I am creating this thread to help people who have questions about the merit system. This is basically a compilation of posts from Theymos (probably from other members as well) about the subject. Feel free to suggest some post that can be added to the main post.

I assume most of us have already read Theymos' post/thread about the merit system so I'll just leave the link here for those who haven't read it yet and also to make the useful posts be more visible.

Quote from: theymos on January 24, 2018, 11:12:23 PM

Quote from: Kiritsugu on January 24, 2018, 11:05:54 PM

So I noticed it says unused Merit can be decayed at some point in the future - What's the point of this? Is it just to keep people from stagnating their Merit and not using it?

There is currently no decay, but if hoarding seems to become a problem, I might add it.

Quote from: Kiritsugu on January 24, 2018, 11:05:54 PM

Also, what are your thoughts on people here using their numerous alt accounts to abuse the Merit system? Granted, there's not much to "abuse", but someone who has a dozen alt accounts, say one of them gets selected as a Merit source, couldn't that have a negative impact on the system?

If they don't have a source: how would they? Unless they are a source, they have to get the merit from somewhere. A group of accounts without a source can't generate merit without making good posts; they can only inefficiently spread it out among the accounts.

If they do have a source, then that's something that we'll need to detect. The merit transfers are public, so it shouldn't be that difficult. There are also various limits in place which would help to limit the damage from that.

Quote from: theymos on January 24, 2018, 11:24:14 PM

Quote from: yojodojo21 on January 24, 2018, 11:21:41 PM

How about if the post merited is deleted? Will the merit count? Or erased too? Because somebody could just use merit for unreasonable purpose.

The merit is not undone if the post is deleted.

Quote from: theymos on January 25, 2018, 02:13:41 AM

I expect merit to tend toward scarcity as time goes on, but when it gets too scarce, I'll have to add more merit sources or give the existing sources more free sMerit. The goal will be to avoid people from feeling like getting merit is virtually impossible, but also to avoid a scenario where everyone is always maxing out the limits because 1 merit is ~worthless.

Each source has a different limit per 30 days. The current average is 185, and in total up to 8125 merit could be created per month.

Quote from: drm on January 25, 2018, 01:32:58 AM

Actually I have been legendary for a few weeks already now. Strange you see my rank as hero.

edit; I see my rank as hero as well now, I ranked down?
edit2; Seems to be back to normal.

You were oscillating between Hero and Legendary; I fixed it.

Quote from: theymos on January 25, 2018, 06:57:04 PM

I added stats pages:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats
And per-user summary pages like:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;u=35

***

Quote from: bill gator on January 24, 2018, 11:21:57 PM

Quote from: Lutpin on January 24, 2018, 11:02:01 PM

Quote from: theymos on January 24, 2018, 11:00:11 PM

If you want to be a merit source:

Collect TEN posts that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread.

Does that mean all merit sources are hand selected?

They are either hand-selected, randomly sorted out of a hat, or there was some sort of automated search that grabbed some metric as a representative of "merit" (trust, views, etc.).

Quote from: BlackMambaPH on January 24, 2018, 11:07:13 PM

Great Idea, but still in some point it will disregarded or doesn't matter. If you know what I mean.

I do not know what you mean, it is necessary to rank up your account and there is a finite amount of it to around at any given time by only a finite amount of sources and those of us with initial merit. How then, would be become disregarded in any manner? Do explain.

Quote from: numanoid on January 24, 2018, 11:16:22 PM

1 question to theymos, how if someone/people buying/selling merit points to ranked up faster?

Quote from: AdolfinWolf on January 24, 2018, 11:17:58 PM

Will something like a trust feedback for merit be added?

Wouldn't the already in place Trust system be sufficient to handle this sort of thing? It's clearly unacceptable and we already have a place for untrustworthy or malicious activity.