Does the Portuguese local section have a merit source? And is he active? Or should we send someone to apply to be a source?
Admin has declared who the merit sources are. You can check the merits distributed there and if you see someone meriting posts of different users regularly, you get some hints there.
I don't want to know who is the source. Only if we have one. Many people in local sections don't have good english so it will be very hard to get merits without a local source.
AH sorry, I admit I didn't understand your post at first. What you are saying is, and please correct me if I am mistaken, is that unless each local language forum, which may be the only place a large number of native speakers post in, has at least one active and engaged merit source, then, the users of that sub-forum will never have an opportunity to gain in rank.
So, I'm sure there is a word out there for a system that is unintentionally biased against non-English speakers. BTCTalk does give them a local sub-forum to interact in, but then takes away, unless they learn English, their ability to rank up.
I'm old enough to remember when French was considered the international language of diplomacy, and actually was, for a time, the "official" language of the United Nations. So, if BTCTalk were French in the main, perhaps some of those calling for pushing out speakers of other languages might re-think that.
I hope, that there does exist, at least one sMerit source in each language that BTCTalk already supports.
Any given forum has to be one language, else it's chaos. The language here is English and that's not a knock against anyone who doesn't speak it. But it stands to reason that if one cannot use the language properly, one will not make good posts and hence will struggle with the merits. Users on the local boards don't necessarily have to rely on merit source members. Any high ranked member should have sufficient sMerit to spread around.