Well, same goes for Ratimov's merits. There's a lot of exchange between Russian accounts on this forum.
Does this mean that it's ill gotten merit? Maybe. But it's up to interpretation really at the end of the day.
We've said it time and time again that local boards should be encouraged to be more active and merit is a nice incentive. But with all that liberty comes also some responsibility, and back-scratching indeed isn't an ideal scenario, especially if a language subforum isn't really growing but it's just the same members over and over again.
Does this mean that it's ill gotten merit? Maybe. But it's up to interpretation really at the end of the day.
We've said it time and time again that local boards should be encouraged to be more active and merit is a nice incentive. But with all that liberty comes also some responsibility, and back-scratching indeed isn't an ideal scenario, especially if a language subforum isn't really growing but it's just the same members over and over again.
Well, that's precisely what we've been talking about at length on my local board, where although the total number of posters in a month may be 40, there are about a dozen of us who are regularly active every day there. We all write with a certain quality, and what ends up happening? We send merits to each other, which someone from the outside could see as a merit exchange, but the same thing happened with the foxpup's merit cycling club, who were accused of sending merits to each other. Normal, they are high quality posters, so it is logical that they give merits to each other.
For me, to say that there is merit exchange, you have to see more than just people sending merits to each other back and forth.
Should there be intervention though? This to me is questionable.
I don't think so either, and theymos has expressed the same opinion.
