Quote from: qwk on November 23, 2018, 02:29:41 PM

Quote from: Quickseller on November 23, 2018, 04:20:13 AM

Quote from: Vod on November 22, 2018, 06:24:53 PM

I have been trying to enforce the merit abuse rules.

Where can one find these rules? How were these rules enacted?

Rules can be implicit / common practice.
It would be nice to have someone come up with a list of DOs /DONTs regarding merit based on roughly 1 year of practice sooner or later.

So far, I guess it's safe to assume that it's considered "blatant merit abuse" if you receive merit in an "obvious" return of merit.
Since that's heavily subjective, usually only cases of "considerable" amounts of merit are sanctioned.
Also, a single merit to a newbie may be scrutinized.

Other than that, I'm at a loss when it comes to "rules".

I am strongly against telling people what they can and cannot do with things they have duely earned, and merit falls into this category by way of the fact they ultimately received merit for making a good post at one point.

Also these rules are something that a dozen or so people have implemented (and enforce unevenly) out of two million registered users and hundreds of thousands of active users. These people were in no way elected to make the rules and you cant argue this is a private forum because its own is on the record as being against these rules.

Further, the concept of merit, or limited amount of karma that can be sent based on the amount received is a very uncommon concept and I would not be surprised to see many who are unfamiliar with merit testing it out with their alts. Sending merit is not reversible, so if someone does this and later sees it is against the rules they are liable to receive negative trust forever even if they conduct themselves in a trustworthy way.

Sending merit to an alt is not akin to scamming, however the presence of a negative rating implies someone is a scammer. If someone sees many people with negative ratings for this reason, they will give less weight to a negative rating to an actual scammer who has legitimately (attempted to) stolen money.