After several months of absence due the way Merit Dashboard counts the post, Russian board is back on the charts. After some deliberatio I've decided to use ninjastic.space when it comes to Russian board (from the next month I will expand that to other boards as well) post count as by the looks of it there is a lot of things going on there, with topics being deleted/moved around month after month, constantly affecting the numbers.
I will make minor adjustments to this explanation. In the Russian section, there are no moving topics, deleting them or anything like that. It's about old posts (2018-2020). They are deleted and thus influenced the statistics of the last months. For example, in July ~8-9k old bumps were removed, which littered several sections. Then all sorts of low-quality posts consisting of 1-2 words were deleted, like
Thanks,
Сool project, etc. This is the real reason why the Merit Dashboard service has been showing negative values for Russian locale lately. Thanks.