Yeah, I had the same feeling, there are waves of users with nearly the same activity opening topics after topics in B&D, I looked a few times over it and it's pretty obvious there is a weird thing happening there, we have a few topics by old members and then a gap in the profile of members to newbie level.
One thing that got me curious about it was that their topics, apart from the really shitty two-line ones, they are more like a statement, not an invitation to discussion, I haven't really found any traces of plagiarism but I would bet on some translated articles.
Not true at all. If you are generating quality post, you will get merit. No matter it’s a reply or a thread itself. Without quality, no matter what you create, you are unlikely to get merit.
There are members who will reward a newbie just for trying to create a topic, not looking at the quality like in an essay, and it's normal if merit would be given only for a high-quality post there is no chance in hell a real newbie would get something.
Probably the only way of merit fishing they've managed to come up with. I miss
the fake newbie drama...