There are just too many variables and it is really difficult for new members to rank up. I have seen people with more Activity than me with 0 Merit, being jr. members or memebers (with difficulties). Is tehre any chance for the revision of the Merit system?
I believe that the main variable is interest. That is after all what posts should aim at, being interesting. Whatever you write can be viewed in many ways by different people, depending on what each one of us is drawn to, and just as in real life, in the forum we won’t get consensus on the degree of interest a post can achieve. Interest is in itself a multidimensional variable.
Interest will be correlated to quality in general, whereby quality will determine whether that interest is held throughout the post.
Factors such as tempo, language, expressiveness and tone all conform the support of the post, contributing to the overall perception.
Then you’ve got the placement factors which give your post visibility: post’s name, heat, posting section, thread, thread size, recency and time, to name a few. These factors are yours to consider and conform your credentials to be spotted by others. Visibility is a prime factor and actually one of the most critical, since good posts can get buried easily by others in a couple of minutes or hours at the most.
Now when you’ve got a post which is candidate to be interesting to some, and placed with a minimum of visibility, the next factor that weighs in is your audience. Good and interesting topics to some, may be disregarded by others due to the content’s no being interesting to them.
Lastly, you need to have attracted enough interest for some of the audience to pocket out some sMerit as a reward for your post. This is however a secondary factor to posting, although it is obviously relevant in a system that does bare ranks, and constitutes a means of recognition.
Having said all that, the point is that the formula is really much more complicated when you give it a thorough though.
Regardless, activity is a factor to use with care. Some are really active bringing nothing to the table, whilst others post with less frequency but more though into every post. Not all posts are going to be candidates to a Nobel or Pulitzer, but the trashcan should not be an objective either.
And no, I doubt the system is going to be revised so soon (monitored yes, but no revised). A brief one day "scare" was enough back on April the 1st ...