There’s also a bunch of contextual data to consider. I can talk for my local board (haven’t looked into others), with which I’ve been engaged with right from the beginning. Unfortunately, the active community is pretty small, with a couple of handful of regulars at best (on and off), and a few stray appearances. Those that are regular, are also generally decent posters, and help maintain the community active. In addition, most of the have no problem earning merits in the general English speaking boards.

Unfortunately for my local board posters, I’m a tad bit mean with my merits, and barely ever hand out more than 1 to those posts I merit (two is rather infrequent). Of course, I tend to posts there too, and every now and then, I receive some of those merit thingies. There we go, a potentially local board closed merit circle from an outside observer’s numeric point of view, but erroneously concluded if not contextualized as above. Actually, what would be seemingly wrong is to find profiles that go unmerited, yet post decent enough content (at least as decent as those merited).