If I can recall correctly, Jr Members before required 0 merit but then it was updated to be at least 1 merit causing a lot of existing JR Members with no merits to be demoted to Newbie.
Please see details in
History of bitcointalk.org's rank system. What you mentioned is the demotion on old-era Junior members when
enhanced merit system was kicked off.
More details on the evolution progress of merit system:
- The merit system was fixed with some bugs
- Adjustment on Hero members for their airdropped sMerits
- Changes with the enhanced merit system.
Quote for important details
The exact formula was:
yearActivity = activity in the last ~year, max 378
freeMerit = the merit (not sMerit) you started with
modifier =
0.1 if member
0.2 if full member
0.25 if sr member
0.35 if hero
0.4 if legendary
return (yearActivity/378) * modifier * freeMerit
So the most you could get is if you were a Legendary who maxed out your activity points in the last year, in which case you would get 1 * 0.4 * 1000 = 400 sMerit.
Note that I later made an adjustment giving 500 extra merit to some hero members, but no extra sMerit was given here.
I'll probably publish a dump of the initial sMerit at some point.
I decided that the previous allocation was too unfair in this area, so everyone with activity >= 775 got 500 more merit if they didn't already have 1000 merit (and also Lutpin). No extra sMerit, though.