That was an interesting post by Theymos, and I'm grateful to him for clarifying some of the policies and motivations behind Bitcoin Talk.

There are a number of things that responsible members can do to help the forum. One thing is to try to maintain an efficient flow for thread readers. For example, a poster of member rank should be aware that full quotes are usually redundant, so the quote by BitNaija immediately after the post by Theymos is both redundant and annoying. I'd like to revisit this thread, so I put him on ignore to save wasting my time when scrolling.

I'd like to make a couple of suggestions with regard to posting permissions. I believe that it would be worthwhile to restrict thread starting in the serious discussion board to members and above. In fact it may be worth reviewing the permissions for thread starting.

The combination of merit and reputation tagging seems to be having a beneficial effect, but there are still some abuses of the awarding of merits. The awarding of merit for reporting posts is discouraging for members who want to see the merit system working to improve the quality of posting. It allows low quality spammers to improve their ranking without contributing to the growth of information available in the forum. Account and merit selling is a rising industry here, and it prompted me to try to build a database for merit awarders to use. Hopefully this would deprive the new underworld of merits, and reduce the profitability of their ventures. I think it would be better if the forum staff controlled this, as there is too much scope for errors if is administered privately.