Topic: *Restarted* Post history review offer (Read 3673 times)

quote author=Casdinyard link=topic=5426440.msg64009398#msg64009398 date=1714406179]
and you get a pretty exhausted merit source.
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Nail===>Head.  Plus at this point--at least as far as doing post history reviews--I'm a dejected one due to the general mediocrity of the posts I'm seeing come my way and the 98% certainty that I've been meriting members with alt accounts making borderline 'good' posts.  I always tried to be generous, but I've also kept in mind why the merit system was such a blessing from on high (Theymos).  No way in hell I want to start helping shitposters or account farmers to rank up with relative ease.


No problem; you write well and you earned the merits I gave you.  Lol about the chicken nugget.  I'd prefer an extra dipping sauce, but honestly anything free these days I'm grateful for.


Oh yeah.  It's basically just that it's going to be harder to get rid of my monthly allotment of sMerits each month.  Over the years, the closeness of my reading on the forum has diminished due to the quality of the average post.  I've come to expect that most posts here are just crapola written to earn money (which can be seen in the number of duplicate answers whenever someone asks a question; nobody really reads anything anymore, and for the literary-minded I can't say I blame them).  But I'll keep spreading those merits around, believe me.


Nah.  I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way, as I did when I first became a merit source in 2019, i.e., reading and evaluating.


You're welcome.  Your posts are kind of funny, even if your grammar is atrocious (lol). 

...............................And with that, I am sealing this thread with a kiss and burying it in dust and the sands of time....................................

You have your own right to make use of any criterial for the pattern to how you distribute your merit, if you think this has gone so far, then consider it a worthwhile benefit as well, you have achieved a lot in doing that.

I may also want to go by your idea of stopping it because of the numbers of inflows on request for the review, in which a times its could be tiring or frustrating when you even see those that don't qualify applying, maybe you can be it a personal deliberation on whom you see make a quality post, then you go through their profile and if you finds such interesting, you can choose to merit such without them applying.

In a nutshell, my suggestion is that, you may choose to make a personal random selection on forum members whom you must have targeted for making quality post and go through their profiles, if the initial method of profile review base on application does not work anymore, you can take it up yourself to choose on a random selection of quality posters across the boards, it will be a surprised for someone who doesn't expect merits seeing you giving him, just my suggestion anyway.

This is something the community has to get used to because you have made your decision and all you said is true after all you choose to take this path as a merit source and now that you want to put a stop it (not receiving PMs) what would then happen to your position, are you still going to be a merit source?🤔
I'm ok with what ever decision you've made, I'd say instead of leaving all these behind why don't you change the way you normally use to do or have a specific time to preview  post or why not take that space of Ratimov since he's no longer making use of that thread or start your thread (with a title you choose)...just saying, and don't feel bad for doing what you did, after all you don't know which is sending a PM if is an alt or not.

Have to say a big thanks S.C...

I won't lie, this would be missed and I'm talking as a beneficiary of your kind gestures but I do understand your reasons for stopping because just like you said, many alts accounts have taken this as an avenue to grow their accounts and as it is, not much effort is put into making a good post anymore since they know that they can always apply for a post review and the merits will come.
Like I said, you had good intentions when you initially started this but like with every other thing in life, there's the pros and cons to it. Thank you for what you did for most of us in this community as many of us owe it to you for our rank ups and I sincerely hope you don't regret ever doing this..
 

Hey The Sceptical Chymist, I completely understand your decision and all I want you to think is that it was not all in vain. You helped me rank up to Hero if I remember correctly and I think as a poster I haven't done badly subsequently. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Thank you.

I have already expressed a similar opinion in some of the previous discussions that took place in another topic, but also before when I also expressed my opinion that this way of "distributing" merits is not what it should be. Personally, it never occurred to me to ask that someone "review" my posts, but then again, everyone is free to share their sMerits as they wish, as long as it does not enter the sphere of abuse.

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@The Sceptical Chymist, I think I already suggested it to you, but if you want to distribute most or all of your sMerits, simply raise the scale and give 5 or 10 merits for each post you consider valuable (even max 50 merits). That way, you can still be a useful merits source, and if you also reward people who know how to distribute your merits to other quality posts, you've done a great job.

Sad that this has to go but I totally understand where sir Sceptical Chymist is coming from, the fact alone that you're doing this shit for an extended period of time while having to wait to get your rations of merits before you can even do something is already a pretty arduous ordeal, add to this the concept of beign potentially taken advantage of by people you barely know for the sake of provisioning merits and actually promoting constructive content in this forum, and you get a pretty exhausted merit source.

It was fun while it lasted, being some of those who continually received merit assistance and content advice after leaving this forum for a lengthy amount of time, but if it meant having to deal with people who can't even increase the quality of their content on a daily basis, then I guess all of us have no choice but to deal with his decision.

Thank you very much Sir Sceptical for being one of the most helpful merit sources around here, and I would never forget just how much you have helped me grow this account after quitting and returning recently. Hope you find further success IRL as you have found here, also hope you get an extra chicken nugget every time you order.

You did what you thought was right at the time. Your criteria has changed, which is normal. It is important for a person to admit this change and move on.

I believe you will continue to distribute the smerits as you see fit. 

To be honest, I think that it is a good decision, I don't like the idea of sending your posts to someone to get merits, it just looks very fake and unnatural. It's okay to not receive merit on every good post. I think that giving away merits should be a more natural thing, i.e. you visit threads, read posts and then merit the one that you think deserves to be merited.
I think that sending your posts to someone via PM and asking them to check if they are eligible for merits, to me, looks like an attempt to rank up just for the sake of signature campaign. That's why I try to not post in local board, locals are always a little biased, no offence but this is just the way I think.

From what I remember, you had good will but far too many of those that benefitted from your efforts did not deserve it as they had nefarious intentions. Alt-accounts and account farmers were pouncing on any member that was offering to merit their posts and not only that, any opportunity they had to make a list of their posts trying to rank up in any thread facilitating ranking up or merits.

I am glad you have removed yourself this situation because far too many accounts took advantage of your good will.

Hello community,

"Take advantage of the time that people give you, without taking advantage of the people giving you time"

...Curtis Tyrone Jones

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Don't beat yourself, might not be the end you wanted but "Kindness" is the ROI. You won!!

Thanks for your kindness towards our community - you lifted a lot of "Deserved" profiles over there. Don't stop paying us a visit  

Dang it. I was putting together myself to make a request but its cool. I trust your judgement and you are right about how you feel. I appreciate the good work you have done in the forum with post history reviews. I know many many who have been beneficiaries of your benevolence when I look at their merit history. Thank you for this particular service to the community.

To the community:

After giving this a lot of thought, I've decided to end my offer to do post history reviews for people on request.  The whole thing started off great, but as of late I get the strong feeling that I've been basically helping a bunch of mediocre posters (and most likely their alt accounts) rank up, which was never my intention.  I've also been refusing more and more requests because posts don't meet my standards for merits, and it's just turned into a big time waster that I don't want to deal with any more.

I'm going to take a look at the requests that are still in my PM box, and if any of those members have written decent posts they'll get merits.  Aside from that, I am done.

I'll leave this thread open for a little bit and then I'm going to lock it.

I don't think that's the case, like going through your merit giving activity, you're like a teacher in this Forum that always push members to get on their feet whenever they're slowly dropping their efforts to give the Forum quality post. And you're well known to give out merit by reviewing posts that deserves it not like you wake up one morning and start giving merit to post that's not close to receiving any merit, you know how to do your thing and I believe you're more popular than the other merit source.
And again, you can't tell in any way that you're giving alt account merit, you're not from the spirit world to know who's who, you do what you have to do without minding if you're giving alts some merit, believe me that if you start thinking that way, this journey of post review will come to an end, you'll stop doing the merit review because you feel you're giving alt account merit.


Long or short slump it doesn't matter, you also need a time out to cool down a bit before coming back to start up from where you left it. Everyone have some other things to do outside the Forum that's why we get to see some account being inactive for long, so I'd say take your time in handling your stuff before coming back (which you have, I suppose) stronger.

As has been unravelled in this excellent thread PytagoraZ & komisariatku are alts, there are far too many nefarious characters around the forum that have one goal which is to obtain a higher rank to join signature campaigns.

Those accounts cannot rank up without a sizeable amount of merits therefore they try a wide array of activities to try to achieve their goal. You mentioned that thread you were asked by PytagoraZ to review his posts, thankfully it seems his alt-account and cheating competitions was made public before you responded but that episode demonstrates why it is difficult to review posts and give merits.

I am curious, will you raise the The Sceptical Chymist review assessment bar in order to give out merits to posts that meet a certain higher threshold because of what happened with those alt-accounts being linked?

Naaaa...Damn it!!! That's not true old boyyyy!! Remember I looked through your profile and somehow, I described you ... Only that i learnt you don't have a protruding tummy, but that doesn't make you look like anything close to your description..

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I see alot of sense in that as well... I've read through several post that didn't get merited but has a shitty reply as though it was a constructive criticism merited.. That alone made the discussion a chaos of unnecessary point proving and argument.
I got messaged by a user several months ago from bitcoingirl's thread, begging me to merit their post for some returns....I'm afraid the worst is yet to happen,Vod.

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

The merit system doesn't seem to be able to automatically throttle; when I left as a merit source I had over 1,000 smerit.  Theymos said to give more merit to an individual post rather than merit posts not worthy.

Merit has now become a commodity; I am going to be reviewing negative trust on profiles in the past regarding this.

Any person who has no doubts about what he's doing is either stupid or a sociopath (take that statement with a grain of salt).  Of course I've got doubts about people taking advantage of my offer.  I always have, and I had them right from the get-go.  But since I eliminated gambling posts from my review offer I think I might have prevented myself getting taken advantage of just a little bit.  And again, what nobody else sees aside from me and the PM recipients is that I reject a lot of requests based on post quality, and I put a lot of members' PMs on ignore so that I don't get fooled into doing reviews for them again.

Also, I do also give merits to posts I happen to come across, so it's not as though that doesn't happen at all.  It just accounts for much less of my sMerit stash.  I do thank you for the input.

I'm not sure about the 3 month thing, but I might consider the suggestion about alts and tagging.  But I think I've tagged at least one member for taking advantage of my offer before, so it's not like that's unprecedented.  Anyway, I'm going to sleep on it and appreciate the suggestion.

I don’t think people are keeping on your profile. Well you can never tell but my theory is these accounts are following a pattern. It’s possible they figured you do post reviews at the end/beginning of the month, so they know the right time to pitch in their request. If you’re being taken advantage of by alts, it won’t be long before you find a resemblance in their posting pattern.

As far as I can see, you are active on the forum, and if you see a really good post, why not reward it with 5 or 10 (maybe even more merits) and that way you can share a lot more than you do through private reviews. There are also people who will never ask anyone to review their posts, and all of them somehow remain out of your reach - and I know there are a lot of good posters who don't get nearly the merits they deserve.

There is no doubt that your intention is good, but you yourself have doubts about the sincerity of those who send you PMs.


Every merits source is in some way a person of interest, especially those like you who offer private reviews - because unlike those who do it publicly, it is much easier to hide bad intentions (alt accounts) when no one but you can see it.

I'm not at all surprised that people do everything to get merits, because for a good part of the members, this forum is, as they say, "a place for work", and nothing more than that.