Neg.-rating someone just because they sent out 1 merit is completely backwards and proper trust abuse in my view. It's similar to political de-platforming.

I was disgusted by the reckless and vicious doxing in this case, where:
 - The evidence was very thin.
 - Even if all of the allegations were true, it'd likely result only in civil penalties, not criminal.
 - The whole thing was motivated merely by past arguments. OgNasty never caused Vod to even lose anything, as far as I know. An utterly ridiculous & disproportionate escalation.
 - It's based on the premise that purely statutory crimes are directly unethical, which I don't agree with at all, though I'm willing to mostly look past this as subjective.

It's good that Vod came to his senses on this after the fact, though doing it at all certainly blemishes his reputation in my mind, and I added to my notes the fact that those users merited such a post. Meriting it is saying basically that we need more posts like this on the forum, and we do not need more posts like this on the forum.

Red-trusting Vod over this is an appropriate usage of red-trust, since his actions here are highly trust-relevant. But I tend to think that since he edited his post and seems to genuinely regret at least the public doxxing part, it'd be best to forgive.

For the meriters, I can understand the argument for red-trust, but I tend to think that it's at the wrong level. If the meriter was meriting it because they were actively thinking, "I want to make the forum really vicious, where everyone is constantly tearing each other apart for stupid things, and this post moves in that direction," even that's not really a trust-relevant motive, just a very unhelpful motive. And probably the meriters were thinking more innocent things than that.