It's even worse. Why is merit needed? To rank up. Why is ranking up important? For earning (bounty, signature,...).
I just want to wear a(nother) hat
you get plenty of Merit for your helpful posts even for the second account, and you named both accounts the same. You'll get your hat, don't worry.
You know that this was not about you, you don't pose a risk to the (Merit) system.
False, you get plenty of merit for posting helpful posts in the RIGHT threads with the RIGHT people, i have seen plenty of posts that were exceedingly helpful and they gained 0 merit. some were understandable as they were much older posts however i have seen plenty of new helpful and informative posts in random threads that received no merit. i could easily heavily abuse the system with a simple dataminer and then go to the right threads and post long and informative posts to get loads of merit. how would you do it?
simple, the forum software is very simple, you notice that the post url is just a post ID and not a post name this means you could make a timed for loop in python
e.g.
import urllib2
from time import sleep
header = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'Connection': 'keep-alive'}
for i in range(10000): #goto every page between 1 and 10001
urlbase = "https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic={}" #of this url
request = urllib2.Request(urlbase, headers=header) #with this request
response = urllib2.urlopen(request) #and download the response
html = response.read() # and read the downloaded response
print html
sleep(5) # then sleep for five seconds so as to not trigger the ddos-protection blacklist
then you could easily parse the data for who merits the posts and how much they merited (i am not going to post the code for this because im not going to enable, if you know enough (literally that code is exactly seven minutes of google and writing (i dont code in python)) then you could run another script to check the profile of the users who merit the most and then view where that user mostly posts and output that to a file, spend 20 minutes researching the coin and post in their thread a detailed help system for new users and bam easy free merit. its a broken system that is crazy easy to abuse, in an hour of my time i could easily abuse the system to get tons of merit. of course id have to run the python script overnight to get enough data and parse it to be able to use that hour best but still, one day and you could have hundreds if not thousands of merit.
you don't pose a risk to the (Merit) system. Wink
This is not a threat, but i myself, someone who doesnt know a damn thing about python, could easily destroy the entire merit system by finishing that little script, integrating a database utilization, and releasing it for free. Bitcointalk would need a massive update to how the entire software runs in order to mitigate that, not just to the merit system.
first, they would have to remove the ability for you to see who merits you, then they would have to remove the ability to see what posts were merited, they would also have to change how the forum recognizes threads, as well as blocking you from seeing who has what amount of merit. blocking that specific header will do nothing, i know how to have things use random headers.
hell i dont even need access to the post, this url gives me everything i need and MORE
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u={userID here}
If you truely think the merit system is not broken in any way, boy are you sorely mistaken
Matrix
