It really all depends on what sections will be rank/merit restricted. If we limit all Bitcoin related sections and only allow people to rank up in the altcoin, Beginners, and local boards we'll just see an increase of spam there. Yes, it might be restricted to one section, but that just means whoever is moderating that section or frequents those sections will be overwhelmed with low quality posts and people attempting to get merits by making their poor quality posts look constructive or of an outstanding quality.
I see your point, and yes, perhaps there would be some "migration effect". However, a counter-counterargument is that we already face the challenge of many low quality posts, and for now this is universal across all the sections / threads.
Possibly, we could make merits spendable to unlock certain sections or certain threads. If someone is willing to spend 1 merit to unlock a thread then you would probably expect them to at least try and get that merit back by posting in that thread. Although, this is assuming that everyone cares about merits not everyone will and the likelihood not many people make enough posts let alone quality posts to get enough merit to do this. I don't think this is necessary and is adding a sort of pay wall behind threads which not every post needs to be constructive.
Well, if somebody has "legitimately" earned merits to spend, i.e. has been awarded those merits for their posts, they already have proven themselves in the eyes of their peers, so the spending of merits would not provide any additional measure to ensure quality. Or did I get the wrong end of the stick?
I don't think this is a good idea side wide, but could be an option for those people who make self moderated threads and want the discussion to be of high quality. They wouldn't receive the merit it would just be lost forever to avoid abuse. This would also have it's drawbacks including less sMerits being spent on quality posts, although we could just leave that up to the merit sources in the future when there's a lot more of them around.
Yes, site wide does not make sense. Perhaps just creating a write-restricted level 1 area (same level as Bitcoin, Economy etc.) would be sufficient, or there could be several level 2 sections, one each under Bitcoin, Economy etc. I would, however, not make this a thread specific option only. Otherwise these (hopefully) high-quality discussions will be intermingled in the index with the open threads, and thus will most likely go unnoticed.
Although I don't see how receiving merits as part of those restricted discussions could lead to abuse, you actually hit on an interesting idea:
If merits can only be earned in the open areas, but not in the restricted discussion areas, but earned merits are used as an entry requirement for posting in the restricted area it could create on one hand quality discussions in those restricted threads, while not "starve" or "marginalize" the open threads. It seems to me that this would create an ideal balance without introducing an unwanted "run-to-quality" bias and at the same time continue to raise the quality of the overall forum as currently intended.
