For consideration:
If you're counting the initial (airdropped) Merit, which was based on Activity, aren't you double counting Activity?
If new ranking system implememented and based on the suggestion of @LoyceV, it should only take earned merits into considerations.
Automatically allocated merits at the launch day of merit system makes non-sense. Why? Because the allocated merits based on activity-count and the potential new ranking system should avoid overlaps between activity counts and merit counts.
Contributions of forum users should mainly base on earned merits, not total merits - which include both allocated merits and earn merits.
I don't agree with your suggestion. We cant measure the contribution of forum users only looking at their earned merits. Even though Merit system introduced recently, that doesn't mean members who are active (
active and contributed as well) way before the implementation of Merits weren't contributed to the forum at all. We can't take that part entirely from the total picture.
Instead of that suggestion, I would like to suggest if we can put a
weighting factor for initial (airdropped) Merits when taking account into the calculations of contribution rank would be fair.
My suggestion is 0.75(Weighting factor) for earned merits and 0.25(Weighting factor) for initial merits.