I was being polite and I gave you my personal stance on the problem because you mentionned me. I don't want to keep arguing about this mainly because theymos is probably a brick wall when it comes to reverting changes, and because I've talked about this for way too long.

Both you and hilariousetc argue that a negative solution is going to be bad because people will abuse it, why don't they already abuse the existing trust system? Only people painted red are ones that "deserve" to.

But I'm going to just completely scrap off that system for the sake of coming up with something new.

First, merit doesn't solve the spam problem. Newbies and juniors still spam and don't get punished for it. Merit just "highlights" a few users that made supposedly "interesting" posts. But it fails because it's an extremely biased stat. People that post in scenarios where there is a lot of opinions and try to pick sides with sMerit owners, or people that give out money, have forum status, etc... and lots and lots of factors make Merit a much easier currency to grind by a minority as opposed to the rest of the community.

So how about another idea, decentralize it. (ha-ha) Make everyone able to give out merit, just not by large quantities, and only by peer confirmation.

Someone posts a good post? If 5 different users give it a +, the user gets rewarded by a point. But wait, what if people make junior armies to spam +?

Let's see, let's make it weighted. For a user to get a point out of a useful post, he's need + from 3 different user ranks, and 5 total +. Everyone has the ability to give out +s, but they all have an equal amount of currency. Rank doesn't matter, each user can only + 5 posts per month. These are just numbers I'm pulling out of my ass. But I hope you see the point.

It's really not hard to try and come up with a less biased system if you spent a long enough time thinking about it. But like I said, I'm burnt out of this topic and feel like I'm wasting my time contributing. You can reply to let me know your opinion, but I'm afraid this is going to be my last post, cheers.