Your list is inaccurate. I have 712 merit. You claim to listing everyone with merit above 435, but you clearly did not do this.
1) Users who earned more than N merits but you never merited them. N = 100 is ~700 users, N = 30 is ~2000 users.
Pamoldar
has merited you.
It was unclear by his request (and in your OP) that you are excluding those who have received merit from the requestor in all cases.
In the future, please read the OP properly before trying to bash anyone you don't like..
How could you possibly say that? You literally scammed someone because you did not like the type of business they are in....
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?
(legitimate feedback)
I would not exclude someone from possibly giving them merit solely because they have received a single merit from you in the past. Perhaps a person should be excluded from consideration if they have received more than xx merit from you previously (possibly AND need at least yy additional merit to achieve the next rank, ignoring activity).
I also would not give anyone merit "automatically" if they have not received merit previously. IMO a better criterion would be the person has already received x merit from y people. Anyone who does not have existing merit should IMO be reviewed and good judgement should be considered if they are putting a decent effort into their posts. There are probably enough people who have zero/1 merit who are not deserving of merit that it would probably be difficult to filter enough of them out.
To account for engagement, I would suggest that the person should be quoted by someone else. An additional sign of engagement would be that the person made a subsequent post after being quoted. To eliminate sockpuppetary, a requirement that a certain number of unique people need to quote the person (who have above a threshold of merit, possibly from a certain number of unique people).