Merit czars had been suggested too.. and sure that sounds good in theory.. but likely would have quite a few negative aspects too.. even though i would imagine that theymos does have some names of members that he would calculate to be less likely towards corruption as compared to others.. but everyone likely has some flaws in regards to sometimes even having time to carry out such duties... or even the right kinds of skills and access to administrative tools.. which there might be some difficulties in terms of giving some of that kind of access to administrative tools too.
Merit Kings? i.e. merit sources? I think that current merit system is good enough for this forum. It has it's pros and cons, like, the abuse from local boards but a lot more problems can appear if only limited number of people will be able to give away merits. We can also implement something like merit moderation or merit approval by other members, i.e. the case where one gives away merit and it needs confirmation of 6/10 to be finally given. But that's a lot of headache and waste of time for many people.
I think we should live this system the way it is right now.
When reading your response, I see that I did not really explain what I meant by "merit czars"... and maybe it is because I used the plural rather than the singular.. which probably was caused by my thinking about multiple proposals about merit czars rather than there being more than one merit czar at a time..... so sorry about that confusion.. and you seem to have gotten distracted by the word czar too.. since you substituted "king" in there... which sure is the same idea.. but I can see that you are thinking about it differently than what I thought that I was trying to say about some merit czar ideas that had been proposed in the past.
The way I recall the essence of the merit czar proposals is that it would be someone to oversee the merit system and the various merit source members so then maybe somehow managing how many merit source members and their merit source allocation - and in that regard having someone overseeing that area would presumably allow for more merit sources rather than fewer.. or whatever the merit czar might put into place and start to oversee based on how much power and/or discretion that theymos might give to such a hypothetical person (or if it ended up being a team or a rotating czar... who the fuck knows? kind of in the theoretical stage, anyhow?)..
It just that I had mentioned the merit czar thing as something that some folks had proposed could be a possible solution to have someone who is more active in making changes than what theymos currently has not been making changes to the merit sources (the merit source members and/or their merit source amounts) too frequently... so some kind of a merit czar system would be more active in regards to making changes and perhaps more aggressive too? I don't know.. if you ever read anything about bureaucrats in terms of Parkinson's law, if a bureaucrats is created, then such bureaucrats will create more and more work for him/herself to justify his/her existence including justifying the need for more and more assistants, too...and then the longer that the system exists the assistants will need assistants, too.
Some kind of merit czar system is not totally off the rocker.. but it might not end up solving anything.. except surely theymos might sometimes not want to have to do certain things and the incorporation of some kind of a merit czar system could be a way to delegate some duties and to still allow him to oversee the matter regarding how those changes (or that merit czar person) is working and if it might be getting better or wore in some ways without theymos having to do some of the grunt work related to the merit system (at least in theory)..
I stopped the last few months myself. I got tired of finding out a lot were just looking for merits and fake accounts trying to hustle signature money.
The majority of users who caused my appearance in these tables in some rare months unfortunately left the forum not even trying to get higher ranks. Well, it is disappointing a bit, but I think that it is a right way of spending smerits anyway. If I see a good newbie with interesting ideas, desire to study something new or even good questions it is good to share a merit with him. And what will happen next matters not so much. Of course we can hope that it will help someone we will be proud to found such gem among the first ones. But even if it will be just one such a gem for all forum life may be it is enough not to be disappointed with that others didn't become what we expected? Of course many of our efforts will be wasted,
but I try to stay optimistic anyway!
You don't sound very optimistic jokers10..
Of course, if anyone is a merit source member, then that member has more smerits to spend so can afford to be more generous and even to accidentally sending smerits to undeserving folks... and yeah how much due diligence is needed in order for any of us to figure out whether to spend the smerit on a potential undeserving member might have something to do with how many smerits a member has to send/spend...and may need to be more judicious in spending if they do not have very many smerits available in their smerit bank.
Some of the very good members start to stand out right away and several members seem to start to notice them, and it might not even matter that much if they received any merits in their first 100 posts.. or their first 2-3 months on the forum.. at some point, some members are going to likely notice that they are providing a lot of value in their various posts.. and by the time they get up to 50-100 posts.. the patterns of the quality of their posts can likely be seen and even cause some contagion in regards to sending that member smerits from a variety of members even if they might not have received any smerits in their first 50-100 posts.
On the other hand, shitty posters sometimes will grow in the quality of their posts too... but sometimes some of the shitty posters never really improve in their posting style or substance...and they might even get worse with the passage of time and seeing a pattern in their post history.
For example, we can look back and identify some forum members who ended up being scammy and maybe even lower quality members than we had initially perceived them to be who had received a lot of merits, and yeah whether or not those scammy members are enabled by the first few undeserving smerits that they received seems to be a difficult question to resolve by studying various cases in which members might be ranking up undeservedly.
I will agree that ranking up does start by receiving one smerit leading to 10 smerits, leading to 50 smerits, leading to 100, but still? It's going to take quite a few members getting duped into sending smerits before the undeserving member ranking up really seems to be a systematic problem and are we going to go back and look at blaming joker10 for giving the first smerit or two? I have my doubts.
I know that sometimes I have given several smerits to a member, and then I realize that they are either a scammer or they are really a very disingenuine poster, so yes, sometimes mistakes are made, and maybe some of us might have already sent several smerits to that scammy and/or low quality poster, and I repeat myself:
"are we going to go back and look at blaming joker10 for giving the first smerit or two? I have my doubts."
