Make merits to decay so that we can see the actual merits provided by the admin to an ideal circulation for the forum. @OgNasty had done some good support on newbie in the Beginners & Help section by giving them almost 7 merits just signing in bitcoin address and verify them one by one. I think getting in to member rank is not difficult for those newbie who had been rewarded with the merits rewarded by him.

I saw many users here that are doing great in making statistics and that would be good to determine here the statistics of number of users per rank. So that admin can check whether it is really need to give more merits or not depending on the number of users as per rank.

Decaying merits would still be the best option I guess. However, I think that admins had plan on this already and they just going to implement it on the right time. Of course if you are planning so must think ahead so that you can avoid possible technical mistakes for the forum and to the users of bitcointalk. We'll have to wait, see and trust the admin.