It is a nice suggestion but don't you think they will be punished soon enough for their actions? Default trust members are going around giving red trust to merit abusers and I think it is enough punishment for now. Nevertheless,. I think merit abusers deserve a permaban if ever they are caught abusing the merit system.  That way we also won't need merit moderators.

This isn't going to happen. Staff are already swamped and I think it should be left up to the community to police just like scams are. Merit abuse is probably just going to cause more hassle than it's worth and sadly farmers and "friends" are just trading it or swapping it between themselves and it's regular users who are left feeling the pinch whilst those with a lot of accounts and/or "friends" will just continue to bend the rules to their advantage.

I would gladly tag merit abusers, but as I've said before it appears Theymos doesn't want that, and I have to respect his stance.  Also, these cases of abuse are much less clear to me than account sales or even campaign cheating.  There definitely can be users who really like what one particular person has to say, and I might tag such a person unnecessarily.  I don't feel like dealing with the backlash of that, nor do I really want to neg someone and be totally wrong.

This all will take care of itself eventually; I have some faith that this'll be true.  We're only in month 2 of the merit system, so it's still young.  It wasn't designed to stamp out shitposters immediately--it's a gradual, long-term thing I think.  We'll see in a year or two.

This won't happen, as it could result in moderator abuse, just like (likely) scams aren't moderated.

Default trust members should not tag normal members for merit related cases, people were posting garbage and DT members tagged them, theymos made merit system and said that he had to speed up the process because he didn't want DT members tagging garbage posters. misusing merits is the same as posting garbage. majority of members will abuse this system because they don't really know what is happening, they only see that their accounts need merits to rank up and since they don't have anything to contribute, they would keep doing what they were doing.

After running out of merit supply, they have nothing else, even if somebody provides merits for them, it would be expensive, we have to find merit sellers after a few more months when only sources have sMerits to distribute. please don't tag people now. what if theymos disables merit requirement to rank up for a month or what would have happened if he'd introduced it one month late?

Let people do what they want with their sMerits, or tag them but don't act surprised if theymos removed you as DT1-2.