I understand the intention behind the last change in the ranking system, making 1 Merit point mandatory to achieve Junior Member status and wear signatures. However, in my opinion, this does discriminate new honest users more than it is necessary.
So here's an alternative idea:
- Return to the previous system (Jr. Member status is based only on activity, and Newbies get at least a minimal signature space)
- But both Newbies and Jr. Members are given their signature space only "on probation". That means that if one of their posts is legitimately reported as spam and thus removed, they lose their signature space entirely until they rank up to Member.
This gives Newbies and Junior Members incentives to write meaningful posts without having to renounce some of the features of the forum, and without pressure to get a merit which is sometimes difficult even if the post quality is otherwise good. And the standard to award merits also hasn't to be lowered.
(Unfortunately, the thread about the new changes has already grown too much that I could read it entirely, so it's possible that this was already proposed. However, maybe it's good to discuss it in a new thread.)
There are good points to this suggestion like giving chances to Newbies & Jr. Members for them to give good contribution in this community at the same time give themselves chance to earn thru Signature campaign. The probation rule will serve as an important and serious law to be followed by newbies who wanted to remain beneficial to their privilege. Much better than immediate demotion of ranks because they still have a chance to change the way they interact with this community, in this case, they will insert more effort and try not to waste their privilege.
2) Smerit- this motivation for newcomers, write better messages. Just today, in one day I saw 5 big articles from beginners who are trying nice whriting.
Great to hear this, so people learned to practice writing a quality article but the problem is the merit system, of course, has disadvantages because it somewhat unfair for others who wrote informative high quality posts but not notice by someone of course some mentality of members here are not generous even if they saw some good article still not rewarding merit the reason some newbies or members thought that posting quality still useless due to no one appreciate the work.
Hopefully, there's a system that automatically checks quality contents and gives rewards to those deserving users to make it fair because it's really hard to rely on other members to reward us merits because most humans have crab mentality who don't want someone to be on top.