While theymos has come up with a fruitful solution of adding merit system to combat spammers in his forum, but I have a feeling that this might not end up well enough after some time. Users having the power of crediting merits (those who are in the merit sources team) will abuse the system by only crediting merits to their friends and won't bother rating others. This is a huge centralization risk to a decentralized Bitcoin forum.

Unless theymos comes out with a solution to this issue or diversify the way merit sources will be chosen, this forum will slowly turn into reddit full of merit abusers.

Just my thoughts.