I think its far more likely that he's exhausted his brain. I'm only about 20 or so pages into that thread, and its been every couple of days I've been going through them. He's been doing it for hours at a time, and some of them are from newbies which can't embed images so he has to go through the extra effort of navigating to the image.
Honestly it is my first time I witnessed continous hours of actively works in the forum from theymos. I know he probably does this but we don't know what he does behind the scenes. This time, with the art contest and his merit-sending activities, we have good evidence that he works hours-in-a-row for the art contest within last few days.
For newbies and restrictions to display images, I guess theymos probably write a script to automatically display images post by newbies. It is not too challenging for our beloved admin. I don't believe theymos does this manually.
Initially, he planned to distributed at least 500 merits but from now I think he might distribute at least 5000 merits.
- I will give out a ton of merit, probably at least 500 in total, based mainly on effort.
I joined the contest and received some merits from theymos too, but merit is not what I truly care about. I would prefer to get this badge but I don't think I have chance to get this (based on merits I received from the contest and what top highest receivers got).
- Between 1 and 20 (depending on number of submissions) people will receive art contest recognition badges:
, based mainly on
community consensus of who had the best art. In judging consensus, I will be substantially but not entirely influenced by the total amount of merit your art received.