We need to get away from the idea that if a person only has one leg and a pregnant sister, then we need to award merits. You are only doing it so that they can spam the forum, and earn a bit of extra cash. Merits are for people who support the forum, and provide helpful and informative posts. This doesn't mean that you only give merits to posts that would win a Pulitzer prize, but they should certainly be above average, and of benefit to the forum. For some time now, I've been looking at the post histories of some members, and where they make consistent posts that encourage further discussion, I've been awarding merit for posting behaviour, rather than just for individual posts.
Based on your theory, should only members with higher ranks or at least Full members with high activity be looked in, to see if they've got something informative and helpful to the forum? As almost 99% newbies are completely new to this concept and many of them don't even know the basics of Bitcoin, how can we expect such above-average posts from them? They can learn and say something in their words but most of them fail to make it look a well-said post.
Giving a huge number of merits to one post may have side effects. Your intentions may be good and you want to help him to rank up, but, as you said, 90% of users will think it is your alt and such they will avoid dealing with him.
Noted. That's the reason why I created this thread, to know whether the community will support this or not.
If he was able to create such valuable post, he probably has many of them, you can give few merits to each one.
One more good point noted.
If I may ask: why do you want to get rid of your sMerits? just keep them and whenever you find a good post, give it the amount it deserves.
Sending merits can't be reverted, what if you give all your sMerits to one user than discover that his post was copy pasted from someone else!!
I've never said that I'm in any kind of a hurry to give out my sMerits to anyone at a stretch or in a single shot, but rather look for better people who deserved good amount of merits on their posts but didn't receive. This plagiarism is one such issue I'm scared of, and if I accidentally (not intentionally) give out merits to such user who copy-pasted content from someone else's, will I also be blameworthy with that user?