Topic: (Suggestion) sMerits Of Banned Accounts (Read 352 times)

The way OP explained it in his post, the person who reported the account for plagiarism would be credited with the sMerits of the copy/paster. He wouldn't earn any merits in the process. And considering that those new accounts don't have any Merits the reporter would also not be credited with any sMerits. That would make the user a temporary merit source the way I understand it. Because he would have an X amount of sMerits that he could send.

But it still could and probably would lead to abuse so I don't see this being implemented here.   

Right, "wasted" was more the word I should have used instead of "deleted". Anyhow, as you’ve explained, the upper limit seems to be what counts for the pool to start being wasted, and it does not affect the daily refills that make up that upper limit unless it is exceeded, staying at that upper limit value if in excess after a refill.

Perhaps the warning could be given in relation to the personal Merit Source Max. Say for example you had a max of 100 sMerits, and still 70 to give out. If tomorrows partial refill would take it above that 100 maximum (i.e. refill of 50 sMerits), a warning message indicating that tomorrows refill would lead to a waste of 20 sMerits could help gain conscience of this fact.

I think you're going at this the wrong way: source Merit doesn't expire, but it stops replenishing once you're at your maximum source amount.
If you want to maximize your source supply, you'll have to empty it as fast as possible, so that it gets replenished again.

Correct. Let me give an example:
Say you have a total source supply of 10 sMerit. If you spend 1 per week, you will always have about 6 sMerit left and send a total of 52 sMerit per year.
If you use your sMerit as quickly as possible, your source supply will be empty most of the time, and you can send about 120 sMerit per year.

I try to keep my source amount as low as possible, but haven't been able to "stabilize" that yet since it was increased at the beginning of January. I now get a large and fast replenishment at the start of the month, and empty it later on. Eventually this will average out.
At the beginning of this month, I had >25% of my source available, it's now <10%.

I don't think we need to kick the hornet's nest like this.
All the high valuable members will became targets and there is gonna be a lot of mess.
It's better like it is now, just burn them. There are enough sMerit generated per month, just there are not enough good posts to be rewarded.

 

Sometimes it’s easy to lose track of exactly when some of the merits from the source will become wasted due to them being unused. There is a general counter that states how many merits a Merit Source has left, but no clear indication when exactly they will be deleted for being unused. I don’t think I’ve let any wither yet, and I don’t believe they do so at the same time, but rather on a daily basis related to the moment they got refilled (Merit Source’s merits are not all refilled on the same day after 30 days, but rather 30 days after each batch is sent, even down to the same time and minute).

Although not trivial to implement, perhaps a message indicating how many will expire in the coming days would help (if they do not all wither on the same date).
i.e.

Non of those are active at the moment, don't think new sources will be appointed anytime soon and the reporting to merit source thread isn't that active in terms of merit awarded to reported posts. It feels like either merit sources have lost interest in the thread leading to them not reviewing recent reports or post reported doesn't meet their criteria on meritable posts. I viewed recent reports and compared them with earlier reports and discovered the merit awarded in the two period difference is huge.

Not seeing a very good reason to implement this.

If a user wants to award good quality post he can apply as a merit source(to get sMerit monthly)
As LoyceV said, those merits will not be wasted because merit sources has a monthly supply of sMerits.

I see abuse on trading sMerits to post.
Buys account just to nuke them and get sMerit. (Might be use to establish profile/integrity. I don't know how but possible?)

I don't know if it's a good idea to redistribute the merit for good reporters since it leads to a new abuse, someone can create 5000 accounts and randomly copy paste and report them to get merits on the main account.

A good way to increase the circulation can come from sources who can't spend all monthly smerit, instead to give 1 merit to post they can give 2 it seems a small difference but in the reality it is huge.

The word you're looking for is "plagiarism".

That would make me a high-value target I have 452 sMerit plus some source Merit left. Good luck finding plagiarism

Merit and sMerit isn't scarce, theymos can create as much as he wants. Several "redistribution systems" have been suggested, but it's much more work than just increasing source amounts.

Reporting copy-pasta, spammers, tagging scammers... is supposed to be a voluntary work aiming to help the community and should not expect anything in return.

If admins start rewarding reporters, then you should expect all sorts of abuse.

Decayed merits is not supposed to be a problem while there are enough active merit sources.

TS { Thread starter}, I suspect you don't know merit can be created from tin air by theymos by just a click of a button. You have to careless about wasted merit and concentrate more on educating the active member to distribute their smerit. Because if they weren't hoarding those merit in the first place, it won't had be wasted when they get banned.

Merit are just like Like via Facebook, Mark doesn't take those like and give it to users that report the account if theymos discovers the circulating merit has reduced he'll just create more and distribute them to merit sources.

Reporters may have some other compliment like reporter badges for their work so transferring the merit from bad account is actually not meant by the implement of merit system so I will say its just a bad idea to transfer the banned accounts smerits to the people who reported it but it might be a good idea if it transferred to the merit sources.

You are pointing abuse? So the users will create newbies accounts and will copy/paste a post and report themselves?
Moreover you are forgetting that Newbies dont have enough Merits or sMerits.

Moreover we can do one more thing in which the suggestion can work more efficiently.
The user who will report the copy/paste post of a pilgarist, will only get the sMerits( not the Merits) which the user will efficiently use to reward only quality posts.

Pretty much this. The vast majority of banned plagiarizers are low ranked members who would have little to no sMerits. This is even more so given that senior members (and therefore the ones with sMerits to send) being caught plagiarizing are starting to be shown some leniency in the forum of temporary bans and signature bans rather than permanent bans. The amount of sMerits lost in this way is probably tiny compared to, say, the amount of sMerits gained by inactive accounts like Satoshi's.

If we really were losing too many sMerits through bans, then the easiest way to counteract this would be to simply increase the number and allowance of the merit sources.

What if the guy who reports the post is a shitposter and a spammer? He would be meriting his alts or probably would be meriting the people he likes if he has received the decayed sMerits. This destroys the fair distribution of the merits and would rank up other spammers too. Possibly there are very few accounts apart from Newbies and Jr Members who are banned for plagiarism. Hence there aren't much sMerits getting wasted. Truly speaking a plagiarist will get caught and would be permabanned even before they reach the Member Rank with 10 earned merits. redsn0w and Hhampuz case was quite different, and they would be back within a month and a week.

What about the sMerits satoshi, Hal, GameKyuubi and other inactive accounts are holding? satoshi has at least 848 sMerits clogged up in his account, GameKyuubi has at least 260 sMerits if we consider their received merits. People are still meriting them even though they know that these merits are getting decayed! If you are a good poster, merit sources will surely help you to receive the merits as they are being active in fair distribution.

We don't need these transfers anyway!

@Suchmoon keeps track of the earned merits that are “destroyed” as a result of a ban/nuke (see [MERIT][NSFN] We're destroying more merits than we're sending. Like, way more). We can’t derive the exact amount of sMerit that gets trapped in those accounts, but we do have others indicators such as the amount of merits and earned merits destroyed, as can be seen in the above referenced link.

data as of 15/02/2019.

I’m not really too concerned on the amount of sMerit that gets trapped in the event, since were it to be significant, @theymos can easily increment the Merit Source quotas to make up for it. Nevertheless, I doubt that it is significant enough to have to even need consider the option from a global perspective.

Transferring those sMerits to the reporters that originated the bans would seem to turn reporting into a sort of bounty hunting, where the bounty are the sMerits on the banned account. I don’t really like the idea, and reporting should be a natural procedure on one’s day to day browsing on the forum, and not a treasure quest.

It goes without saying that people who publicly report other users for rule breaking on threads (farms, plagiarism, etc.) do get merited, and some of those cases get uncovered after putting quite a bit of effort into it, and thus are likely to be appreciated by others with merit. But making a merit modus vivendi from a forum policy point of view is not likely to be endorsed.

That will surely get abused. More work for the admins because a lot of people would start reporting posts just to get some smerits from those members with smerits.

Could be a good idea, I guess the only negative is that Merit Whore’s will start reporting loads of posts(more than they would usually) which will make extra work for mods/admin.

As of now many accounts are nuked, some are getting permanent bans whearas some are Getting temporary bans.
But what about the sMerits that the nuked accounts are holding? They are going to be wasted? Right?
IMO the sMerits should be transferred to the ones, who had reported about the User to Mods for pilgarism.
They will keep on sharing the Merits to the quality posts and in this way the sMerits will be not wasted.

EDIT:-
The users that will report about the pilgarist accounts will only get the account's sMertits. They will not be credited with merits. Else all user will stop making quality content and Will start reporting posts. The users will use the sMerits to reward only quality posts.

By the way This is just a suggestion.
Waiting for Community's response on this.