Topic: [PROPOSAL] Disable Merit on Local Boards. (Read 356 times)

It should not be like that! Why? Because massive abusements occured in many local boards of the forum; and till now admin and moderators can not find complete solutions to end this endemic.
I come from Vietnam. At the time I knew about local boards in the forum, Vietnamese local board was banned several months before. Honestly, I felt very dissapointed, then I spent several minutes to scan around the local board. Honestly, I realized that admin and moderators made right decision.
I also saw lots of users complained that there are massive abusements in other local boards, such as Chinese, Russian, etc.
We should and have to end this somehow, and merit system will play important role to do this.

In modern society, especially in technological aspect and crypto ecosystem, you can not take advantage if are not able to use English. If you are not able to read, to write English, you should not earn merit points in the forum, consequently. Because you don't deserve to receive merits.
Generally, I don't support the idea to disable merit on local boards.

What? NO! That would be horrible! I would actually want to promote to have more sMerit sources in the local boards to allow those who can't speak english fluently to gain more merits. There may be abusers or account farmers in the local boards but that's only the minority. Let the mods of the local boards handle that. Even if you restrict sending merit in the local boards, that's not going to be a way for them to improve their english and grammar. Forcing them to post on the other boards won't help, and it will just add to the spam.

You're wrong on many of the points you claim:

- You can't black-out local boards because you've detected abuse there. Abuse should be reported but local boards are not a set of new sMerit mafia per se. Within local boards there  is a wide difference of variance in the amount of sMerit awarded to them. Russian and Turkish are at the top and effectively contribute to people ranking-up there, while other boards are suffering a severe sMerit drought. No to discrimitation based on language.

- Meta is rather about helping forum structure and management as a whole. By that, I don´t see why you consider it's not there to help out. In terms of sMerit awarded to Meta, the percentage is rather measly in the lower ranks, so it is not an issue even by those standards.

It's not really like you say. sMerit Given to same rank or below:

Jr Member: 24,80%
Member: 60,33%
Full Member: 71,50%
Sr. Member: 79,02%
Hero Member: 77,07%
Legendary: 88,64%

Jr. Members tend to do just what you say, but other ranks tend to favor same rank or below.


Check out the stats on this post to see which rank each rank sends sMerit to in further detail: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.33469339

My answer is NO, by now and will never be implemented in the future.
Why?
All users in the forum are treated equally, and all boards (including child boards) in the forum should be treated equally, too. Particularly in specific aspects which have globally impacts on the forum users.
I agree that there are some places in the forum, only higher-ranked members can join and discuss, but your suggestion is for merits. So it should not be implemented locally, should be distributed globally and equally for all.

More and more topic from this user about merit lol, i dont know why does he try so hard to get merits. It is better if you do some other contribution rather than making some useless and foolish suggestion.

If you want to ban merit from local board, then its better if you delete the local board instead, since people wont be active there because there are no merits.

Lol, non-native English speakers should learn how to use English proficiently before posting in the forum. You should learn, sharpen their English skills first before showing the written threads. If not, most of their threads will be something like shits.
More importantly, the forum is a place for discussions (in some boards, in-depth disucssions). It is not a place for spammers, in-proficient English writers to publish their low-quality threads.
For someone who interested in learning useful tutorial to improve their threads' quality; there you go:
TMAN's guide to getting merits

Well, the issue in here is to eliminate the merit abusers but why when I viewed their profile was not tagged them by DT members.
We know that moderators on the local board are limited I think just only 1 or 2 moderators so it is not easy for them to caught merit abusers.
So, therefore I agree on that disable merit on Local Board most of the abusers hiding in that section.

If we were rating people on their English skills, then you wouldn't be looking so hot, my friend. I would be careful, because you are walking on a slippery slope, or throwing rocks in a glass house; take your pick of analogy.
This forum is not a linguist forum, it is the Bitcoin forum. Bitcoin was meant to overcome language barriers and need no translator. We should embrace other communities, countries and languages as long as we can feasibly do so. There is no benefit to the forum or Bitcoin by centralizing it to exclusively English speakers; this literally defeats one of the main premises on which Bitcoin was created.

No.
People will abuse anyway on others sections, and local is good for people who don't have English as first language.

There is no sense in entertaining this suggestion as something to be seriously considered. I don't mean to be harsh, but if you had read the original announcement/discussion thread for merit, theymos addresses this directly by explicitly saying they are looking for merit sources that actively spend their time in local boards. The merit system is not meant to centralize or give incentive to discussion around a couple of boards and topics. Nobody should be punished for speaking a different language or for being part of a sub-board community. These local boards are a tremendously wonderful part of our community. There must be a better suggestion that this, else I do not see it being taken seriously any time soon.

For me its good because they will improve their english skills it may also benefit them not only here but also in their personal life.

Exactly. Users who don't understang English but want to earn Merit would be forced to post in English boards with help of Google Translate. But it's obvious that their posts will be hardly understandable and nobody will give Merit them. English boards are already full of low quality posts written in broken English, why we need to make everything even worse.
If you see Merit abuse on local boards, don't be lazy and report it, I don't think it's more difficult to notice it than on English boards.

Your suggestion punishes everyone that does not speak English, and would cause these people to post even more impossible-to-understand nonsense to the English boards in an attempt to gain merit.


These statements are laughable.

This is a useless suggestion.Merits should be given regardless of the boards they're in if the posts are found useful by the members of those board.I agree farming merit becomes easier in local boards due to lack of moderation and obviously language.However,local board moderators should be willing to go an extra mile to somehow report such accounts and have them tagged.

That would not be possible since it is exactly the same in saying that there are no quality posts in local boards or any other boards that will be affected by the changes you are suggesting.
That would also be good but I don't think that suggestion would be accepted, everyone is free to give merits to any post they wanted to merit, may it be posted on meta or not.

Alt farming merits accounts can use any board to distibute merits between each other so the merit limitation for local boards will not really help avoiding those farms. As every system has a loophole, sheeters will find ways to reach their spammy goals. Your proposal, like many other proposals, will not help the success of the new ranking system but we, as users, can keep reporting spammers to moderators, and classify them in a pinned thread. I may also suggest to add more options to the ranking system to make it more difficult to reach.
Those who wanna get more merits, have just to improve their english skills and try to understand the meaning of a developped post without even thinking about how much merits they could get.
Keep in mind that those who are interrested by reaching high ranks level, are all bounty hunters.

Another "merit thread" but please give it a time to read.


Merit system is "hot trend" right now in our community many user's are still complaining about this system and many of the high rank members are being rude to them.

But I notice that many this members complaining about the system has a good quality posting (Im not telling that all of them).

Then I realized that some of those complainants are contributing good quality post and helping other newbies/people in this community but they cant get merit points because of this reasons:

-Some of us has too much standard to merit a post.
-Many user's hold their sMerit for evil purposes.
-Maybe the merit source are not enough especially many of them are not active on distributing merit.
-They give high amount of merits to "ANN Threads" 20's-50's But I think Ann thread's dont need to be merited.
-But this is the biggest problem why the merits circulation is not enough, those "Merit Abusers" we all know that many of them holds a high amount of sMerit especially those people who has many high rank accounts.


So Im suggesting this proposal to reduce the possibility to abuse the merit system.

I know that soon they will be out of merit's but for sure they dont care anymore as long as they already maximize the rank that they can get on abusing merit system.


My Suggestion is to limit the section/board that everyone can send merit, especially disable sending merits on local boards because in my experience on hunting those merit abusers I see a lot of abuse on local boards that I dont understand and got lazy sometimes to translate the each pages to make a report.

Ex. this user.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/noidor-965089
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/gamerwot-1108972

Try to check their merit summary and you will see a lot of connected accounts meriting each other on their local boards thread some of them are obviously alts and maybe some of them are friends.

Limiting boards that can send merit will surely reduce this merit abuse case and it will be easier to track those abusers.

The bad effect of this is we will flood post on section's that can send and receive merits...




FUN FACT: I think it will be also good if we ban sending/receiving merits on meta to see who are the people really wants to help and people who just post here to earn some merits.