting thick but it's not even all in one manual.. Also the evil system, ranks and badges, account recoveries, captcha bypass, etc. before you even get into forum etiquette..
I don't mind this really.. It's another way to distinguish who has put in the time and effort to get to and stay in the know about it all, but past the point where I would expect any but the top users to understand everything..
Bitcointalk function quizzes sound fun, something like
https://play.howstuffworks.com/quiz/can-you-name-these-engine-parts-a-onesentence-description..