This merit abuse is unacceptable

The art contest was obviously a ploy so that theymos could rank his alternate accounts up.
LOL that art thread definitely got too out of hand. A lot of users saw the high potential of them actually earning merit without having to make decent posts hence it's really not surprising that they're taking full advantage of it while the thread is still up and active until it gets old enough to be locked.
Goddamn that's a lot of merits though.
Yeah, its a one off thing though to sort of get the community involved with the anniversary so I think its an exception where we can reward users on art they've created instead of quality posts.