Why not put account that opened for bounties access limit to alternative cryptocurrencies only, because that is what required to earn rewards in most campaign anyway, and use this merit system to control their posting quality there.
Just put button on member profile page asking if the account is for bounty hunting purpose and set their account access accordingly, once this is up we should report any account promoting program out of alternate cryptocurrencies and set their account to bounty hunter.
Account that are not created for bounty or as some of us put it "learning" just go as normal using the old system.
Once again, this is not a forum to earn money, it is for a bitcoin lover and other crypto enthusiast to engage and do something good for the community. Making a criteria like that will encourage people to earn money only without engaging to each other, without learning process, etc. And who would merit them if they all dont give a contribution (high quality posts etc) to this forum and can only join into single board? The best chance they have will be the higher ranks that do bounty too and the chance there will be a lot of merit farming will be higher.
So from me, merit is working, not perfect, but merit doing a great job in this first month, i hope it will have a greater impact from this moment.
That is why we need user to voluntarily pre-designated their account according to their usage, if the person comes here just to learn let him have easier way to rank up and not bogged down by Merit system which specifically design to stop bounty hunter spamming the forum to rank up their account, and also the Merit system will served its purpose as a measure of how good the account owner posting quality at the alternate cryptocurrencies in case he choose the account is for bounty hunting purpose.
If we want this forum to be specifically just for
learning purpose only, just delete alternative cryptocurrencies so no more bounty hunting here and no more spamming, the fact is we still not into that and we still allow some money earning activities going on here and allow alternate cryptocurrencies to exist, instead of subjecting everybody to same system that probably will discriminate some people who have intention to learn, we should ask user to voluntarily set his own account, and have him go through the specific ranking system. Once we decided that this forum is for learning bitcoin only just delete alternative cryptocurrecies, everyone go through same rank system