Why only see a Newbie account as a spammer?
We don't and I'm not sure why you would think we are just picking on Newbies. You now merely need
one merit to become a Junior Member. You need ONE HUNDRED to become a Full Member, and ONE THOUSAND to become a Legendary. Why are you not complaining about us attacking them? The problem is people are coming here in droves to farm thousands of accounts just by spamming and we need to stop that and the best way to do that is to make sure they're making quality posts and once rewarded for them via merit they get to move up ranks. If they spam or make low quality contributions then they will forever remain a low rank as they should.
Then what would you or forum developer do to overcome them, spammer or multiple accounts that already have a high rank, the large amount of merit can divide into other cloning accounts only to join Signature Campaign.
I think you are talking about the members who received a lot of merits in the introduction of the merit system. Merit is not moderated by the forum but DT members will red tagged if any member found guilty for merit abuse scenarios regardless of their rank. So it's not about the rank mate. The truth is they can't trade their merits for their alts forever. They will eventually dried up their initial airdropped merits. Most of the good bounty managers now put
earned merit requirements for joining signature campaigns and also they will manually overlook the profile of the candidate whether merit abuse scenario happened before approval. Even most of the managers will not accept the members having red tagged (specially for merit abusers) for their signature campaigns. As a whole admin/mods/DT members were taken the necessary actions to overcome the spam and merit trading problems but sometimes even they can't stop these problems 100%. They all are humans too and spammers will found new ways every day to beat the system. So what we can do is
report every time when you found out merit abuse scenarios to DT members which having solid evidence. Then whether the post with high quality still applies to them, I don't think so. Similar to the government system, high ranking officials will be more flexible even though what they do is wrong, and the people will get punishment even though they are innocent.
Giving away your sMerits for quality stuff is up to every individual member. If we all do their part there will be no complaining about the way merits distributed. Punishment for breaking a rule is always there whether higher rank or lower rank. There is no flexibility when it comes to the violation of rules and also we all should remember if you are not knowing the law is not an excuse when you found guilty for breaking a forum rule. I have seen that most of the members who break the law were saying that they are innocent in the first place and then saying we don't know the rule so give me a second chance.
BTW can you point out an example where officials became more flexible for a higher rank member found guilty for violation of forum rule?