Quote from: cryptovigi on October 14, 2018, 12:05:54 PM

jr. member - 1 merit,
member - 11 merits,
full member - 101 merits,
senior member - 251 merits,
hero member - 501 merits,
legendary - 1001 merits

If we are talking about fairness, then we can say that it is fair to implement the same rule to the high ranked members - requiring them to earn at least a single merit to maintain their rank and status.

The table below shows that low-ranked members are not the only spammers in this forum but there are only high-ranked members. Sadly, the merit system can only target new accounts and cannot affect the old spammer accounts.

Quote from: tranthidung on October 03, 2018, 07:47:33 AM

[Merit Analysis] Users ranked Sr. Member & up that have not earned any merit
Moreover, there are lots of Hero and Ledgendary have not earned any merit.

The percentage of users at Member, Full Member, Senior Member, Hero, and Ledgendary have not earned any merits till October of 2018 are 83%, 82.6%, 79.8%, 73.3%, and 47.2%, respectively. Amongst all ranks, Ledgendary is a outstanding one with nearly 47% of them have not received any merit. Ranks from Member to Senior Member (even with Hero Member) are almost the same.
Detailed statistics given below.

Quote from: cryptovigi on October 04, 2018, 12:17:36 AM

Rank	number of users	number of users received at least 1 merit	number of users with who didnt earn any merit
Member	27 918	4 744 (17%)	23 174 (83%)
Full Member	18 181	3 173 (17,45%)	15 008 (82,55%)
Sr. Member	9 016	1 818 (20,16%)	7 198 (79,84%)
Hero Member	4 143	1 105 (26,67%)	3 038 (73,33%)
Legendary	2 145	1 133 (52,82%)	1 012 (47,18%)

~
I don't want to fall into arguments there, but it's something like unfair system, even for lower-ranks, of course above Junior Member rank.
Do you agree at this point?
How fair the forum and merit system, rank system are if someone started as a Newbie and get 100 merits to rank up to Full Member rank. In another case, someone who is a Full Member and will not get any merit over the next one year, will be able to stay at Full member, forever.
It will become more clearly unfair for higher ranks, such as Senior, Hero and Ledgendary ranks.

Outside the forum, in real life, in some nations, there are strict requirements on professors, associate professors that they have to satisfy strict criteria, which require them to have new contribution, new project, new published scientific articles during speficic period in order to be as Professors / Associate professors. If they can satisfy those criteria, they will be demoted (as Junior Member rank witnessed weeks ago in the forum).

The merit system discussion always target the spammers having low ranked account. And your suggestion seems to address the issue of spammers having high-ranked account. I hope theymos will consider this one.

Given the table above, assuming that the percentage represents members who only spam and cannot earn even a single merit since inception of the merit system, then almost half of the Legendary rank are spammers. I think this number is alarming if we are really dedicated to lessen the number of spammers in this forum.