As a separate point, does anyone know if sMerit can be gained thorugh activity increasing? E.G, every 14 activity you get a merit or is it just when you get merits that you get a 50% sMerit?
Nope, no "free" sMerit other than what we all got initially. You can only get sMerit if someone sends you merit (0.5 sMerit per merit received), or if you're a merit source yourself (fixed amount per month).
). Actually it was for a WiFi thread in the Ivory Tower, and it was a really helpful set of suggestions for me. I suspect that this use of the system may be part of the planned improvements. Giving merits to posters making generalised replies in the spam threads will not help to improve quality. Giving away sMerits hasn't affected my personal holding, so I can see it is a way for those of us with specialist interests to reward helpful and informative replies in our threads. 
