Quote from: DarkStar_ on February 18, 2018, 04:23:35 AM

Some points might be:

Lack of merit sources in Altcoin sections?
More spam in Altcoin sections?

I think it's pretty obvious posts in bounty-sections ("here are 60 links to Facebook") shouldn't get any Merit. But I am curious about the people who did receive Merit: did they receive it for good posts in other sections (there's nothing wrong with a quality poster who also hunts bounties), or did they receive it from their many alt-accounts for worthless posts?

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I'm scraping merit data using Google Sheets, with this formula:

Code:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(MID(IMPORTXML(D2,"//*[@id=""bodyarea""]"), FIND("Merit:", IMPORTXML(D2,"//*[@id=""bodyarea""]")) + 6, 4), "P", ""), "o", ""), "s", "")-LOOKUP(MID(IMPORTXML(D2,"//*[@id=""bodyarea""]"), FIND("Position", IMPORTXML(D2,"//*[@id=""bodyarea""]"))+9, 2),{"Co","Fu","He","Jr","Le","Me","Ne","Sr"},{"0","100","500","0","1000","10","0","250"})-0

So far, I've only used local scripts to extract data from Bitcointalk, but this is much cooler! In the spreadsheet, I only see "=magic!C42". It turns out to be a hidden sheet, from there it's self-explanatory. Very nice feature!

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Be warned: You will get rate limited eventually.

If it's possible to reduce the frequency of downloading pages to less than 1 per second, you shouldn't hit this.

Quote from: btcton on February 18, 2018, 06:13:56 AM

It would be interesting to know which sections tend to produce the most quality content in the forums. This would probably be very hard to do considering that you are getting rate limited yourself with just 500 users in the sample size in a single section of the forum, but there might be an alternative way such as scraping the last x number of posts from the section and adding up the merit from there.

I hope theymos will add more statistics in the future, the total Merit per board shouldn't be that difficult to show.

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I do not have much experience with Sheets/Excel when it comes to scraping, but I might eventually write a quick script to do it and post the results myself.

I've considered collecting Merit stats by myself, but there are too many profiles to keep track of. It would take weeks just to download all profiles only once.
Vod was tracking Merit on BitcoinTalk Public Information Project (BPIP), but it currently doesn't show it anymore. I don't know the current status.

Quote from: krishnaverma on February 18, 2018, 06:44:01 AM

Some are still sending merits like 10,20 to their alts for meaningless posts.

Long term, they won't earn new Merits from sources, and their sMerit dries up.
This is how theymos puts it:

Quote from: theymos on February 03, 2018, 06:20:54 PM

Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.

Quote from: DarkStar_ on February 18, 2018, 05:14:08 PM

It's hard to automate a way to find the post quality of the user. I thought about finding the average character per post, but I noticed many have posts like:

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Twitter Bounty Week X
Tweets:

Retweets

From what I've seen, almost all posts with any of these phrases are low quality:
-facebook
-twitter
-Im agree
-Great project
-nice project
-sir
I can make this list much longer, but this is just off the top of my head now. It's not 100% accurate, maybe "only" 98%.

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Without looking though, I'm guessing that the 3 most merited sections are:
- Meta
- Development and Technical Discussion
- Technical Support

I think the first one is some sort of loophole in the Merit system: almost anybody who creates a thread about Merit, receives Merit! Unless the post quality is bad, then people who point that out receive the Merit. Long-term, when Merit is no longer "something new", I expect much less Merit in Meta.
Many posts in the other two sections receive well-deserved Merit indeed. I hope they won't get flooded by Merit-hunters.

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It's hard to scrape how many have sent merit, as you must be logged in to see those statistics. It would be too complicated to do it in Google Sheets, and probably still complicated in any of the programming languages I'm familiar with.

It would be quite easy to keep track of Recent merits (downloading the page a few times per day is enough), and add them up per user. But it's too late now to get a historic overview.

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so it's still possible to argue that merits aren't really being distributed in certain sections.

I've Merited posts in the altcoin section, but only if they deserve it. The main problem is finding them amongst hundreds of thousands of spamposts.
Two days ago I created a thread in Altcoin Discussion. It got 6 views, including my own. Spam kicked it off the first page in 20 minutes. I moved it to Service Discussion today, and got the answers I needed. As long as the spam continues, the altcoin section is lost for serious discussions.