Topic: Merited Banned Account - page 2. (Read 430 times)

One of the main purposes of introducing merit system is to identify the high quality posts so that readers can avoid wasting their time by reading all the posts. Merited posts are sign of high quality post. So, there's nothing wrong if a banned user gets a merit if the post is high quality.

The only problem with meriting a banned user's post is the circulation of merits. It's going to be decreased if shared with banned user but the ratio is too small as shared above.

Yep, it seems a waste to send merit to banned users.

With so few ways to get banned, there's also a pretty good chance of accidentally meriting plagiarism.

I know I would appreciate a heads-up, maybe something like this:

I figure that, were the banned status to be explicitly shown on the account’s profile summary by his posts, I might have pondered not meriting the post I merited, although the question he formulated was interesting and I might have do so regardless. I wouldn’t mind being able to decide after seeing a visual cue within the forum itself, but alas, that is not the case (I know there are useful extension to that effect, which I’m not inclined to use).

My remeriting sprees are more picky though, and they don’t remerit posts for banned users to the extend it can avoid doing so. Thus the post I merited on the sixth was not remerited on the fifteenth.


Note (messing around with data):

There is a forum stat that shows Merits sent to permanently banned members in the last 180 days (this one). Whilst the list is incomplete, showing only top senders to permanently banned users, it accounts for 729 sMerits sent to them. Of course this is also a superset of the case depicted in the OP, since it accounts (I believe) for merits sent both before and after the affected accounts were banned.

Even so, and using this therefore subset/superset and incomplete stat as a deliberately exaggerated worst case scenario, that would give an average of around 4,05 sMerits per day given to banned accounts, which is pretty small forumwide. Bearing in mind that we’ve sent around 151K sMerits in the last 6 months, the figure in this worst case scenario would be of around 0,48% of all sent sMerits in a 180 day window. Small enough for it to not be statistically significant.

I will disappoint you. This account has not created a single quality post. And perhaps you will be very upset that even the post that seemed to you of high quality was not written by him personally. Therefore, just get used to the fact that not all people see plagiarism and rush to check it. Because of this, such posts are marked with merit. 
But you don't have to worry that your posts will be invaluable at a time when such bad guys, just by copying, earn merit faster than everyone else. Enough merits for everyone.
As you can see, this account regrets its actions. I think that he will deserve his ban with dignity, and he will realize that, in fact, he only deceived himself.

Do you know one thing about plagiarised content? they are nice to read, it was a pure copy and paste, but of course, it is not everyone that will notice the act. It is possible that at the time those posts were merited, the users weren't aware that the user has been banned, and the post that was merited obviously deserved merit as a beginner to encourage them.



Again, by SMF default template, the forum doesn't show banned on profiles except when you used a third party extension such as the forum BPIP extension to see something like the above, if any user should view Feeling sound profile, they wouldn't know that he was banned.

People are banned for a variety of reasons. Being banned does not mean that they have not made other posts which are merit worthy. Further, it is unreasonable to expect merit sources to check the status of every user they want to merit using third party tools.

The amount of merit being sent to banned accounts and therefore not recirculated is minuscule and not worth worrying about. Most merit sources are sitting with significantly more than this in their stash, not mentioning all the merit sent to inactive accounts (like the 4.5k to Satoshi) or other users who simply don't hand it all back out again.

If you think there are good posts going unmerited, then link to them in this thread: [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source

I don't see any problem if someone want to meriting a high quality post of a banned account, why should someone only meriting a not banned user? maybe some users doesn't want due to it will make the account can't send sMerit to other users (CMIIW).

If Satoshi said a dying Bitcoin is a donation and make the Bitcoin price slightly increase, then we also say it's will become dying sMerit and it will make Merit slightly valuable due to lesser circulation.

I just found out that some user still got merited after he was banned. Though we know that merit was based on quality post shared to this forum, but I believe that the merit should be sent to another qualified member with good quality posts than being sent it to banned account. I have no problem about being merited if that account is banned because of his/her quality posts, its just like we are throwing merit away to banned account where it can never be sent to anyone.

For example :

This user feeling sound was reported due to Plagiarism last Aug 4 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60685684 and got 7 merit after he was banned last Aug 5, 2022. See below images.





So, I would like to suggest if possible, we can disable this "merit +" sign beside "quote" button after user was banned to avoid getting merited? I believe that in anyway somehow this can maintain the good flow of merits? What do you think?