That merit thing is becoming a communistic idea. For Newbies like me, merit will be mandatory for progressing, and I understand this. But harassing everyone to earn merit constantly is a bit too much, really. Now it aims to impose more and more restrictions. This forum should be a place of freedom, but it is getting restricted more and more, sadly.
it will take some time to understand that the freedom you mentioning is abused my majority. and the merit system is a try to fix the outcome of this freedom lol
It will also take a little time to understand that being given the privilege of being allocated some advertising space underneath your posts is an extremely generous action by the site owners. Did you think about how much Twitter and Facebook earn from placing adverts next to what you write?
Asking people to do something as trivial as posting something that gets given a merit every couple of months to earn that privilege is not harassing or imposing restrictions on anyone. WTF is this talk of freedom? You are free to use the forum without a signature.