The main problem is probably getting the merit data. You would need to make your own scraper to get merit data and then build an API or maybe ask Vod or Loyce for an API.
I have no plans on making an API (and have no idea how to do this). Besides, I don't scrape Merit continuously, only weekly (full list:
merit.all.txt).
API probably is best solution, but i was thinking about parsing HTML from user's merit summary page & built a list/dictionary contains total merit sent & count of merit transaction to an user.
Instead of scraping individual user's merit summaries, it's much less work to just scrape
Recent merits and keep track (that's what BPIP does).
I think Piggy updated it to where it does actually support PMs.
Correct. Maggiordome was polluting the list of unread posts too much.