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> If someone presses on the +merit, but has no smerit to give, then it gives the user the option to "report to merit sources." <
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I dont think it would work. What is there to stop every active user on the forum to report load of posts, getting into the nearly impossible situation where the queue would have a size similar to all the posts being created? (Ive exaggerated it a notch, but that is what would happen I figure, unless lots of restrictions are set in place to somehow avoid abuse and troll report of candidate posts in large numbers).
Besides, for it to work similar to the regular reports, it would require for the Merit Sources to have a similar uniform criteria: if one proposed post is marked bad (i.e. does not deserve merit), then none of the other Merit Sources could merit it.
Well, it would naturally need some restrictions. If it were to be implemented, it would have to restrict the functionality to Jr members and above to mitigate sybils. Also, I think rather than a merit source having the option to mark something as "bad," it would give the merit source the option to "report to moderator." That way, if someone is trying to pass off insubstantial, off-topic, plagiarized posts etc. of their alt accounts, those posts will get reported to the moderators instead for proper action. If a merit source simply doesn't think a post deserves merit, they can simply mark it as unhandled and move on. Perhaps after x number of merit sources mark the post as unhandled, it will get removed from the queue entirely. Also, perhaps limit an account's ability to use this function to once every 24 hours.
As I stated in my previous post, this probably won't get implemented. It's just a suggested solution. I'm very curious where all these unicorns are hanging out that make really good posts, yet go neglected.