When we make a valuable post, we get rewarded in the form of "merits" here - a system injected to stop spam and encourage high quality comments. But, a question immediately struck to my mind and I thought I should definitely ask this as it's something really interesting.

When a user deletes their post/thread or when a mod deletes a user's posts/threads (least possiblity) due to low quality which has 1 or more merits given to it, what will happen to those merits? As we're aware that merits once given cannot be reverted back, will it still show in addition to the total merits in that user's profile?