The problem with showering merits onto forum stats, and ignoring the main purpose of the forum, is that it discourages some members. Since I've started to notice the rapid rise in merits for forum "governance", and I've had posts deleted, and ignored when I comment in topics that I think are relevant to the old purpose of the forum, I've joined some other forums ( not crypto ), and I'm spending time on them, rather than trying to promote activity here.
I would agree. Although, the forum statistics are informative, and I do believe they deserve some amount of merit. However, with the recent increase of source merit I'm hoping users will be rewarding more merits to other things, and not just the statistical threads. I'm certainly not going to stop meriting those statistical threads that are of high quality. Although, posts using generic data from tools made by other users on the forum will likely not be merited by myself or at least not receive as much merit. I think we've seen a rise of users who are using these tools as a way to get merit, when largely the statistical information provided doesn't really offer much insight that anyone else could get from the tools which have been made available to the public.
You guys need to decide on the forum you want for the future, and use your merits awarding and posting to help guide it. Mods can also help by considering their thread deletion policies. In the past, I've taken a few days off as a direct result of what I considered to be an unreasonable post deletion.
Don't feel like you need to take a few days off if a post is deleted. Message either myself or another mod that you think handled it. I certainly don't handle a lot of your posts that are reported, but I might be able to offer my thoughts on why it was deleted even if I'm not the mod that actually handled the report. This offer is open to anyone as well. I'll try my best to get back to any messages which is seeking clarification for why a post was deleted. If you don't get a reply then just assume I've missed it as my inbox can be a little messy some days, and send another message.