Quote from: CryptoRobert on March 17, 2018, 07:30:47 PM

Is it just my impression or shitposting seems to have slowed down a bit overall on the forum?
And is it just my impression or merit-related-shitposting on the other side has drammatically increased in the meta section and in this very thread in particular? I remember having been following this thread on Merit & new rank requirements in its early days and then, after a long absence, I've now come back and I've suddenly found it full of posts written in quite bad English and in most cases stating banalities.
But perhaps it's just my impression...

That's right! There is hot trend from merit beggars to move from Alt child boards to Meta; Beginners & Help boards in order to catch attention of higher ranked users, then beg them for their sMerits. I think this trend has two sides:
1) Newbies and/ or Junior members (lower ranked members generally) will have more opportunities to get more knowledge, skills, experiences, and valuable lessons from higher ranked members by joining these boards. It's good for themselves. Then overtime, they can grow more, and become more knowledgeable enough to help other users in the forum (particularly newcomers) to solve their problems. It's good for the forum and it's good effects of merit system and the trend to move to serious boards/ child boards in the forum.
2) The trend has negative effects, which result in hundreds/ thousands of shitty-posts in Meta; Beginner & Help, etc. which rarely happened before merit system launch. However, I think over time, this bad effects will dissaperar. Why? Simply because shit-posters will soon realize that higher ranked users and merit sources will become stricter over time when assess threads ' quality before sending their sMerits. That means shit-posters, spammers almost have no chance to get any merits by keeping shitty posts, then they will stop and leave these boards or the forum finally. The only way for them to earn sMerits is improving their posts quality, to be more constructive, more helpful.

Give merit system more time, then most of spammers, shit-posters will be controlled, and eliminated.