The merit system is not working, look the merit points of people on the forum, it does not move (even for the more relevant posts), the forum established a system which was suppose to penalize newcomers flooding the forum with useless post, but the forum penalize itself, good luck everybody, If you think people will give you merit points for free you are mistaken.
Merit is given to those who deserve it. Did you make a thorough study on the current merit system that made you conclude that the system is not working? What is your basis or its just because you don't get merits on your posts that's why you concluded that the merit system is a failure. Its not even more than 2 weeks, give it a chance.
That's bullshit though. Look at which posts in this very thread got merited and tell me why they were deserving and others weren't. The only common theme seems to be that they defended the merit system. Is that what the system was created for? How is that any different than the circle-jerks that the "upvote" or "like" systems perpetuate?
There are lots of problems with the merit system, but the one that stands out to me, other than the arbitrariness (not sure if this is even a real word but the spell checker seems to think it is lol) of the whole thing is that there are just so damn many posts created on this forum that it's impossible for them to be judged on whatever metric of usefulness that is supposed to be used. It also isn't cutting down on spam either. I still gloss over 90% of the posts I see because they're just the same sentence being regurgitated using varying degrees of broken English to answer the OP, with maybe a handful of people actually responding to other posters and furthering discussion. Instead of worrying about likes/merits/epeen-measuring-contests, I'd rather see a 4chan style system that tags responses to each post with mouseovers.
Disclaimer: I honestly don't give a crap about the advertising privileges or whatever it is that a higher rank is supposed to grant since I block every single ad on this site. Yep, the annoying banner ads, the signatures, and every other eyesore that's on the default site. Is there a membership or something that I can buy to get rid of all of that shit?