--snip--
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.
--snip--
I already noticed the same thing... Maybe it would be a good idear to generate some statistics in a couple of days and create a list of posts that were given exactly 1 merit AND this 1 merit was needed to stop the demotion of the receivers... That way we could filter trough these posts and neg tag anybody who clearly tried to cheat the system by trading/buying exactly 1 merit....
Creating such a list would be easy (i can do this without needing anybody's help), but filtering out the abusers would be a daunting task...
As for the proposition of anybody losing 1 merit every x days: i must say i'm against the proposition... What about people that seldomly post? Even if 100% of their posts would be high quality, it would still be probable for them to demote if they didn't forcefully post a couple posts every couple of days...
Fully agreed with you. I have also noticed this. Even some higher profiles are also gaining merit. Isn't the waste of merit when merit for quality post will not be available???