Since 1 merit for Jr Member revolution everybody talks about this magic thing.

Newbies (including me) try hard to get their first one. They read guides, starting new threats writing their first “valuable” posts. What is interesting in 99 out of hundred cases they try to convince everybody how happy are they now and how perfect solution is rising the requirements of ranking up.

Ranked users also make a lot of discuss about this “merit revolution”. Mostly pointing out its advantages as lowering the spam allover the forum thanks to temporarily kicking out thousands account from signature bounties. They also considering is one merit for Jr enough? Maybe this limit should be lifted up higher like 5 or 10 or even more merit.

But… let’s leave merit for a while (today probably everybody are fed up this word).

When everybody says “Merit” I'm asking: What about Activity???

Activity on this forum is a parameter based on the post count and time since being registered. Being more precisely it’s minimal value from the total number of posts  and the number of 14 days periods one’s posted since registration multiplied by 14.

activity = min(time * 14, posts) 

The idea of providing this parameter was also decreasing spam. After this implementation spamming more than one post per day became useless if ones purpose was only get higher rank. Other words it became impossible to rank any account faster than fixed period of time.

Ok, that happen in 2013 and it works until today. Has anything changed since 2013? I think it has! Few years ago new era – ICO’s Era has come. But I don’t want to talk about altcoins in general but only about two activities connected with ICOs - bounty and airdrop.

Why? What makes the difference?

Before bounty and airdorp threads have started, each post even shit one had “meaning”. By posting anything you started a new topic of discussion or simply took a part in existing one. Even if the posts were only “Yes”, “I don’t agree”, “I like this project”, “Bulshit!”, etc. they were somebody's voice in discussion. It also means that poster at least has read a few post from the thread to chose if his answer should be “You’ve right!” or “What a nonsense!”.

What about airdrops and bounties? Posts in such threads in 99,99% only inform about 2 things:
1. "I want free coins!”
2. “I did my job - here is my report/retweets/reposts...”
And that’s it... nothing else... Other words they have completely no meaning from discussion board point of view. This case they shouldn’t also be treated like any kind of activity on forum. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against bounties or airdrops I’ve also taken part in many of them, but look the situation:

Today it’s possible that guy whose only activity on forum was asking for free coins 60 times (airdrop) or taking part in few bounties is writing one good post (or get 10 merits in other way – as you all know it’s unfortunately possible) and he is automatically given Member rank. Does such guy really deserve Member rank?

Even in signature bounty campaigns posts from bounty threads are not counted so why we should count it while calculating important Activity parameter.
Summing up: my idea is to cut off the posts written in bounties section from the number of posts used to calculate activity parameter.
I’m not sure how difficult it could be from the developer side, but if there are future, which divides all written post into 14-days periods and then calculated only not empty periods probably there would be also possibility to cut off post from bounty board while calculation activity.