Speaking of which, I'm still trying to come up with criteria without relying on existing merits (improving on example #4 in the OP), i.e. finding the elusive never-merited good posters. Here is what I'm thinking:
- User who made at least 50 posts in the last 6 months (just to eliminate some throw-away accounts)
- Excluding posts on Bounties and Press boards (any other completely useless boards?)
- Excluding posts shorter than 100 characters (not sure about this one)
- Has to have quoted someone at least 10 times (to show engagement in discussions and not just drive-by spamming)
- Never received merits
Any other ideas?
Perhaps having 90% of whatever arbitrary percentage of their posts on the first two pages of a thread? Your existing criteria would generate way too many spammers who pick a megathread in Gambling/Altcoin/Bitcoin Discussion, pick a random post to reply to and basically repeat the same points. Alternatively/additionally, exclude those who have posted in more than 7 locked threads in Gambling/Altcoin/Bitcoin Discussion since those are spam megathreads 90% of the time.
Only issue with the first part is that it would exclude people who post in various sports threads such as the
Serie A discussion thread or
EPL discussion thread which have valid reasons for being megathreads.