I can't say this seems very fair to smaller coin devs trying to get their project noticed.
There are thousands of those, and almost all of them will struggle with the same problem. The old system, in which spam threads won, wasn't fair either.
I agree the hundred of newbie comments can be very annoying for people and to an extent it is a good idea in preventing this but it all seems to be more biased towards those that have been here a lot longer than those even here a year or two.
The Merit system was created in January last year. Being around longer doesn't necessarily mean earning more Merit: many old users barely earned any Merit, and some much newer users earned a lot.
and deciding to look at a random topic
I took a look at
your topic, and it looks exactly the same as thousands of other shitcoins.
at least consider a bump option for an activity level every few days etc as "no Merit = no bump" is a bit to unfair.
The problem with Activity level is that account farmers can and will farm thousands of accounts to do this.
A paid bump option could actually work: the forum knows the current bump score of each topic. Based on that, it could offer a certain price to
instantly reach a certain bump score and thus a certain position on the board. After that, the normal bump decay would apply again.
Maybe $10 to be on top and a bit less to be half-way the first page? If the forum offers a paid option, it could take business away from commercial bumping services.
