Very interesting to see the reactions to the newly introduced concept of merit as an additional indicator of account maturity and quality beyond just pure number of posts / activity. While this was introduced to increase post quality it has of course created a counter movement and a market place for "trading" merit - for money.
So this is just a reminder for everyone that the introduction of merit is a GOOD thing because it will help improve the quality of this forum for everybody.
"Trading" merit will undermine this and render it eventually useless.
Keep contributing!
I agree that merit is a good thing, due to reduction of low quality posts. And trading isn't an issue, because everything is checked and controlled by forum moderators (hopefully) and they'll cut off such actions. But there are some other problems: people give merits quite seldom, if we compare to "likes" on fb, and it would be great if people truly gave merits for what they like. But the thing is - lost of people barely even read others posts, or even if they do they don't feel like meriting someone due to rivalry. But I like the conception and I hope that it will go off well.
I agree with you, people here in the forum don't waste their time reading posts of other people. It seems that they have lack of interest reading posts just to giveaway merit. I guess this new rule is relatively good for the forum because it lessens spam posts and it pushes posters to contribute more quality posts, but it makes more difficult especially for newbies to rank up.