Quote from: shushanika on October 06, 2018, 07:12:30 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on October 05, 2018, 07:12:31 AM

Quote from: rik1 on October 05, 2018, 06:51:14 AM

So will the useable smerit get destroy every month if we don't use them.

smerits do not get destroyed (or decay) for regular members unless the member is a merit source member.

Currently, there are only 120 merit source members. See this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=sources

Merit source members have to spend their source smerits every 30 days in order to regenerate more source smerits. If they do not spend their source smerits within 30days, then the source merits will not regenerate until 30 days after they spend their smerits.

Good to know it does not get decayed but it seems it also does not get refilled, it would be great if from time to time it gets refilled so people who are not posting in areas where merit sources are active have a chance or earning it.

As S_Therapist already responded to you, your point(s) are lost upon me (and apparently on S_Therapist, too?).

Think about what you are saying. The merit system was introduced in order to attempt to take a significant dent out of the farming of BCT accounts in order to commercialize payment and to attempt for shit posters to earn a quasi-passive income from shit posting. The introduction of the merit system, and how the merit system was designed, was meant to address that problematic shitposting and farming of account development that seemed to have gotten exponentially worse in the past year or so (or possibly one year prior to the implementation of the new system).

Merit member sources was an attempt to put several humans (or at least seeming human to the extent merit sources are to be considered human) in the process of reviewing posts and recognizing good (or at least better posts) as compared to some posts that are more obviously shit posts. Actually sometimes it is obvious what is shit posts and what is not, but other times, there can be some difficulties and errors in determining the good, bad and the ugly, and still seemingly humans are better at that (as contrasted with an algorithm or some other possible methodology).

Your suggestion of giving each member a renewing bank of smerits might not be a bad idea, but it likely would have a tendency towards taking us back nearly to the same place that we started.

Surely this current merit system is far from perfect, but I currently believe that we have seen some members who have been able to earn a decent amount of merits and to "shine" in this new merit system. Accordingly, I remain of the tentative conclusion (as several more senior members have also asserted) that if you make genuine posts on subjects that interest you, and you attempt to interact with members in threads that are genuinely interesting to you, you have a very decent chance of earning a sufficient amount of merits to rank up over time - even though it could take a bit longer than it would have taken for you under the prior (pre-merit) system.

Surely, as the current merit system remains in play (or some variation as we have seen it already tweaked), there are likely to be identified some issues.. For example, if theymos recognizes a bit of a ranking up problem, then he might be able to make some further tweaks to what we already have in order to make that ranking up better, if the new system seems to be preventing some seemingly deserving members from ranking up in a reasonable timeline given their contribution(s) to the forum.