Buying merit or normal ranks is like buying yourself a bunch of trophies to put on your shelf. It's stupid, and it's an insult to everyone who achieved it legitimately...
Copper membership is good. Now, if you want to participate in signature campaigns, you can either pay the $10-$20 for copper membership or accomplish the herculean task of making one good post. I don't think that it's unreasonable in either case.
If people are making good posts but are still struggling to get merit, then that's a problem with the merit system and should be fixed on my end. Demanding money in order to bypass a broken system would be really bad. But AFAICT the merit system actually is reasonably effective at identifying good posters.
Sorry to be posting with my newbie account, but it isn't hard to figure out that... the system is indeed NOT working. Most do not even know the difference between merit and meritS, unless that has changed as well. Additionally, it's not like there are 'rovers' or 'patrollers', whatever the correct term, that actually go around into different threads to search for "well written" posts and decide to award the poster merit. Not to my knowledge anyway. I think there is, and has been, an inner circle of the bitcointalk 'court' ever trying to maintain their top status here without regards to the quality of other posters.
I'm not speaking about spam posts, nobody likes or wants those here, or on individual forums within a particular coin's website. But if you wish for your forum site to grow, in membership size, this is a horrible and inequitable mistake. There ought to have been your special 'merit givers' going into threads, on maybe a random basis and actually looking for well written posts BY NEWBIES to reward them for the post quality as well as to teach, or lead, by example in doing so. Recruit new member simply be rewarding merit to those who are new, and signing up on their own accord, but writing good posts. They ought not to have written a brochure, but a post.
I can't help but notice each time I browse in a thread with members such as those in the upper ranks discussing more ways to set rules, or debate about other issues that affect or pertain to status levels and merit do I see such merit flowing freely... between 'friends' and given to posters for mediocre posts, not based on the same standard of what would be considered a "quality, merit deserving, post" to better themselves and continually rank up, as with LIKES on other sites as follows:
Merited by yahoo62278 (10), EFS (6), Cyrus (5), mprep (5), hilariousandco (5), fcmatt (5), krishnapramod (5), abel1337 (5), o_e_l_e_o (5), paxmao (5), suchmoon (4), cissrawk (4), pugman (2), SFR10 (2), dinda22 (2), DarkStar_ (2), Aleister Crowley (2), iasenko (2), pawel7777 (1), NeuroticFish (1), sapta (1), chris200x9 (1), LoyceV (1), examplens (1), Lafu (1), AngelSky (1), andycarrol (1), Be_Happy (1), Arteezy.rtx (1), mu_enrico (1), abhiseshakana (1), Coolcryptovator (1), morvillz7z (1), mightwalker (1), vphasitha01 (1), as9ardia (1), Dont trust for money (1)
May this be the beginning of the demise of bitcointalk.org. Bitcoin is not dying out, but thousands of other cryptocurrencies exist, albeit most start-ups so most will fail however several hundred will remain.
There are: bitcoingarden and altcoinstalks, both of which are great for altcoins
