the bottom line is that merit is highly subjective. it's the prerogative of the advertisers how they want to incentivize posters, but i'd personally avoid any campaign that used merit instead of post quality to deny payment.
Nobody read those shitposters in megathreads
Google reads them.
indeed. i get the impression that some campaigns are mostly intended for google results, not forum impressions or clicks. dealing with that kind of motive is a whole different can of worms.
So kill the root of the problem, instead of adding some other rule. I don't count any megathread posts, guitarplinker didn't when Rollin.io's campaign was running, and I'm guessing some other managers do as well. If all managers do this, then things would be fine, without needing to heavily change up how campaigns work, and open up new avenues of abuse.
but how do you get all managers to do this?