I am affected by the new merit rule as well. And yes, I signed up to the forum because of bounties, trying to reach a level where joining a bounty program would bring me more than the minimum reward.

I get it that people post a lot of spam posts in some topics and I definitely agree that something has to be done to keep a certain quality of the forum but I don't know... Shouldn't the administrator(s)/mod(s) rather delete entire topic that is considered inappropriate instead of just removing posts and banning users?

It's also true that I post a lot of low-quality posts (ie. bounty reports, proof-of-participation etc) but I find it hard to believe that not a single post can be considered as quality post...