I do not think it is appropriate to be a rating tool. I believe this is a tool to improve the quality of forums. It's really up to the members to use it to help direct the flow of writing. So far it seems to be used to "appreciate" ghosts in the past, and to help sig campaign members to "rank" to increase the size of their banners. Because of this abuse, I think the good points can only be given alone, which reduces a bit of the offense. Merits will cause nothing but problems for forum users and admins. We have allready seen members being accused of selling merits to other members. When I used to run forums (not crypto forums) I tried the merit sytem out and the emails from users claiming that this person or that person sold merits got so bad I disabled it in