And I have to congratulate him after I managed to fulfill 3000 merit in his current profile.

So far the Russian local board are the most active local board in terms of merit gain, number of posts and also number of active users. AFAIK, Russia has long put bitcointalk on the ban list which might cause a bit of annoyance for users. But I really appreciate their efforts to keep users active in this forum with a number of posts, active users and also merit distribution even though I assume that users there should use a vpn. They are impressive in my opinion