Created a petition!
Lol 
You must be confused, thinking this is a democracy where spammers get a vote.
May we get some hints where we can find those 36 new merit sources?
I'll give you a hint: begging for Merit isn't going to get you anything good.Many of these limitations can be eliminated with a copper membership. In particular, you can set a signature at Member level if you wear a copper membership.
I want to know when is the copper membership will expire ?I already see several Newbies who complain (or compliment) in this thread, and suddenly received 1 Merit today! See this example, he received 1 Merit for an old post 17 minutes before posting in this thread.
I'd say the next step should be for everybody (all Ranks!) to lose 1 Merit every x days. It could be as low as one per year, or maybe once every 3 months. That should demotivate users from buying one Merit somewhere.
Any normal poster won't be influenced much by losing 1 Merit once in a while.
But it's a good start already!
Reference data for future abuse tracking:
Last Friday, 6286 users had received 1 Merit.
One week earlier, 6237 users had received 1 Merit.
One more week back, 6190 users had received 1 Merit.
That's an increase of less than 50 per week. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 500 new users with 1 Merit next Friday.
Update: Follow-up reading