Topic: Disable delete option from merited post. (Read 528 times)

If a mod removes a post that is unjust and didn't actually break any rules then you can complain about it in Meta (as I'm sure you would) and the post can be restored by an admin. If a mod removes a post then it is usually for a good reason or that it broke the rules and that merit probably doesn't deserve to be given in the first place.


This is all completely subjective, and I'm not sure how you'd enforce it anyway.

That's the point.
Merit abusers can not circulate their original merits forever.
They are limited and have to come to the end someday.
It is the key reason why @Theymos implemented the merit system and new rank requirement with main purpose to give spammers big motivations to change their posting habits.
I don't want to mention about Spambies from massive farms, but only main-account spambies. Some of them have changed, and might change in the future to be better publishers, in my positive belief.

I don't think so, especially for Junior Member rank. We all can not say that someone is merit abuser by getting one merit for non-sense thread. During my time I spent in the forum, months after the beginning of new era with merit system and new rank requirements, I have seen several threads got meritted by higher-ranked members for almost non-sense threads. The key point is here, everyone have rights to give their sMerits away to any thread they want. For instance, some threads which make they laugh, even those ones are non-sense threads.
Consequently, it is really hard to say someone is a merit abuser by sending or receiving only on merit, in my point of view.

To sum up, your suggestion is only meaningful for more-than-one-merit-receivers or senders!

I will not agree with this because moderators are human of course that could commit human error in the process of deleting individual posts. If this will happen then there will be some members rank that will be demoted after deleting some of their merited posts? So, I do not think that it should be consider. I could be demoted too to newbie if it will going to happen.

Merit abuse is something that should be stop but not in a way through deletion of the merited posts which considered as merit abuse.

If the problem is all about stopping the merit abuse then I suggest to consider a system that will approve and dissaproved merit give aways. It could be a lot of work but this will ensure that merit will not be abused.

Or else, there should be a control on how to give merits.

1-3 merits, for constructive and helpful posts.

4-6 merits, for sharing technical expertise. As we all know that technical aspects are being paid with high salary so we should consider also giving more merits on this posts .

7-10 merits, if it is helpful, constructive, encouraging, empowering posts, and sharing technical expertise.

11-50 merits - if the post was really brilliant and one of a kind post.

We should not worry about this because we could report the post/thread if found that there is a merit abuse being done. Like there are lot of posts that receive 50 merits that are relatively not that good and that is clearly merit abuse.

Isn't it better to leave it as it is, but with an option those merited posts to be archived.
Just auto quote the post in one Megathread with all the merited posts and it will happen only for the first received merit.
Then you get a reference link in this MegaThread.

If you think about it it will be cool to have all the merited posts in one thread where you can browse and read.

This can also be done manually, but if the post get deleted before it's quoted it will be difficult.

Great idea on disabling the delete post option for merit post, but every good idea will give this abusers something more sinister to do just in case your idea is implemented in the forum. Just like how they find a loophole on the 24 hours before you can delete your own post on ANN threads, they simply created a self-moderated ANN Thread so that the author of the thread can delete the posts of bump bots, simple solution so that the ANN thread goes up in the first page without the bump bots deleting their own posts. Who knows they might do a similar way to delete their posts for evidence by creating their own thread and deleting it afterwards they have given the merits to the recipients on that thread.

I really don't think burning merit just because a post has been deleted is a fair idea. Just because somebody no longer things a post is relevant doesn't mean that they should not retain the reward they received when it was relevant. Yes, we'll see people abusing merit by deleting their posts, but if you see somebody with 50-100 merit and no visible posts assigned to it, then you would automatically know that's suspicious anyway, nullifying their ability has no benefit.

Just to get an idea of how much merit is actually assigned to currently deleted posts, I’ve dug up the following:

Total Transactions awarding sMerit to now deleted posts: 5.650
Total sMerits awarded to now deleted posts:                   13.084 (6,37% of total).

The breakdown by month is as follows ((*) most recent month will still increase deleted merited posts as days go by):
That’s quite a large sum, and has all sorts of reasons behind, but in order to be transparent it would be nice to either avoid the deletion of these posts or revert/burn the awarded sMerits. It does seem like a downward trend nevertheless, although this fact is aligned to the reduction of monthy awarded sMerit.

@vlad230

It is more about responsibility i guess. While what you have been mentioned in the upper posts is right, it brings a lot of cheating and abuse, and if no one wants to change that, there will be mess here and there on the forum like merit selling, merit trading, merit farming, etc, and the cheating could be done from users with resources like money or friend or etc. Please see the bigger picture here. All the cheating i have mentioned could lead to a lot of scams too, and would render the function of merit unapproached, useless.

There is nothing wrong on giving some good advice to the admin, especially if its for the goodness of this forum. You said we need to shift our 10% energy of merit talk to fight scammers, i said we should make 110% effort to fight scammers and spammers. Not dividing our 100%, but adding more effort is the best solution.

I'm not sure why people are still concerned with the merit thing...

As Theymos said here:
So, it's clear merit is not moderated. While I don't agree with a lot of merit being sent on shit posts, you can complain about it endlessly it's not going to change and it's not going to be relevant to forbid deletion for the posts that were merited.

I also remember Theymos said that you can also top up with merits anyone whom you think deserves to rank-up, so it's useless to complain about it.

If 10% of the energy devoted to this "merit talk" would be dedicated to fighting the scammers on this forum who steal ACTUAL MONEY from people, we would be in a totally different place right now...

This could be true. But, deleting a good thread which is filled with merits would be one out of the thousand cases, and all the remaining 999 case would mean deleting merits transferred because of abuse.
You can also experience post count decrease and sometimes activity decrease because of the thread/post deletions. Only spammers care about the post count and the activity point, others don't really count their posts on a daily basis... Some time will pass and this will be the case with merits as well, only merit abusers will care about their merit count, other will just look at it once per week/month/year etc...

I agree with hillariousandco's suggestion, but there must be some slightest adjustment to make it better because the post deletion can be done by the user or moderator. I suggest the only thing that makes the merits disappear is from the post deletion by the moderators or administrators, because sometimes even a good thread that is filled with merits can be deleted for some legit reasons.

You can find so many redundent replies in ANN threads and got Merited heavily (some cases 50 Merits). So what we are going to do when we found the content of posts are doesn't deserved to be Merited?

Since Merit abuse is didn't moderated by mods or staff, there's nothing to do about these kind of incidents and we had to accept the common answer that given everytime,  
As far my knowledge DT members never(not usually) tag merit abusers, if there is any clear cut case with strong evidences. I have seen only once theymos reversal the merits from a account where got hacked.

@theyoungmillionaire I'm also really frustrated with bolded parts, is there anything that I missed recently explains me with examples too

What about the trashing of the thread? If somebody got merit in some shit thread, then will you ask for not to trash the thread?

Merit burning is good idea if post is deleted but "Self Moderated Thread" can abuse it.

Anyway ,why you guys are still so obsessed with Merits. Why we want to analyze and scrutinize each and every merit given.

Look , spam,scam, alts and now Merits has took away the priority of discussing/reading bitcoin to the edge.

The rule should not affect the merited posts if the entire thread gets deleted, but if an individual post is deleted, either by a moderator or by the user himself, then the merits should get burned as @hilariousandco has said, because in that way, the one who sent the merits with the intention to abuse the system would get nothing back, neither the receiver would get any benefits out of that.

^What is a service merit and what new forum guidelines are you talking about?

There are many reasons why the topic/post/reply got deleted (already discussed a thousand times):
Given the above reasons, your option is not valid, because, based on experience I got some smerit sent to deleted post(s), which I think really deserved some merit on it. For example, I have merited one of Welsh’s reply and then a minute later the topic itself got deleted. You mean the merit I sent to Welsh will be debited and credited back to me? IMHO, that is kind of blurry suggestion. The reply is of quality.  It will affect those posts with quality, but, at the wrong topic or affected by new forum implementation rules which only discussed on staff board. As discussed, merit is not moderated and investigating them is time consuming. It is the merit holder verdict on how they view quality post (which sometimes used as “like” stuff) it is up to them, abuse is a reality. It will soon be part of history, not all are merit source.

By this way merit system will be erosion day by day. In case if merited post deleted by moderators ? Result will be same , I mean erosion of merit.

I wouldn’t worry too much about merit “abuse”.

There is a limited amount of merit someone can merit themselves unless they have a source in their pocket. Unless of course they make a habit of making good enough posts to otherwise receive merit, in which case the “abuse” won’t have any meaningful affect.

This would be better, but the merit should just be burned and not sent back.

Another option would be the removal of merit which will go back to the sender. But it's much harder to implement I guess. I agree that merit abuse went too far on this forum.