Weekly Updates are added on the last page. The external link for the full list fixes the weird characters in the titles.

Wouter Mense created Merit counts on "Top-merited recent topics", asking to sort topics based on total Merit received in the entire thread. His reason:

Quote from: Wouter Mense on October 18, 2018, 01:13:47 PM

~ to abuse the efforts of merit-givers as another way to more easily find interesting things on here.

See [overview] LoyceV's useful data on Bitcointalk for more of my forum-related topics