I don't think a single merit requirement is of any significance, it's too easy to feed into an alt and bot network. I've mad a number of suggestions in the past, and some of them are.
It would be very difficult to bot this given the nature of the scarceness of merit, not to mention not worth it for them.
- Newby thread starting restricted to an intro and an account recovery board. Newbies and juniors restricted to beginners and associated boards.
I don't necessarily disagree with some restrictions being put in place on where and what newbies can post, but theymos seems dead against this, and I understand his reasoning.
- Merits associated with posts deleted by a mod, or by the poster should be removed.
I agree with this. It seems some people are even deleting their posts once they've been merited. This could be done to cover up abuse. If a post is deleted for whatever reason then the merit should go with it.
- No merits for trading, bounty, ICO or similar posts.
As I mentioned in another thread recently, I don't think excluding bounty threads from being able to receive merit would be bad thing.