I hope everybody would be fair about this new feature implemented by admin theymos.
This thread is for the purpose of awareness that merit is given to a constructive and quality post. I have made a thread here in the market place section, hoping that there will not be such things like buying and selling merits. Let's work with our own asses.
P.S.
OP is not asking attention, read and understand. Obedience is better than sacrifice.
Saddly, but many people are already selling/buying Merit points, for example here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2827197.0On local boards there are much more Merit sellers. There was people who got 20 or even 50 Merit for a low quality posts, it's obvious abuse of Merit system. Both, buyer and seller has to be reported to DT members and they will give them red trust rating.
The good thing about this is that we can easily spot people out and verify that they're connected if something fishy is going on. Even if people make plans outside of this forum to grant merit, we can easily retrace which post the merit was added onto, and if the post is garbage, then it makes sense to flag them with red trust. I'm thinking that this whole merit system can make it a lot easier on higher ranking members who want to help the forum out by flagging the spammers and scammers.
One thing I hope doesn't happen in the future is the use of merit as "rep." Merit has nothing to do with reputation, and we should make it clear in the marketplace section especially that this is the case.