I think one solution could be that some percentage of merit required for ranking upto Jr. Member and Member should come from a Verified Merit Source. Verified Merit source should fulfill the following requirements:
1.) Belong to the set of people comprising DT1 member and people who have shown enough commitment towards the forum by earning, say, 250 merits.
1.) Be randomly selected from this group
2.) Anonymous in Merit History
3.) Change cyclically
A thread could be started where these members simply grant merit to new accounts. That source shouldn't show up in the merit history to ensure that people don't get bugged or start getting bribe offers.
Its fairly complicated but so is the problem. Maybe i should think of a more elegant solution..Hmm..Thinking Hat on..
As one of the people who would currently qualify to be a "verified merit source," I'm not sure that I want the added responsibility of only meriting newbies. However, I believe that my current allocation of source merit allocation is probably in the top 10, if not top 5, so it would be much more work for me than many other merit sources. I could end up giving a handful of newbie posts an insane amount of merit; however, people tend to notice when the amount of merits given is a two digit number, and I am sure the "merit abuse" allegations would crop up (although only the administrators would know who the merit source is, people could figure it out by noticng that such and so merit source isn't giving out any merits anymore.) When you say "anonymous" do you mean the merit score goes up with no other record or do you mean it will have a label like "anonymous" or "Verified Merit Source?"