Topic: Merit Requirement for Member Proposal - page 3. (Read 725 times)

It's curious how all the hero members want the requirements for sr. members and below to be increased, all the sr. members want the merit requirements for Full Member and below to be increased, etc. If the merit requirements are increased from 10 to 25, it will not stop merit farming, nor will it really even slow it down as 25 merits is really not a hard number to obtain. The major issue isn't the fact that so many people are ranking up to member, it's that people are filling up bounty and signature campaigns with alternate accounts.

I would recommend a more reasonable solution, remove the merit requirements altogether, and only upgrade members who are within a certain percentile of merit received per month. E.g. Only the top 5% of high quality users are eligible to rank up. There should be a leaderboard so that we can check who is currently in the lead, and that way if people are boosting their way to the top they will also be under increased scrutiny. I genuinely think this system will stop the abuse issues, and will result in more high quality members in the upper member levels. You will never stop the Jr. and Newbie members from potentially being low quality, but you can at least stop them benefiting from their spam posting.

I look forward to seeing any responses to my proposal.

In all honesty, I believe you can easily make 10 merits with a well thought and informative topic. However, you will have a hard time getting merits from only commenting on threads.

100 merits for full member seems difficult but I personally don't need to worry about that for a few more months. I'll complain about not having 100 merits next June.

It isn't the number of members that is significant, but the number of active members. In fact, if you are considering merit as a competitive reward, it is even fewer than that. It should just be the ones that are capable of constructing a meaningful and informative post that are the competition.

It is already hard for a Member to rank up to a Full member as it is, so if they have the quality to acquire 100 merits, a little increase for merit requirement to rank up would not hurt them because they are capable of acquiring it.

Merit farmers will still stay for quite a while in the forum, we have 1,472,528 forum members at the moment and only a handful of members are making an effort to identify merit farmers.

Well, some of the merits you've received seem totally random and by those standards I should have gotten a few more merits for my posts, but sure, if you think so...

We all know that merit allocation to rank up is still under experimental stage. I think the mod theymos is aware of this and i am patiently waiting on what would be their action for the proven alt accounts. Lets just wait and see.

P.s. with merit system. Mods can easily track alts / farmer accounts. Its all recorded.

No, you are wrong.
 I'm no Einstein but I still get merit.
It's not so difficult as it seems. I have put a lot of time reading in order to be able to answer some average questions, but now I understand more so + the Merit you get knowledge which is more valuable.

Would it work like that, though? I'm just asking. When the merit system started, every member was given merits equal to the rank they held then. Maybe that would happen again.

This would mean you'd drop down your rank to jr member again. Do you really want that?

I'd say give us Members the chance to rank up easier by lowering the merits required because there's no way I'm getting to 100 unless I come up with something like "Theory of Relativity Vol. 2" 

Give the system a few months at least. Then we can discuss, when we have enough data to analyse.
No changes are needed at this point.

edit> corrected some typos.

Demerits could easily be abused, just like what's happening with merit farming right now and alts and so forth, and even just an organised group of people would be able to demerit others maliciously. What we've got with merits is just fine right now IMO. Merit farmers are being caught and red-trusted every single day now, and it seems to be stopping at least some farmers.

I guess you are right increasing the number of Merits to rank up isnt so bad. But still many out there are just newbies that doesnt go well with the Merit System, if you'll gonna take a peek on some local threads many of them are already having a problem with just the 10 Merits requirements and as of that they're just begging for those with the higher rank just to give them that while knowing that is really impossible. I find the increasing the number of Merit requirements more helpful for them because with that they wont have a choice but to raise their capability of posting some threads with such a quality.

25 Merits is just fine, even though im still on my way ranking up, I approve this kind of proposal for us in the future wont be having a problem with those who're cheating just to rank up. It's unfair for is who really strive and trying the best of what we can do.

By the way, may I ask for your contributions to help here if you know some other ways to help the newbies THANKS IN ADVANCE! ( not asking to give Merits but a reliable sources will be enough for us.)

 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/other-ways-to-get-merits-lock-muna-dahil-napakarami-ng-off-topic-comments-3021637

This is a good idea to add, but if theymos increase the merit requirement for each rank, then it will be more difficult for members to rank up, even for hard workers (I mean people who write high quality posts). Merit farmers are not longer stay in the forum soon, because they will be all tagged by DT members, it's a matter of time. I don't think there is any issues with the merit requirement for each rank now, maybe there is another idea which theymos think about can improve the merit system in the future.

That's my point. Account farmers with higher ranks can easily send 10 sMerits to their Jr. Member alt accounts. Thus, making them easy to farm bounties even more. AFAIK, Members are paid more than Jr. Members in Signature Campaigns so if these spam bots could make their alts rank up fast, they could harvest more.


I disapprove this one. What's the point of initiating a merit system if the required merit for a rank will be reduced when they find it difficult to attain the required merit. The user should adjust, not the system.


It's too easy for quality posters. 25 will be a challenge.

I guess theymos doesn't want to put the limit to high due to the lesser restrictions that come with being a member. Although, I believe he has suggested he's willing to tweak things if people are getting merit to easily, and the other way around. I don't think this is an issue currently though and the 10 merit is probably fine.

I see many Jr. Members easily rank up to Member because the required Merits is only 10. And I can see many merit farming (an example:
 see here). We are aware that this is done by some/many bounty hunters out there. This is an obvious abuse and would like to propose some minor changes in the required merit requirement for Members.

Instead of 10 Merits for Members, why don't we increase it to 25 Merits? This way, Jr. Members will have to strive harder in order to rank up to Member. Merit farming will be difficult because their sMerits will diminish fast.

Insights are welcome.