I have some suggestion about this merit system.
Because of it is too hard to gain merits, this came out on my mind.
What if people who has a lot of sMerit make another account and send merit to his/her own account to rank up for farming, newbies here like me get hard times to gain merits and it is not fair to newbies like me.
Lets accept the fact that even you make sa useful and high Quality post you still dont get merit sometimes.
It may be hard to get merits but there are many users probably merit sources who has created threads in this forum that gives out merit if you are a good poster. Just visit their threads.
My suggestion
Why dont make it like this, No sMerit system only MERIT system and only admins can send merit to a post so that it will be fair for all and less the job of admin by checking someone send merits to another if its a farm account.
In this system no one can play the merits only the admins.
It is not possible for the admins to looks after all the users in this forum and keep on giving merits according to their post quality,they wont be adding new mods for that i guess,either way they will miss out people,because it is an impossible task, theymos appointed some users as merit source because they were interested and hopefully they will take care of that.
EDIT: In additional I think we can make merit system automatic like activity. depends on the how long the post is, and if the post is not useful or quality merits can be gone if the post is deleted by the admins.
(there must be a lenght requirements to be merited automatically, I think all can notice a long post if its a spam post/trash then if everyone report a trash post it can be automatically deleted).
Merit system cannot be automatic like activity and if it does,then there is no use in implementing the feature in the first place,a quality post cannot be wagged on the number of paragraphs you filled and if that becomes a norm then you will see people writing gibberish to reach the post length.