The thread is excessively over-flooded with useless posts. There are no proper discussions going on in that thread, nor there is any need of a discussion in there I guess. The first post of the thread carries the information that a user needs to know about the system, other than that, there is nothing useful in there. The thread has become a place for people to post utterly useless posts like "I need merits", "Merit is good", "Explain merit to me" etcetra.
Thus, I think, it would be better to just lock the thread and pin it there. So that anyone willing to know about the system can open it and read the OP and just leave without leaving his not-needed feedback in there too.