The merit system is not working, look the merit points of people on the forum, it does not move (even for the more relevant posts), the forum established a system which was suppose to penalize newcomers flooding the forum with useless post, but the forum penalize itself, good luck everybody, If you think people will give you merit points for free you are mistaken.
I think the member itself should choose a topic that really contribute to this forum, cause most of time people prefer to post in a thread were in, it's already have 1-50 pages. Usually this kind of thread are just repeating the answer by everyone just to complete their required post. So try to find a unique topic, and give an informative post so you can get merit.