Although I agree that we need more Merit sources, it can't necessarily be concluded from this. Many users
* distributed Merits to their alt-accounts, and this should end when their initial free Merits dry up.
* From the
Top-merited users, recent merit, many users have red trust for Merit trading (from the first 10: 452: pitipawn, 283: RichDaniel, 251: saulzaents and 151: niknik1966), and many are suspected to have traded Merit (such as
Chachacoin17).
It's even more suspicious if they stop getting new Merit right after they've reached the rank requirement.
Yes a certain percentage should be abuses, and I was trying to extract some rule to distinguish them.
In addition to focusing on the transaction with precisely necessary amount for rank up, and red trust, the
pitipawn's merit history provides another rule; almost all the threads s/he was merited are "(Deleted/Off-limits/Ignored)".
I have no idea how easy that is to write a script to spot,
At this moment these rules are checked by human, maybe there is some nice way to code.