Dammit, I did not want to merit your post because you're a Legendary member, but it was spot-on and I had to.
Hahahahaha... I do that too. Sometimes reluctant to merit Legendary accounts and also members who I have merited a lot, but sometimes, it becomes irresistible...
I have an extensive ignore list to guide my ignoring habits, though that doesn't mean I don't peek at posts here and there. The members I have on my list are ones who've proven to be habitual shitposters, and I have no reason to suspect that they're going to improve anytime soon. I generally don't put members on ignore just because I disagree with them, even if that's a consistent thing--I don't have QS, TECSHARE, and a number of others on my list. They generally don't write big rambling walls of shitposting text like cryptohunter and those others write, so I don't mind seeing their posts.
Probably, we are never going to have exactly a prefect system that does not change at all because even as people we change through the years and therefore it would be a good practice to tweak our systems from time to time. I used to have an Excel list for a kind of keeping track of certain kinds of behaviors that I found worthy of notation, and I nearly completely abandoned that particular list and streamed it down to a much smaller kind of list of consideration(s), and probably with the passage of time, I am going to need to tweak my current practice, too.
Theymos never put down any guidelines for merit sources and their ignore lists. If he ever did, I would gladly abide by them.
It's likely a good thing for theymos NOT to lock in too many criteria about merit (or merit abuse) into a written document, even though, like the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is famous for writing that he could recognize porn when he saw it, theymos could proclaim the same kind of abilities to recognize merit abuse when he saw it. hahahahahaha