Quote from: The Pharmacist on June 24, 2018, 09:23:54 PM

Nah. I took a look at a couple posts he merited and it looked like they were in Russian. That board definitely needs a merit source, and it looks like xandry is fulfilling his duty there. I don't speak Russian, so I can't attest to the quality of the posts he merited, but I don't think there's anything inappropriate going on.

If you have a board on ignore, when you look at a merited post it shows up as deleted/ignored. Even if xandry merited some posts that got deleted, so what? If you're insinuating that he's selling merits or somehow giving them out inappropriately, I don't see the evidence. He's given them out repeatedly to some of the same individuals, but look at how many times pugman or TMAN has given me merits. They just like some of my posts, and I think the same thing is going on with xandry.

The posts that he is meriting are for reporting the post, and letting the person who infringed the guidelines know what they did wrong. Here's a quote of Xandry's reply which was translated by the user "esmanthra" here

I've voiced my concerns, but also came to the conclusion that what Xandry is doing is probably fine in the thread TryNinja linked.

Quote from: xandry on May 26, 2018, 07:55:54 AM

[...] Indeed, when merit system appeared, I got the opportunity to encourage users for help in moderation, which was frankly lacking. (Note: In Russian section.) At first I tried to apply it to "service" threads (about bans, ranks, forum rules, etc.), but sometimes I haven't got enough time to watch if something useful in these topics appeared, so when I click on a link in report and notice that person not only sent a report, but also, for example, explained to author of violating post what they did wrong (thereby I don't need to explain it myself), I endeavor to gratitude them in a merit form. By the way, it turned out, that "violators" often take such user warnings into consideration and move their topics to the correct sections or delete their posts.
Regarding the possibility of obtaining merits this way. Here're some situations when I don't give them:
1. You were wrong and I do not see any violations.
2. You wrote a message with an explanation, but I trivially did not read it.
3. You didn't reach even a Jr. Member rank "naturally".
3. You collected too much merit in the last 30 days, try again later. This is not my personal limitation - it's set by the forum.

Therefore, we have some kind of game of chances here.