I wonder if my experience may be trypical. I started off with 80 sMerit to award, and I was fairly active in hunting for good posts, and I started quite a few threads about merits and posting. As a result of this, I was awarded 333 merits. and this gave me an additional 166 of sMerit to award. I spent a substantial amount of time in my quest to help the forum by awarding these merits. I must have got something right, because Vod gave me a positive trust rating for my efforts. However, recently I've felt myself becoming increasingly abrasive as a result of the difficulties presented by the current posting habits. I'm awarding very few merits now, although I still have some left in the bank. It's also some time since I received any merits, and I look on that as an indication of the fact that my posting now has a lower value for the forum. As a hero that doesn't promote bounties, I have everything I need in privileges, so merits are now not an incentive for me, but they are a recognition of public opinion about my posting, so I need to reconsider my attitudes here.

I have also read that several merit sources are not receiving their expected quotas of source merits, so perhaps Theymos is hoping that merit starvation will help to improve the quality of posting. It does seem to have had the reverse effect though, with many members frustrated by the difficulty in gaining merits, and making posts and starting threads in the hope of gaining a few. I suspect that we may see some more changes to the forum policies on posting, and I hope they will include the creation of some starter boards, and further control over the activities of the bounty spammers.