Given that there are reports that the current actual number of merits given in the past months did not meet the expected merits for circulation, please let me propose an idea.
Give an incentive to the Merit Sources for them to be proactive in achieving their quota.
Being a merit source is already a method to make them proactive. There is no need to "push them" in order to get other people ranked up. Let them work at peace.
An incentive can be a form of payment (bitcoin?), special privilege (additional feature on their profile?), or anything that is beneficial to them.
No.
What do you think?
In my opinion there was an initial craze about the merit system till last month which has decreased now and initially I thought it was because of the dearth in number of merit sources but it seems that its not so. Maybe if they stop meriting and start becoming inactive, theymos would have to actually look into the spamming of the forum and redesign the merit system. Currently the spam problem will not be controlled without increasing the number of mods.