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Given the table above, assuming that the percentage represents members who only spam and cannot earn even a single merit since inception of the merit system, then almost half of the Legendary rank are spammers. I think this number is alarming if we are really dedicated to lessen the number of spammers in this forum.
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You don't have to explain to me the table which I created myself ;-)
Unfortunetly you can't say literally that 47% of Legendary are spammers - in fact even I who created this calculation don't know that. It's because set of data I used for preparing this table. In group of Legendary who didn't get any merit there are all Legendary whose account haven't beed deleted until also a group of users who make their rank years ago and then left the forum or maybe came here only sometimes to have some reading (I have no idea how many of them did this but for sure there are some - according to @mazdafunsun 250 of them wasn't active this year - for sure until 15 August
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4901670.0;all), there are also a group of people who wrote some posts which didn't deserved merits but you couldn't call them spam as well (no one has 100% merited posts).
So the purpose of my calculations was only to
show how many ranked users didn't earn any merit at all but I wouldn't never say that all of them are spammers....
So, the figures above are only for reference. We need to have a forensic analysis with a bit deeper analysis to be able to really discover the facts.
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Agree!!!
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The merit system discussion always target the spammers having low ranked account. And your suggestion seems to address the issue of spammers having high-ranked account. I hope theymos will consider this one.
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You've right since today it targets only low ranked users but except numbers you have remember the scale - there are 50k-60k ranked users without merit and 1.500.000 - 2.000.000 low ranked users (newbies and jr.) without merit. So I have to agree that this group is much more important from the spam's point of view...
however, I didn't change my previous mind at all and stil claim that
"it would be really FUN to see some high ranked users fighting to "EARN" their first merit ever ;-) "