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Right, I felt I needed to butt in here, since I also contribute to the local Spanish board and fully understand the posts without having to result to “google transleet”(catchphrase I use thanks to someone’s misspelt post some time ago) :
First some objective data con contextualize de core focus of your post (I am not going to dissect it all, at least not now):
Paxmao has awarded sMerit to 549 different people, totalling 1.176 sMerits as of last Friday. The average he awards is 1,13 sMerits/TX with a standard deviation of 0,5. Less than half of his sMerit is awarded on the Spanish Local forum, so really he is a global merit source with responsibility over a local board.
The Spanish Local board is a potentially large one, but in practice, the activity is not that high and anyone who can put a decent thought into his posts is bound to stand-out. I consider that there is just a bunch of good posters on the Spanish Local board, so those tend to be the most merited there and even concentrate a fair share due to this fact.
In truth, I myself often try to award merit there, and I find that I refrain from giving too much out not because some posts do not deserve more, but because I don’t particularly like a photo of overly concentrating sends. I have personally merited 25 different people on the Spanish forum, and wouldn’t really have merited more people to date there, but I could have given some more if it were not for the mental hand-brake I draw due to the above. This effect is I believe in the minds of others too, not just me.
Everyone’s criteria for meriting is different, and I would not have merited myself some of those posts (in fact, I didn’t, although I may or may not have seen them). Of course, if everyone had my criteria, then we would only be meriting a certain style and content on the forum over and over again. Fortunately, there is diversity in criteria.
The fact that only one person merited most of the posts you reference is not in itself proof nor a hint to anything. 79,80% of posts that are merited there are for a measly 1 Merit, and 88,28% of merited posts are merited by a single person. Merit is not a Fiesta there really.
On certain occasions, someone bumps a thread with a comment, you read the thread, and decide to merit a post written a few weeks or months ago. This is not too frequent, but again a feasible thing that may happen (I’ve done this on a few occasions).
The 120 day limit of sMerit TXs is not an issue. There are around six or seven tools around created by forum members for us, with weekly updates or even on-the-fly updates. A bit more time invested in searching for these tools will do wonders …
Note: More info on Análisis del sMérito en el foro en español. Notice that there are quite a few decent replies to the OP that go totally unmerited. That's another interesting stat to do ...<...> I would love to be a part of your local board, it seems like its too easy to earn merits.
Easy then: Learn the fucking language and then prepare for around two lifetimes to rank-up there above Member rank...