The merit system is not working, look the merit points of people on the forum, it does not move (even for the more relevant posts), the forum established a system which was suppose to penalize newcomers flooding the forum with useless post, but the forum penalize itself, good luck everybody, If you think people will give you merit points for free you are mistaken.
System is not perfect yet, some good post were missed, some of lower quality were merited. Give it some time.
But overall this should stop rank farming.
Still you can read and search high quality content on the forum.
I really do hope that merit system will show itself as a filter and will remove tons of shit-threads and clone-threads.. or at least will make their amount lower.