When you say limit, do you think the forum software allows for modifications where theymos could "blacklist" a specific thread, so to speak, and make it impossible for anyone to send merits for posts in that blacklisted thread? If that is possible and theymos cared about doing that because he feels this whole thing is a problem, that could be done in the future. Personally, I don't think he cares.
I'm not sure exactly, but we have seen a similar situation before. For example, a April fools joke where we were jokingly selling Bitcointalk merch. However, it was implemented a little differently, he basically took back all merit that was spent in that thread. I'm sure if that's possible, it's likely that he could implement it not to show merit, or even not allow it to be sent if a url matches a certain one. I'm not exactly sure the implementation of merit on the forum, so that's just speculation on my end. I'm not even saying theymos would do it if it was possible, but I think it could be worth asking potentially. At the end of the day it's an unofficial event, and the amount of merit being distributed is rather small, so on that side of things he probably doesn't see the problem. I'm coming at it from a integrity of a vote point of view, which again isn't really his issue. Although, as suggested before I like the idea of the event, I think it promotes good habits within the community, and could prove beneficial in getting the community a little more tight knitted, which I do believe we've lost over the years.
It's even easier to not have the admins involved at all and make the rule sound something like this: Any member voted in isn't allowed to merit the person who voted for them. For each merit sent, they will be deducted the corresponding number of points when announcing the winners. So if you feel like meriting your voters, sure go ahead. But 10 merits sent to them results in 10 points being deducted from you in the total count.
But if you wanted to cheat, you could easily bypass that as well. You merit some other post of your voter, just not the one where they voted for you. Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect system.
Could do that, although that would likely result in a lot of users not actually understanding or reading it, and having their vote not counted, which could amount up. I doubt everyone has read the entirety of that original post. Whether we put that down to their problem is another thing.
Like I said before, there's definitely ways to cheat pretty much any voting system we implemented, the only way to totally prevent that would be to prevent merit being sent in that thread, but who knows some users might try to bypass that on other threads. However, I'm not sure its a problem with the users meriting those that vote for them itself, its a problem for voting integrity that some users have caught onto that, abuse it to get merit, which artificially inflates certain users votes.
I'd just like to think that this event isn't ruined year on year, from this type of influence that occurs. I want to see those voted in genuinely voted in based on
merit (not forum merit
). That isn't perfect by itself, and would be hard to get to that point, but in a
ideal situation, users wouldn't be voting because they think they can earn merit.
There's also other issues which we definitely can't mitigate, users might vote for x because they're trying to gain trust off of them, you know there'll always be problems with things like this, I just think there's a way to prevent much of the merit issues, I just don't know if theymos can implement it in a easy way, and whether or not he thinks it's necessary.