Topic: Can we establish a division for posters according to their quality? (Read 638 times)

I’ve noticed this!
I’m not techie gifted enough to be able to do similar myself but even if I was it’s a lot of work & for what? I don’t see the point in putting in the man hours to create these graphs/pie charts etc.

I mean, it’s cool to earn Merit but there are hundreds of things I’d rather do in life than spend hours & hours doimg that 

Even though the merit distribution is, of course, related to good posting behaviour, I do think that there are some other several factors included. For instance, it has been mentioned that the merit data analysis are the most rewarded threads. Of course, they are awesome, and I totally agree with those ones being rewarded, but I don't think there are actually a single way of determining how a poster is good or bad. Obviously, a spammer is pretty easy to detect, but there are amazing posters on other sections that probably we are not aware of and whose posting behaviour can be amazing as well.
Merits are a good way to distinguish some good from bad users, but this is not the only way, for, as I said, the distribution can be based on what is "trendy". Let's come back a little an analyze some stats by DdmrDdmr, in order to determinate which boards are actually the most merited:


For instance, Serious Discussion is the most merited board per post. That means that conversations regarding free topics, personal opinions and some debates are getting more merits. Of course, we might include the fact that in the Serious Discussion board newbies are unable to participate -which can be pretty unfair if your idea is implemented.
Now, If we pay attention, we see that Meta follows the Serious Discussion when merit speaking. I am not surprised of that at all, for in here some good conversations about the forum are having a place. But, do you think that, in a Bitcoin-related forum, those two boards should be the most merited? Meaning: are the conversations having a place in this two even related to Bitcoin itself??

What I am trying to mean is that a good user cannot be really measured because of the merit/post count ratio. If you are in a signature, probably you will post far more, if you are engaging a technical discussion, probably the same will happen: lots of posts and no such relation between merit and post.

So, there are more factors, from my perspective, than merits to determine which one is a great user and which one is not. By establishing this banner you propose, we only will be able of seeing which one has more merits per activity, but it isn't related to the "amazinest" of the poster at all.

(Notice that English is not my first language and I suffered a lot trying to explain myself jajaj  ).

What isn't good at all is your reading comprehension.


I'll wait a little bit and lock the thread.

I think that the ignore list function of the forum needs an upgrade.
It could work as a kind of "AD blocker" for the forum, but it would be a "ShitBlocker" or something similar
Every member could choose if he/she wants to activate it or not, and select from some presets if he/she wants to see more posts or less but quality posts. Of course, if someone likes to read unlimited amount of shitposts, he/she won't activate it, so it's not endanger the freedom of speech here.
Everyone would be free to create his/her own ignore list (I know that this is working right now as well) but everyone would be able to make his/her ignore list public and if someone likes an ignore list, there should be only one click to activate it for himself/herself.

The idea isn't good at all.

If you need to create a special badge to point out "good" posters, something is going very wrong.

What the hell happend to this forum being moderately libertarian? Why do you have to categorize everyone? This is exactly the type of stuff that's so disgusting about present-day politics.

Merit in itself is already pretty silly -- (You'd think that everyone posting here would do so in a moderately constructive way, right?), but adding "badges" to ascertain good and "Bad" posters seems extremely childish to me, and it makes me wonder why/if this (is) still (is) a crypto/bitcoin related forum.

What's next? Someone's going to grade my last 100 posts?

The idea is good, separating the quality posters to non-quality posters. But, what really is the character of a quality poster on your edge? since we have different views and understanding. There were a lot of people around here misinterpret the meaning of quality posting. This is a forum after all, everyone is allowed to post their opinion and suggestion as long as it doesnt violate the forum rules.  IMO, Regardless of the leghnt of your post as long as there is a healthy conversation it would be considered as a quality post and giving a merit is just a bonus if you find a good point in a single post/topic that could be helpful for your or for the others. So, putting a division for posters according to their quality will make the community more complex and add limits and restrictions to some point.

You can always activate the "show post count" in your profile, so the real number of any user posting activity will be shown. Now, about generating more "branding", well I think this is absolutely unnecessary. All here know who are good and bad posters, and each board has their bests and worst. I mean: not all the boards are equally merited and it doesn't mean that the poster is worst. For instance, the technical one, the more dedicated to bitcoin is used to receive far less merit than Meta, despite the users knowledge about the technical stuff. So, the quality of an user cannot be measured by the relation between activity and merit, but by your own personal preferences.
This is impossible, then, to create a system to determinate the quality, for many factors are included and it goes far beyond numbers under a profile's name.
From my perspective, the merit is kind of "trendy-based" and yet, some of the most-rewarded subjects can be just a result of that trend.  

To be honest I am tempted as some point to make  my own statistics about merit system.  I already hypothesize some interesting topics about merit to dwell and make a statistical analysis.  I always see these kinds of posts earning so much merit and the effort is really worth it because you will gain a lots of merits.

This have different effects if this will happen. Positive and negative. Positive is that there will be an organized division dependent on ranks, posts will be more reliable depends on the rank. Because they actually earned more knowledge than the lower ranks. Negative is that the distribution of information, how about those people who are in this forum with the purpose of gathering information. Lower ranks can gain infos to one who is ahead of them, if they dont have the access to even read such threads, how could it be.

I am not questioning the effort and I acknowledge their effort also. Doing the analysis correctly and publishing it is big task.
When Theymos introduced the Merit he did not think that most of the merit will be used in this way.

Actually  Vlad230 express my feeling very well.

The user could be categorized according to his posting skill but this seem not good because it will going to add more factions in this forum. The worst thing of having a category for it would create a caste system. As stated in the wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste) that a caste system is a form of social stratification characterized by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a lifestyle which often includes an occupation, status in a hierarchy, customary social interaction, and exclusion. And for this only the recognized users will be benefited with merits.

So instead of categorizing users it would be better to categorized the number of merits to be given.

1-3 merits - for logical reasoning post, helpful and constructive post
4-6 merits - for techincal aspects basic guides, helpful and constructive post
7-10 merits - for highly technical & excellent post

This will motivate some good posters to enhance their posting skills especially in technical aspects.

But this data that had been analyzed are helpful and the people who are posting the data have contributed much of their time just to create that post. From the collection of data (bpip.org, and merit.txt.xz), creating of graphs and charts, and translating the data all of which takes up a lot of time and all I can say is that they are both helpful and highly informative to all users that is why this kinds of posts deserves a lot of merits. If you want to have merits not from your regular posts then no one is stopping you to create your own data analysis as all the data is already made available for all of the members here, you'll be surprise on how hard it is to do what they are doing.

I can think of several distinct ways to do this:
1. More Merit than Activity (this seems logical, but you may miss out on high quality users who barely ever post, while you include users who post a lot and receive Merit for some of their posts)
2. More Merit than Posts (this is a much better quality indicator!)
3. Percentage of Posts that received Merit (now it becomes interesting!)

I'll give some examples of each category (full data and explanation here):
1. LoyceV ( ). Since the introduction of Merit, I've received much more Merit than Activity, but only 0.38 Merit per new post and only 10% of my posts received merit.
2. gmaxwell earned 7.1 Merit per post since the introduction of Merit!
3. theymos received Merit on 32.8% of his posts since Merit was introduced.
Update: after checking an update for gmaxwell, he fits category 3 even better with 59% of his posts merited.

Depending on which criteria you choose, you can get a completely different list of users to follow. I would suggest a combination (kinda like Vod's BPIP Recognition), but categories 2 and 3 require extensive scraping from the forum to get the numbers for each user.

To clarify: I didn’t mean that the forum should stablish a division and those ranks should appear on the profile, or as a badge or whatever.
It was just an idea I had in mind that people could use for everyday use. We all know who the best posters are and who the shitposters are, but what about those who don’t fall in those categories? What do you call them? Do you know why you call them like that or do you have a rough idea.

I have an own concept for those who are not shitposters and not exceptional posters, so they fall into not bad, OK, and good poster categories, but it is just a rough idea.


Not really


This forum is like the world, we all have the same opportunities and we are under the same laws, some people have more advantages because they are more intelligent by birth for example, but I like both a world and a forum where there is healthy competition and where we are not equal, even though I’m not the best and I'll probably never be.


Although this goes a bit off topic, I agree.

Yeah, posting about posting about posting 

A corrupt (meritized?) form of omphaloskepsis

Yes, you are right. Some of them didn't earn merit for anything else but merit analysis which is sad.

My opinion is that the people whom deserve to rank up should be mainly knowledgeable in crypto currency, not in how the forum works.

They're missing the point of this forum.

I appreciate the suggestion put in, but dont you think we are becoming too much obsessed with "being able to make quality posts".

This is a forum after all and we expect people from all types of backgrounds to come in and make a variety of posts with different opinions. Some people will be able to make posts that are exceptionally put in and some will not. If we try to make divisions between them it will increase the current divide between the people who are well known and newbies who are trying their best to rank up.

Maybe as a sort of experiment personally someone could do it. But the info if made public would be like a public disgrace to others and I am sure it will become a source of mockery.

I've been away for a few days. When I get back, I'll start to populate my Snow Eagle pages.

It's really for my own use, but others will be welcome to check the lists.

If I understood correctly, you say some users get the number of merit needed to raise the rank much faster than their activity allows them to move higher. And you propose to apply some formula that would allow to increase the rank depending on the merit, not on the activity indicator. If this is what you meant, then I have a question: why do we need activity at all? Maybe it makes sense to remove it altogether and leave only merit, on which your rank will depend? Those who write good posts will move faster, and those who aren`t able to receive merits will remain standing still. Now the situation is such that the activity either inhibits the participant in obtaining a new rank, or doesn`t play a special role, since practically noone is looking at this indicator. Activity has ceased to be informative. Merit has more to do with rank than activity does. The only thing that it indirectly demonstrates is the time spent on the forum, but this can be found out by looking at the date of registration of the participant.

I am little bit confuse about your subject,

Exactly, I think most high merited of post is merit analysis thread. No doubts thread are high quality and useful. But I think it's little bit high (imo). Personally I don't like spend smerit on merit analysis thread since I am holding very low smerits. I believe those user post merit analysis thread their intention isn't earn merit. They have earned enough. It's true that they are also preading their smerit as well. But I think we need take a little break about merit post. Since admin implemented new merit system, we should help low rank people's to improve rank. Especially demoted quality poster, according to theymos " send merit on good post for newbie those need 1 merit". Shouldn't wait for great post.