what is the actual aim of making the merit system very hard for users? This will scare some away and those who are not good at writing, it means they don't belong here?
IMO it's not that harsh, i've seen some newbie got merited only for asking a question & sharing news/article and include his opinion.
What is the reason behind holding a Smerit without giving it out? Most of them will waste or expire. If we put more energy on how we make good articles and also make it easier to harbor visitors that turned to members. This forum will rank as before and we will get enough people that will make use of our signatures for adverts.
That's biased opinion, i've seen some merit source complain they always run out of sMerit.
I think today is my first time of seeing a site that doesn't care about their Alexa ranking. Hmm, like you said "quality discussion" without enough readers isn't it a waste of information? How about the people that will be searching for this forum and what they will see is other crypto blogs that pop out on search engine.
First time? I've seen few hobby blogger who don't care about traffic / rank at all. Besides, to get on first time on search engine result, you need to perform SEO (search engine optimization) which might be costly or take some time.