Quote from: mjglqw on January 06, 2020, 06:29:32 AM

Yeah.. This is quite shady. That 50 merit sent is the first sent merit from the gizmoh account in the last 120 days.

Nope, that batch of 50 merits is the first one he gave his sMerits away.

According to the merit data dump from theymos (extracted by LoyceV and stored on loyce.club), last week (2019w52), he did not send a single sMerit away, before today.
According to the converted dataset, released by LoyceV, stored at loyce.club, there is no history of merit transaction for that account.

[1]: http://loyce.club/Merit/merit.all.txt
[2]: http://loyce.club/Merit/userID_sent_received.txt

But that account shows nothing strange with password and email changes on profile page and on the the modlog page. There are three rounds of password changes, back in 2018 and 2019 (early months of each year). I don't see strong signals of hack.

Quote from: hosseinimr93 on January 06, 2020, 06:35:46 AM

Soon both accounts will be banned or at least will get negative trust.

Maybe, theymos should consider decaying unused smerits.

No one will be banned simply because of shady behaviours with trading or merit transactions.

Decaying unused smerits, I don't think it will happen.
Moreover, there are barely cases that theymos stepped in and do roll back (demeriting) with 16 negative merit transactions so far, but all of them happened months ago (February of 2019, forum time). Sent_userid = 0 is the forum account, used to roll back merits.

Code:

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
   | forumtime amount sent_userid received_userid |
   |-------------------------------------------------------------|
132299. | 05feb2019 22:07:11 -2 0 92110 |
132300. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -5 0 81995 |
132301. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -2 0 1316028 |
132302. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -9 0 290351 |
132303. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -1 0 289011 |
   |-------------------------------------------------------------|
132304. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -9 0 249872 |
132305. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -7 0 249436 |
132306. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -8 0 165478 |
132307. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -2 0 9645 |
132308. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -10 0 358020 |
   |-------------------------------------------------------------|
132309. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -10 0 15728 |
132310. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -10 0 2536607 |
132311. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -4 0 1246188 |
132312. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -10 0 355462 |
132313. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -10 0 92110 |
   |-------------------------------------------------------------|
132314. | 05feb2019 22:07:10 -5 0 2472107 |
   +-------------------------------------------------------------+

Neutrally, I gave you data, the rest things for data interpretations depend on your own thoughts.

Personally, 50 merits can not change the destiny of one account. If one is unable to make a single good post, the one will consequently be unable to rank up without other abuse and they will fastly dry out of their airdropped sMerits.

Theymos:

He states that he only starts to feel issues with hundreds of merits used illegitimately.

Quote from: theymos on January 24, 2018, 11:12:23 PM

Quote from: Kiritsugu on January 24, 2018, 11:05:54 PM

So I noticed it says unused Merit can be decayed at some point in the future - What's the point of this? Is it just to keep people from stagnating their Merit and not using it?

There is currently no decay, but if hoarding seems to become a problem, I might add it.

Quote from: Kiritsugu on January 24, 2018, 11:05:54 PM

Also, what are your thoughts on people here using their numerous alt accounts to abuse the Merit system? Granted, there's not much to "abuse", but someone who has a dozen alt accounts, say one of them gets selected as a Merit source, couldn't that have a negative impact on the system?

If they don't have a source: how would they? Unless they are a source, they have to get the merit from somewhere. A group of accounts without a source can't generate merit without making good posts; they can only inefficiently spread it out among the accounts.

If they do have a source, then that's something that we'll need to detect. The merit transfers are public, so it shouldn't be that difficult. There are also various limits in place which would help to limit the damage from that.

Quote from: theymos on February 03, 2018, 06:55:05 PM

I think that tagging may be appropriate in particularly obvious cases, or particularly egregious cases involving hundreds of merit points and several posts. But generally you should start out by assuming good faith, and only change that opinion as the evidence really piles up. Tagging someone immediately after an instance of apparently-inexplicable meriting is too trigger-happy IMO. Even if it is a case of illegitimate merit, even hundreds of illegitimate merit points are not much of a problem IMO, so you have to ask whether it's worthwhile to possibly make a mistake by tagging someone who is merely suspicious.

Quote from: theymos on February 03, 2018, 06:20:54 PM

Merit sales, transfers to aliases, back-and-forth trading, etc. are not much of an issue. All illegitimate merit will decay, and will account for a tiny and very expensive fraction of the total merit economy. It's basically a rounding error; fight it where convenient, but waste no sleep over it.