<…> Later in 2018, it was announced that users without any merit will be demoted to Newbie regardless of their ranks. <…>
Not all users were deranked back to Newbie. Only meritless Jr. Members, since all the ranks above had merits (earned or airdropped).
Now in 2020, the forum ranked number 11,525 in February and at 22,845 this month this shows that our forum is doing well in good content but performs very bad in traffic
There’s been a global pandemic in between. We should give that a fair share of the reason behind. Alexa does not measure traffic with consolidated certainty, but rather uses extrapolated data from a subset of users. In a pandemic such as this, the models can easily go adrift.
How does Alexa get its data?
Alexa has a large traffic data panel consisting of millions of people all over the world. Based on the data from this sample, Alexa estimates the number of visitors to all sites on the Internet. It’s a complicated calculation that involves correcting for biases as well as identifying and discarding fake or spam traffic. Our data scientists are the best in the business and they make sure the data we present is free of noise and non-human data, so you can make the best decisions for your business.
How is the Alexa Rank calculated?
Every day, Alexa estimates the average daily visitors and pageviews to every site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months is ranked #1. The site with the least is ranked somewhere around 30 million. If no one in our measurement panel visited a site over the past 3 months there is no rank at all for that site.
Note the recurrence of the term "estimate" in the above quote (
https://blog.alexa.com/improving-your-alexa-rank/).
Not many newcomers will visit Meta, and that thread is really a one-off (i.e. not a recurring idea).
What is the reason behind holding a Smerit without giving it out? Most of them will waste or expire.
Merits do not expire for anyone. Some Merit Source Merits may go unspent, but you can’t expect them to always spend them all (it’s a pretty selfless task, and time consuming). Sometimes, they need to resort to
sprees of a kind to ease their burden …